Essay on Scarface: Then and Now
Scarface (1932) is the film that uncovers the tragic story of rising a gangster to power and the tragic end of his life, when he is shot down by the police, while he attempted to flee from his home and break through the police siege. The film seems to be extremely violent, even excessively violent from the contemporary standpoint. On the other hand, the film contains implications for sexually explicit scenes, which though are never shown in the film. Therefore, Scarface is the film that focuses on the violence and eliminates any moral and social boundaries of violent behavior but still remains ethically rigid in the depiction of sexually explicit scenes.
Sexually explicit scenes in the film are rather implicit and are not shown in the film in the way they would be shown in a present day film. For example, the visit of Poppy to Tony’s gaudy apartment gives implications to the continuation of the sexual scene to follow the visit, but the film winds up the scene without the explicit continuation. Instead, a contemporary film would likely to continue the scene ending up with a sexually explicit scene of Tony and Poppy having love.
The violence is amply presented throughout the film. In fact, from the beginning the main character of the film, Tony manifests his inclination to use violence to resolve all problems. For example, he obtains promotion and becomes Jonny’s lieutenant after killing a Mafioso, who controlled the Southern side of the city, Big Louis Costillo.
Furthermore, the film continues to cover the violent nature of Tony’s ‘business as he takes control over bars and come into clashes with other gangsters. The film is full of violent scenes depicting the murder of gangsters as well as civilians. For example, the scene, when Guino kills O’Hara, the leader of the Irish gang that controlled the North of the city. Another violent scene is slaughtering of Irish gangsters in the garage by gangsters impersonating police officers.
At the same time, the film shows violent scenes which refer not only to the impersonal slaughter of numerous gangsters but it also uncovers the family tragedy of the main character, which also involves the extremely violent scene, when the sister of Tony is killed by a stray bullet. On the other hand, this scene is preceded by another violent scene, when Tony kills his friend, Guino, after seeing him with his sister, being unaware of their secret marriage. In fact, such violent acts have a profound impact on the audience because of the personal tragedy of each character involved in these scenes. They are not some gangsters, whom Tony does not know but they are people, who are very close to him, closest people, as the matter of fact. This is why such violent scenes have a particularly strong emotional constraint and the audience grows more and more involved in the film. Moreover, while watching these films, the audience has emotional turmoil since, on the one hand, the audience is shocked by extreme, apparently excessive and unreasonable violence, as was the case of Guino’s murder, and occasional, unreasonable and illogical killing of Tony’s sister by a stray bullet.
Thus, the film turns out to be extremely violent, even for the present audience. On the other hand, sexually explicit scenes are underperformed in the film from the contemporary standpoint.
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