Scarface - Classic Film Pick

"Scarface" was the pinnacle of Brian De Palma's career. Al Pacino's unforgettable performance as a fictional Miami drug lord named Tony Montana is the stuff of legend. That De Palma's ultra-violent depiction of Miami's early '80s cocaine trade barely scratches the surface of the era's bewildering amount of violence that built Miami, only adds to the film's notoriety as a scathing cinematic document. Tony is a Cuban ex-con refugee whose criminal aspirations know no limits. When Pacino delivers the film's famous opening dialogue, in a Florida detention center, several generations worth of social oppression are wrapped up his character's thick accent. He's a super-anti-hero. Tony talks about his familiarity with America via his U.S.-born father, and answers his captor's questions with just as many queries as replies. Montana confronts his captors with a mercury-quick sarcasm born of such furious desperation that the audience is involuntarily seduced.

"I am Tony Montana, a political prisoner from Cuba, and I want my fucking human rights now."

"There's nothing you can do to me that Castro has not already done." Here is a master of his own destiny.

Written by Oliver Stone, "Scarface" can be viewed as an extension of "Midnight Express," the 1978 prison-escape film Stone wrote for director Alan Parker. Drugs represent a kind of free-market capitalism fought over with an all consuming obsession by authorities and criminals alike. "The World is Yours" flashes across the sky on a Goodyear blimp. It's an American propaganda message destined to be twisted in the minds of such conspicuously jealous and greedy individuals as Tony Montana. His outrageous rise to wealth presages an even more dramatic decline that mirrors the economic arc of a country more invested in money than culture. "Scarface" is a parable about the self-destruction of criminal success. It's a cinema of pure compulsion.