Cinema: Say Good Night to the Bad Guy

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Scarface takes its title, plot and comic-grotesque tone from a 1932 film directed by Howard Hawks, written by Ben Hecht and John Lee Mahin and starring Paul Muni as a lightly fictionalized, heavily romanticized Al Capone. That Scarface ran 90 minutes; this one ambles along at nearly twice the length. The first film has a screwball-comedy briskness that made Tony an outsized monster, a festering lesion on the body politic, without stopping more than once or twice to spell out social message. The new Scarface is at bottom a bitter comedy about the perils of drug abuse, and De Palma directs his actors to play at the pitch of gross grandiosity but at the pace of a chamber drama.

Perhaps De Palma and Stone had aspirations of Godfatherhood: an operatic overview of the nation's immigrant black princes, a meticulous dissection of the relationship between crime and Big Business, a celebration of the American power ethic, a warning against corporal or corporate abuse. But Scarface lacks the generational sweep and moral ambiguity of the Corleone saga. At the end, Tony is as he was at the beginning: his development and degeneration are horrifyingly predictable; his death evokes not fear or pity, but numb relief.

If Scarface falls short of justifying its running time or its ambitions, it is still exhilarating for its vigor and craftsmanship. Visual Consultant Ferdinando Scarfiotti has designed the film in a kitsch-glitz riot of evocative colors: gold (for money), white (cocaine), red (blood) and black (death). As Tony vaults up the ladder of excess, his bad taste escalates as well. He trades in his yellow Caddy with the tiger-skin upholstery for a $43,000 gray Porsche. His favorite hangout, the Babylon nightclub, is a gaudy Erechtheum stocked with black Naugahyde banquettes, pink and blue ribbons of neon, black-marble toilet stalls, and mirrors, mirrors everywhere. The mansion of Tony's dreams boasts an Olympic-size bathtub; in the foyer, statues of the Three Graces support a huge gold globe bearing the legend THE WORLD is YOURS.

Through this underworld Pacino stalks like a panther. He carries memories of earlier performances (the bantam bombast of Dog Day Afternoon, the nervous belt tugging from American Buffalo, the crook'd arm from his Broadway Richard III), but creates his freshest character in years. There is a poetry to his psychosis that makes Tony a figure of rank awe, and the rhythm of that poetry is Pacino's. Most of the large cast is fine; Michelle Pfeiffer is better. The cool, druggy Wasp woman who does not fit into Tony's world, Pfeiffer's Elvira is funny and pathetic, a street angel ready at any whim to float away on another cocaine cloud.