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— Jeppe Kleijngeld
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This remake of Howard Hawks 1932 gangster classic – which starred Paul Muni as gangster Tony Camonte – became a legendary movie within the genre.
Screenplay writer Oliver Stone changed the setting from Chicago in the early thirties to Miami in the early eighties, when it was flooded with (criminal) Cuban refugees. One of these is Tony Montana, a hoodlum with huge ambitions and an equally great temper.
After portraying Michael Corleone two times in 1972 and 1974, Al Pacino added another iconic gangster to pop culture folklore with his performance of the volatile Tony Montana.
The movie may at times be over the top, Pacino is 100% believable in his outrageous performance. As opposed to Michael Corleone, who was silently menacing and always had a serious composure, Tony Montana is much more loud, engaging and openly aggressive. Different personalities, but equally cunning and altogether deadly.
Together with his friend Manny, Tony rises in the Florida underworld after performing a few bloody jobs for local cocaine big shot Frank Lopez (Robert Loggia). Very soon, he dresses in silk suits and drives expensive (and butt-ugly) sports cars, but it isn’t enough. He wants the world, Chico, and everything in it.
With its infamous chainsaw sequence and ‘Rambo’ style ending, Scarface raised the bar in the level of violence acceptable within the gangster genre. The ending is never topped in how extreme, bloody and bat shit insane it is.
Many movies on this list are ‘rise and fall’ stories. In that category, Scarface is the top achiever hands down: no high in the genre was ever higher, and now low was ever lower.
Scarface is thus the ultimate rise and fall gangster story and with that, it is one of the greatest gangster movies ever made.
Imagine that you are living in the nineties and GoodFellas is your favorite movie of all time. Then its director Martin Scorsese announces a follow-up with much of the same cast and crew. This lucky occurrence happened to me.
Of course, Casino could have been a disappointment or a mere repetition of GoodFellas, but it became another mob masterpiece by the master of the genre (although he maintains Casino is not a mob movie). I fell in love with Casino in the cinema back then and now, thirty years later, I am falling in love with it all over again. I’m enjoying it even more than I ever thought possible.
Like in GoodFellas, the first hour provides a documentary style insider perspective on the mob’s Las Vegas in the seventies. The voice-overs are provided by Sam ‘Ace’ Rothstein (De Niro), a professional gambler who ran the Tangiers casino for the Chicago outfit, and Nicky Santoro (Pesci), a mafia enforcer who is sent after him to watch his back. Street guys running an operation of this magnitude? It is easy to see why Marty wanted to tell this story. He loves criminal conspiracies and this is a major one.
Things go smooth for a while, but as the tagline says: ‘no one can stay at the top forever’. Rothstein, the most controlled guy on the planet, falls in love with the highly volatile showgirl Ginger McKenna and marries her. That is one gamble that will cost him dearly. Their rocky marriage is the first thing that gets out of control.
The second explosive element in the mix is Nicky, who starts his own gang in Vegas and then starts pillaging the place as if it’s the Wild West. Finally, there is also the dumbest gangster in the mob’s history – Artie Piscano – who keeps financial records of the entire operation. At the end, ten years after Rothstein moved to Vegas, the whole house of cards starts collapsing in on itself.
The casting alone makes this one of the greatest mob movies ever. De Niro, Stone and Pesci couldn’t be more perfect (one made mafia member said Pesci’s performance is the most realistic portrayal of a wise guy ever), but all the supporting characters are golden as well. I mean, where did they find all these old mob guys in the grocery store? They are just fantastic.
Add to that the incredible cinematography, editing, production design, music, the beautiful credit sequence by Saul Bass, and the most realistic and gruesome mob violence ever put on screen, I mean Scorsese really aced it once again.
Miller’s Crossing is another great one from the prime gangster film year 1990 and second best from that year according to me and Ethan Coen, who once generously confessed that he thought GoodFellas was better.
Miller’s Crossing is stylistically based on Dashiell Hammett’s novels The Glass Key and Red Harvest and tells the story of Irish crime boss Leo O’Bannion (Albert Finney) and his gambling addicted Nr. 2 Tom Reagan (Gabriel Byrne) who rule over an unnamed American city in the 1930’s.
They enter into a conflict with Italian competitor Johnny Caspar (Jon Polito) and his lethal henchman Eddie Dane (J.E. Freeman) over the unreliable bookie Bernie Bernbaum (John Turturro) who Caspar wants to kill and Leo protects.
When a gang war erupts, Tom and Leo’s friendship gets strained over a woman (Verna, played by Marcia Gay Harden) and Tom joins Caspar’s gang. But to what end?
Many scenes in Miller’s Crossing are reminiscent of The Godfather, but Coen Brother style which means darkly comical and at times outright bizarre, but also brilliantly executed.
The complex screenplay is an ingenious piece of work. Famously, the brothers got a writing block while penning it, so they took a break to write their next movie Barton Fink, which is about a screenplay writer with a terrible case of writing block. Then they returned to Miller’s Crossing and I think it became one of their best screenplays; full of hard boiled dialogue and layered characters.
The casting is also great. Gabriel Byrne was never better as the headstrong and principled Tom. All of the supporting cast members are excellent as well in equal measure. And the thrilling camerawork (lot’s of riding and swooping camera moves) seems to be inspired by the Coen’s best friend Sam Raimi who plays an amusing bit part in this film.
There are also lots of hats in this movie, but they don’t really mean anything.
Michael Mann’s Heat is mostly known for the pairing of screen legends Al Pacino and Robert De Niro (who were also together in The Godfather: Part II, but didn’t share a scene together).
As expected, they are sensational. Total dynamite. But the movie has much, much more to offer. The screenplay, to begin with, is a masterpiece full of rich characters, deep insights into the world of crime and intelligent storytelling.
At the core of the story is the parallel between the lives of two men on opposite sides of the law. Neil McCauley (De Niro) is a master criminal who and his highline crew take down one major score after another. Lieutenant Vincent Hanna (Pacino) leads the Robbery-Homicide Division of the LAPD and obsessively hunts down thieves and killers.
Both men are pack leaders, admired and respected by their men for their superior skills and leadership abilities. They also both struggle with maintaining private lives as their chosen professions are all-consuming.
From the large number of memorable scenes, two stand out: McCauley’s and Hanna’s face-to-face in the coffeeshop, for the sheer acting power involved and the beautiful dialogues, ànd of course the massive shoot-out in the L.A. streets after the botched robbery.
Rather than dubbing in the gunshots, Mann had microphones carefully placed around the set so that the audio could be captured live. This added to the impact of the scene, because it sounds like no other gunfight before or after. Also, because you’ve become attached to the characters – both cops and robbers – it is an unbelievably tense scene. A truly heart pounding motherfucker if ever there was one.
And that is where Heat really separates itself from other crime flicks; it is surprisingly touching. Whether you watch Hanna comfort a woman whose daughter is just found murdered, or at the end in the final scene when he is holding the hand of a dying McCauley, you will truly feel that apart from a hyper cool crime movie, Heat also has a really big heart.
Welkom op Fragmenten uit het Schemerland, mijn persoonlijke website en content-verzameling. Je vindt hier veel artikelen over films en series in de FilmDungeon. Ook vind je op deze site mijn achtergrondverhaal, een selectie van mijn professionele werk, en een groeiende collectie blogs – fragmenten genaamd – over uiteenlopende onderwerpen. Veel leesplezier en bedankt voor het bezoeken van mijn blog!
