Death, Italian Style: SCARFACE, SUSPIRIA

 You can argue that gangster cinema began at Warners with Cagney and Robinson, but a few pre-code masterworks aside, the gangster never hit his grandiose peak, never became an Italian art for an Italian form of criminality, until his Italian-American story was directed by an Italian-American. Robert Evans knew this, and so insisted on Coppola for The Godfather. This may sound defamatory, but the Italian-American Anti-Defamation league was founded by one of the heads of the five families, Joe Colombo, so who can you truss? Me, ass who. I mean this as a compliment, for with an Italian director you ideally have the sense of Italian flair and artistry, the Scorsese drive, the Coppola beauty, and the De Palma opera. 

The Italian-Americans don't all necessarily love opera of course, but it's emblematic of their artistic genes, right up there with the poetry of Dante and the Apollonianisms of Botticelli, Da Vinci, Michelangelo, and the masochism of vivid analysis of each centurion lash upon the wrecked torso of Christ so inherent in Catholicism. All this and more pumps, drives, the flagellant Italian heart, which stretches back in its beating history through countless decadent Roman orgies. Thus the murders in Argento and De Palma and Scorsese and Coppola play out like operatic fugues of the damned. They present characters who are laid, who are adults, men, who sometimes joke around but never about business, and when violence occurs to or through them it's always painful. They see death coming, and they make sure their opponents get the same luxury. There's a feeling of what's really involved with killing people with Italian and Italian-American directors, the way few non-Italians can capture. And as in all the good De Palma films, in Scarface, death may be cinematic and beautiful at times but it also hurts and no one dies easy. His characters get time to register the horror of realizing their whole life is about to end, suddenly and with no good reason, and so much left undone. In normal gangster films people just get shot, blammo! But when being true to Italian operatic schematics you need time to die - in slow motion, while Ennio Morricone strings play a semi-mocking eulogy overhead and you look at your killer with a slow turn from pleading to fear to anger and oaths. And if you can't make the jump from fear to anger, the way Lopez can't, for example, then you don't even deserve the top shelf bullets.

It makes sense then that De Palma has no real interest in capturing the Latin rhythm in his take on Miami, filling the score with the boss Italian synths of Giorgio Moroder, and the gaudy architectures of the Italian disco. Hawks' 1932 Scarface bounced around with merry good-cheer and mocktalian comedy-team rhythm that made a stunning counterpoint to the violence. Paul Muni showed that thing we all love about our Italian-American friend/s, that their good natured life force is always on, never wavering regardless of circumstance; only ever half-conscious of how humorous they are; even when breaking your thumbs for not paying your debts they can joke around and make you feel like a regular guy and ask you how's your mother. And if you dated one then you know how nurturing they are, cradling your head when you throw up, and only crying and freaking out when they realize you are never going to stop drinking long enough to be much of a take-home-to-the-parents style boyfriend.

Scarface's ice princess blonde, played as a bundle of nerves snaking themselves through sheer brass will into the shape of a svelte cat-eyed bombshell (Michelle Pfeiffer, making the grade) is the opposite of the Italian girlfriend, the kind of woman an Italian man eager to transcend himself might go for. If you can get her to laugh, a woman like that? Ah Manolo, she break her contract with Lopez for you. Plus, she's forbidden. That's the boss's lady, ogay? But Tony values only that which he cannot have. If scoring the boss's wife off him and taking over the whole organization still leaves him hungry, he has to look inward, towards that hot sister, the final taboo but for a man who hasn't seen her in a long time? zazoom! He break his contract with the social order for her. 

As Tony, Pacino is filmed first in long shots, his musky tan face paint dripping off when he's hot or stressed or being bathed in Angel's blood with a gun to his head. In the early scenes where he's bluffing his way up into Lopez's good graces he seems to fold in on himself; his terrible bangs and loud shirts, short frame and hairy arms, make him seem small and stiff, a peasant trying to cover up his innocence with tough talk and bravado. De Palma's camera doesn't circle but rather observes him from on high; he seems like a freshman on his first day of high school eager to be accepted by the cool kids but determined not to show it. As Tony increases in stature and drive, De Palma's camera moves in for medium shots at the club table, such as the shakedown from the narcotics cop, and Pacino quickly but imperceptibly mutates as well, oscillating back and forth between tough guy killer and loyal clown, gradually losing the clown aspect along the way and replacing it with self-absorbed money-obsessed paranoiac.

