BOOKS
SAY HELLO TO YOUR BOOKSHELF’S NEW LITTLE FRIEND
★★★★
THEY DON’T MAKE ’em like Scarface anymore, but then, they didn’t really make them like Scarface back then, either. The febrile combination of director Brian De Palma, screenwriter Oliver Stone and actor Al Pacino shaped an operatic crime epic unlike any other, and this book by veteran film journalist Glenn Kenny reveals a behind-the-scenes story almost as fraught as Tony Montana’s own history.
After a quick historical and film primer on the history of Prohibition, gangster movies and cocaine use in the US, Kenny profiles the personalities involved, analysing their careers before the film to give context to their decision-making on Scarface. His deep knowledge of film history and long career help, treating the movie seriously even in its less serious moments, as do his friendships with figures who had close ties to the filmmakers at the time, like screenwriter and Hollywood insider Jay Cocks.
Kenny writes in a pleasantly looping style, referring in passing to anecdotes that he returns to in more depth as the book goes on. Especially in the later chapters, he quotes his interviewees in long, almost unedited chunks, the better to communicate their speech patterns. Alittle resigned irritation seeps through when his requests for an interview with Pacino are turned down, but he fills the gaps with archive interviews, a public Q&A with Pacino, and everyone else’s stories about the actor, who was intensely involved in the film’s creation and prone to endless takes and agonising over the details of his character. But in this account there was method to Pacino’s apparent mania; his requests for redesigned sets or rewritten scenes often pay off in unexpected ways, giving Tony the space to roll around on an office chair, for example, when planning an assassination.
Oddly, Kenny shares lots of opinions in passing but doesn’t discuss his own views on Scarface. Perhaps it’s simply assumed that he agrees with (most of ) his interviewees that it’s a masterpiece, and not with those who criticise its excesses. But given his film knowledge and research in chronicling its creation, he does everything he needs without a review.
There’s more than enough welcome chewy asides and character sprinkled throughout the insightful analysis.
VERDICT A
