Scarface

After the last Seventies film (Blow Out), the ultimate Eighties film. It begins like the end of Lester's Cuba, newsreel footage announces Castro's exiles in Florida, among them lies the runty hoodlum who fancies himself a political refugee (Al Pacino). "Cara cicatriz," new to the land but already versed in the order of things: "This country, you gotta make the money first. When you get the money, then you get the power. When you get the power, then you get the women." The shortcut is to bump off the drug lord (Robert Loggia) and seize the golden concubine (Michelle Pfeiffer), the rise is swift and the fall is dire. Brian De Palma for Howard Hawks and Oliver Stone for Ben Hecht, just the duo for piling high the Me Decade's corrupt opulence. "You know what capitalism is? Gettin' fucked." "True capitalist if I ever met one." The mirrored nightclub and the burnt-orange sunset mural, a vicious go-getter's sham paradise surveyed with sprawling crane shots. (One in particular floats from gruesome chainsaw mayhem inside a Miami motel down to the sunny street and back, obscenely outdoing Hitchcock's famous reverse track in Frenzy.) Machismo hungry and erect then sated and flaccid, Pacino's audacious Latin minstrelsy leaves no stone unturned. "The world is yours" flashes on a blimp as the antihero eyes the lavish void, before long he has shot his only friend (Steven Bauer) and been shot by the sister he unwittingly desires (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio). The joke is that he's not ruthless enough for the business, a solitary flash of scruples during an assassination attempt promptly dooms him. "A little coke money doesn't hurt nobody, you know?" Blake's palace of wisdom at the end of the road of excess is equipped with black chambers and crimson colonnades, the last stand riotously mates Kurosawa's Throne of Blood and Visconti's Ludwig. Cinematography by John A. Alonzo. With F. Murray Abraham, Harris Yulin, Paul Shenar, Míriam Colón, Mark Margolis, Ángel Salazar, Pepe Serna, Al Israel, and Richard Belzer.