We learn from books like The Devil's Playground that De Palma knows something about cocaine, and if you look at this movie and the bloated satire of Bonfire of the Vanities (1990) and The Untouchables (1987), as a trilogy, you get a saga of desire, loss, and how empires might be built on the underbelly of America's endless attempts to inflict the morals of senator's wives onto America through prohibition and unconstitutional drug laws, not to mention the importance of not getting high on one's supply that's understood so deeply you can feel De Palma's good judgment slipping away as the film goes on, as it does for Tony (In Untouchables, Connery is shot at almost as soon as he pulls a shot from his stashed bottle of Scotch, for example). And like Tony, and Tom Hanks in Bonfire, De Niro's massive wealth in Untouchables as Capone (the original Scarface) unlimited wealth doesn't change one's roots, so much as gaudies everything up and gradually sucks off the bulk of that amiable life force - so you're getting shaved by your old barber but in a beautiful palatial space under twisted dark manly flooring. This is wealth spent by the man, to realize his aesthetic, not the rich woman's drive for respectability, flowers, white tiles and dinner parties with all the best people. This is the nouveau riche bachelor in full flower, wherein the dark sleek look of the Corleone compound expands outwards, forward and back through ripples in time. 

To get back to the sister, Tony doesn't really understand the way desire for her as merely a hot young stranger is mixed with a mix of brotherly love, paternal instinct, and narcissism. I know the effect of seeing your relative whom you've only seen every five or six years suddenly showing up in your neighborhood as a bona fide hottie, your own flesh and blood; it's so so wrong, and for the mentally aberrant, like Tony, it's the ultimate. Just as it was for Caligula, another crazy Italian powermonger. Yeah, I know Pacino and De Palma may be Italian, but Tony's supposed to be Cuban, and as I say that's part of the problem with Pacino's performance: Michael Corleone seemed uncomfortable with the mantle of Italian-ism in ways he wasn't about killing but Tony Montana is uncomfortable in just about anything, except shouting in such a way as you're as gradually worn down by it as Elvira.

Despite all these problems, Tony lives on today, 20 years later, as a kind of living god. As a character he has aged less well than the the emulators might think, however. If there's something heroic about a last stand it's tempered by his stupidity, his blindness to his monitors, his letting his security team get slaughtered, his own impulse killing of Manny, and of the assassin in New York City, and refusal to accept responsibility for any of his actions.  His final shoot-out can be read academically as a zero point tantrum of grief and self-absorption. We know he was in the Cuban army and in jail and has an assassin tattoo, but we only see him kill a few people until the big finale and it's inferred he's killed no one else on his own time; there's no montage of shootings and take-over violence that we got in the original. Instead the montage is of bling and success: wedding, tiger, money counting, a dated synth anthem "Take it to the Limit," and success but then--once he has enough gaudy toys and can get no higher--he quickly stalls out. Mired in cocaine and confusion, he pulls the plug on his existence by blowing the hit, letting his coked-up ego and repressed love of kids and guilt over his mama--"sensitive weakness"--knock him into a winner-lose-all blowing up in his face world fugue.

Scarface is one of the few 1980s films that comes out looking less expensive on widescreen. Sets seem to end just short a few feet from the side edges of the screen and the backdrops often look like freestanding dry-wall with cheap wallpaper hanging over the top. Loepz's BMW dealership back office with its tropical sunset wallpaper (above, middle) cuts off into a blackness on every side, with the setting Miami sun wallpaper giving off that flat chintzy feel of a direct-to-video porn film. We start with close-ups of his face enduring grilling over  his tattoos by an off screen Charles Durning Immigration cop, then crowded sweaty scenes of dishwashing and stabbing, twilight phone booths, and the gradual closing down around him, there are few places that are seen twice in the film, and fewer actors as the scenes tighten up in a forward Apollonian arc that begins to wither into a fecund limpness, sunshine devolving to images of sunsets, then marble night, before the final red hellscape. The architecture even starts to resemble an Italian horror film, with all the black marble (a symbol of death like the 'X' markings in the 1932 version) and the gaudiness of the sprawling jacuzzi bathroom, and then, for the death knell, a room with marble so black that when the messed up Gina comes in with her flimsy negligee and gun, she's not unlike the fish-eyed demoness at the climax of Suspiria and then, finally, say hello to my liddle fren!

The big separation line between Scarface and Italian horror is that death is where the gangster film would stop, but horror doesn't stop with death, it has a few more places to go. And the brutal circumstance, the violence of going out, is everything. If you look at American horror of the same approximate time, death doesn't dawdle. Even most slasher films, the American ones, like Halloween, are really about the stalking and POV camera: when death comes it's almost a relief, since as I pointed out in "A Clockwork Darkness", we now know where the killer is (on the other end of the knife) there's no more worrying from where and when he will strike, and no onscreen death can match our dread of the potential for it. But Argento's murders, like those in De Palma films, are the exceptions to this: the moment of the first bullet, stab, or slash doesn't necessarily disrupt the previous stalking, one flows organically into the next, for the death throes might go on for a full aria of blows, near escapes, feeble cries for help, and chances to look up pitifully at the uncaring sky or (as in Fulci's Don't Torture the Duckling) busy highway.

And architecture plays another part in prolonging the sense of helplessness. In the Escher-covered apartment building where the first murder goes down in Suspiria, the multiple reflective frosted windows, the bizarre wallpaper, strange vertical angles, unholy lighting, and the howling, strange music and unusual angles, the sorts of things De Palma creates by nature, wedging it into any shot not nailed down by a pre-set story.