Screen:

...Through fearlessness and a kind of insane integrity, Tony Montana seizes opportunity and becomes a successful gangster...

...and in Scarface it is particularly difficult to get one's bearings...

...Art DAZZLING ORDINARY FAIRFIELD PORTER S INCE THE...

...Insisting on the film's artistic integrity, DePalma refused to cut or make changes and ultimately won an R rating for the original three-hour version...

...The implication of this skillful and manipulative melodrama is that the law, because of constitutional restraints, is incapable of punishing vicious criminals...

...It is interesting to see the two films in conjunction because the hero of Sudden Impact, Dirty Harry, (played by Clint Eastwood for the fourth time) behaves not so differently from the criminal protagonist of Scarface...

...Nothing is shown (though the possibility that we will be forced to look keeps us on edge), no screams are heard...

...We are no longer presented with a casual seascape but a painting carefully structured around a series of monochrome expanses of color...

...Once he achieves his limited goal there is nothing left for him to do but create the occasion for his destruction...

...Unlike DePalma's best films, Carrie, Obsession, and Dressed to Kill, which are nightmare fantasies and achieve their power through imagery and metaphor, Scarf ace pretends to be about the real world...

...A novelist, editor, and widely published critic, Jonathan Baumbach has written on film for Partisan Review, Harper's, and other journals...

...From my bias, it is still worth the price of admission...

...JONATHAN BAUMBACH (Commonweal' s movie reviews are currently being written by guest critics...

...The last extraordinary sequence, which is beautifully choreographed by DePalma, almost dignifies Montana's sleazy career by the impressiveness of its conclusion...

...Whenever the sequences are inspired as in the assassination attempt in the garish arriviste Miami restaurant in which Montana and his cronies hang out, the film is dazzling and suggests what the whole might have been if the work were significantly shorter and more of the material were congenial to the impulse of DePalma's talent...

...It is not violence that vitiates Scarface but grandiosity and insufficient audacity...

...Dirty Harry is a law unto himself, a useful (and murderous) corrective to the ostensible impotence of civilized justice...

...I say apparent because much, if not all, of the violent action in DePalma's movies is highly stylized, is not meant to be taken as real life, is movie violence...

...From Porter, no such iconographic claims are forthcoming...

...The answer becomes clear when we turn to one of the most successful paintings he did during the late 1960s, Island Farmhouse...

...l offer these prefatory remarks to explain my affection for the films of Brian DePalma, which have been the subjects of controversy at least in part because of their apparent violence...

...The camera cuts away for a period of time to a parallel scene in the street outside...

...All such qualifications vanish, however, the minute we change perspectives and look at Island Farmhouse as a colorist painting in which the real subject, as Porter wrote of the work of his friend Willem de Kooning, is "the nature of paint as the artist's object of contemplation...

...One result of Porter's restraint is that his realism has never commanded a wide audience...

...Sometimes DePalma's characteristic ironies work effectively in Scarface...

...Such work is often frustrating because it denies us the comfort of satisfied expectation...

...Of the more than 140 paintings that constitute the Boston Museum of Fine Arts 1983 Fairfield Porter retrospective, all but a handful center on Southampton or Great Spruce Head Island, Maine...

...The most disturbing violence in Scarf ace is left to the imagination, is conspicuously offscreen, and is all the more awful as a consequence...

...We don't just think of artists such as Thomas Cole, Albert B ierstadt, and Grant Wood as American landscape painters...

...Nevertheless, the movie's sensational reputation -- it is extremely rare for a mainstream commercial film to be X-rated -- preceded its appearance...

...This behavior seems almost reasonable within the highly charged and distorted context of the movie because the criminal suspects we meet tend to be blatantly guilty and unredeemably depraved...

...The last thing he wanted to be classified as was one of "the illustrators of the American scene...

...The scene is handled with extreme, really ominous, tact...

...Its delicacy wins out over its amateurism...

...We think of them as men who benefited from a sense of place, who made the Hudson Valley, the Rocky Mountains, the farm country of Iowa their subject...

...The first and obvious answer is that Tony Montana provides a performance tour-de-force for Al Pacino, an actor of exciting skill and resourcefulness...

...But Porter is an exception in the way he valued place...

...The film goes too far and not far enough...

...They are rendered without great detail (the boat has the look of a child's toy...

...Their influence on him was minimal, but that of French artist Edouard Vuillard was enormous, and a year after seeing a Vuillard exhibition at the Chicago Art Institute, Porter at the age of thirty-two had his first one-man show...

...One of the impulses of DePalma's work - - perhaps the central impulse -- is to assault complacency, to startle and disturb...

...DePalma's Scarf ace, then, is an overlong, self-conflicted movie full of brilliant unassimilated ideas...

...The second answer, and the one the film offers us as an emblem of its seriousness, is that the story of Tony Montana has both social (he is the bastard son of capitalism) and mythic implications...

...It is important to distinguish between violence in art (or entertainment) and violence in the real world, a distinction too often muddled in the heat of outrage...

...Montana's defect is that his all-consuming voraciousness is essentially unobjectified...

