TALES OF LOHR: GLENN KENNY'S "THE WORLD IS YOURS"

Reading a behind-the-scenes chronicle of everyone ELSE's favorite ‘80s gangster movie

In last week’s Premium Tales of Lohr newsletter, in which I looked at Barry Levinson’s now-officially-a-bomb mob movie The Alto Knights, I noted as one of my favorite classic gangster pictures Howard Hawks’ 1932 paradigm-setter Scarface, in which Paul Muni tears up the screen as a hair-triggered cock-of-the-walk Capone stand-in. But I did not likewise call out Brian De Palma’s cult-favorite 1983 riff on the Hawks original, in which a roaringly in-Method Al Pacino takes on the Muni role, the gangster’s Italian background is changed to Cuban, and the Hawks film’s bootleg liquor is transformed into literal mountains of cocaine. This is because, simply put, De Palma’s Scarface is a gangster film that pretty much everyone who loves the genre seems to like more than I do. My biggest gripe with the ‘83 film is a pretty basic one: I think it’s just too damn long. There is a great two-hour movie to be found within the nearly three-hour bloat of Scarface, but I find that almost every scene in the picture feels like it drags on for at least a minute too long. For a movie in which an illegal stimulant practically deserves co-starring credit, it sure could use a little hitch in its giddy-up.