...Before it opened, DePalma's remake of Scarf ace (the How: ard Hawks classic was made in 1932 and based on the career of Al Capone) had already become notorious by receiving an X rating solely on the basis of violence...

...The ocean, a small boat, a dog, and a clapboard house are shown in perfect harmony with each other on a bright summer day...

...seems self-mocking about its own social seriousness...

...There is a confusion, really complexity, of tone in most of DePalma's films (an uneasy mix of parody and exaggerated seriousness...

...As a realistic work, Island Farmhouse is a perfect case of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts...

...Such a claim would have struck Porter as tendentious...

...It is a fantasy after all, a policier with the configurations of a western...

...It is an imaginative tour-de-force unrelated to the film as a whole...

...I prefer originality to unearned coherence, want films to offer me, in several senses, new ways of seeing...

...From this point on, his career quietly began to build...

...By 1961, when he quit reviewing to give full time to his own work, Porter was firmly established in New York art circles, and from then until his death in 1975, he had fourteen one-man shows and taught at Amherst, Yale, Southampton College, and the Maryland Institute...

...He is less a storyteller than a maker of images that sometimes come together into a story...

...What was it that made Porter such a success within the art world but not outside it...

...Some thugs kill a man with a chain saw while the central character, Tony Montana, a cohort of the victim, is forced to look on...

...When viewing, leave social and political considerations at home...

...It was the country as nature's nation that emerged from Cole's fiver valley and Bierstadt's mountains and Wood's fields...

...In this commitment to place Fairfield Porter has been equally traditional...

...Those who live by violence die by violence...

...The excess in Scarface has comic implication, but to what effect...

...The Northeast Atlantic Coast is where he lived and liked to paint, but he never dreamed of i suggesting that his Southampton or Maine were America in microcosm...

...more often they seem irrelevant...

...After graduating from Harvard in 1928 with a degree in fine arts, he moved to New York and enrolled in the Art Students League, where his teachers were Thomas Hart Benton and Boardman Robinson...

...In order to preserve civilization, policemen like Dirty Harry have to make themselves into avenging angels of the unprotected...

...Nonetheless each balances the other out, and in the end the painting slowly succeeds...

...From the yellow-green of the foreground lawn, we are moved to the dark-green shadow cast 24 February 1984:117...

...The same excessiveness that brings Montana to the top of his profession -- the film means to be about both the capitalist ethic and tragic rise and fall -- causes him finally to self-destruct, and so Scarf ace is also a cautionary tale...

...DePalma makes movies about movies - - movies about making movies, about watching movies, about making and watching them in the same imaginative act...

...It is about a Cuban punk from one of Castro's jails, who comes to Miami to pursue a version of the American dream...

...The ambivalence of tone is one of the legacies of Hitchcock's and Godard's influence on the director...

...one of the dog's legs rests at an impossible angle...

...An everyday scene that was previously both charming and amateurish is suddenly transformed...

...For those who take vicarious pleasure in filmed violence, Scarface can only be a disappointment...

...In the director's most characteristic films, the action tends to comment on itself -- the act and the judgment of the act as one...

...For Porter, this lack of widespread popularity was never a problem...

...The chain saw episode, which takes place early in the film, is used not to inure us to violence but to sensitize us to its horror - - to this particular horror -- to make us ready for anything...

...Scarf ace makes a number of self-conscious statements about itself (one of the characters says "Nothing exceeds like excess...

...He has not, in the fashion of an Andrew Wyeth, endeared himself to the public...

...EARLY nineteenth century, region has been an important force in American painting...

...What disturbs us most about DePalma's cinema is not the violence itself, which is dreamlike, but violations of conventional expectation...

...Instead, he has been seen as a stylistic conservative content to paint the private lives of the upper middle class...

...As John Updike observed in a recent essay, Porter's world seems to consist primarily of "nice people, nice places, pleasantly redolent of affection and sensitivity and, that great underwriter of both, money...

...For his regional predecessors, place was not merely subject matter they knew intimately...

...Commonweal: 116 S UDDENIMPACT is, in ways that count, a more violent movie than Scarface...

...The implicit question of a film like Scarface is why is a vicious punk worthy of our attention at such protracted length...

...Sudden Impact, which is also directed by Eastwood, disguises its inconsistencies with impressive skill, is satisfying (as vengeance f'dms tend to be) by fulfilling our most primitive feelings...

...Their point in painting and repainting a region was to gain the freedom to generalize about it...

...Born in Winnetka, Illinois in 1907 to wealthy parents, Porter never had to work for a living or depend on patrons to sustain his career...

...Place was America in microcosm...

...The tone, and the self-consciousness it generates, seems like an inherited mannerism, one of several unassimilated ideas...

...During the 1950s Porter acquired tremendous influence as a critic for Art News, and in that same decade he began to gain a reputation as an artist's artist -- the leader of a group of painters that included Alex Katz, Robert Dash, Jane Freilicher, and Neil Welliver...

...But the role of Montana is too cramped, too without sufficient variation or growth to give the remarkable Pacino full range of his gifts...