Tony's Corner: A Fan's Notes
"De Palma & Tarantino: SCARFACE, KILL
BILL and the End of the World as We Know it"
Volume 1.
 Earlier in this fall
movie season there occured one of those cosmic coincidences that cause paroxysms of joy in
film lovers everywhere, when the 20th Anniversary re-release of Brian De Palma's gangster
classic SCARFACE was swiftly followed by the release of the "4th film by Quentin
Tarantino," KILL BILL. Like some kind of harmonic convergence of chainsaw and samurai
sword severed limbs, or a hyper-violent, highly stylized bloodsoaked solar eclipse, De
Palma and Tarantino's respective, highly controversial films appeared to share much more
than just closely-aligned dates on the calendar. Tarantino's long avowed affection for De
Palma's work comes to the fore in KILL BILL, Volume 1 (with volume 2 to follow in
February; thank you Mr. Weinstein!), in a manner far more discernable than even in
previous efforts. The brief split screen effect and 360-degree vertiginous camera moves
that QT deployed in JACKIE BROWN as a tip of his kangol hat to De Palma, have now evolved
into an elaborate funny-scary split screen hospital sequence that occurs early in KILL
BILL, one that manages to reference CARRIE, RAISING CAIN and most obviously and
deliciously, DRESSED TO KILL, all to wonderfully satisfying effect. Among the gazillion
scattered references to countless other movies that can be found in KILL BILL, there are
also a couple of clear allusions to SCARFACE.
The most noteworthy of these, evoking Tony
Montana's vain-glorious demise, occurs during the jaw-dropping extravaganza that is the
film's climactic set piece, the astoundingly choreographed and shot series of battles
between Uma Thurman and what appears to be half of the Japanese underworld (led by arch
rival Lucy Liu's O-Ren Ishii) in that Tokyo nightclub of Tarantino's fertile imagination,
The House of Blue Leaves. O-Ren's chief of Security, one Johhny Mo (say "Zhang
Yimou," cute, Quentin), played by legendary martial arts star Gordon Liu, is mortally
wounded and takes a dive into a fountain that is so literally soaked with the blood of
dozens of young samurai who'd already fallen by the sword of Thurman's vengeful character,
known only as The Bride, that it splashes a red so resplendent it would make the Kubrick
of THE SHINING, or even current Japanese gore-meisterTakashi Miike feel insufficient. The
art direction and set design work in this sequence far surpasses even PULP FICTION's
legendary Jackrabbit Slim's, and when you factor in Robert Richardson giddy camera work,
QT's inventive staging, and the miraculous fight choreography and wire work of long-time
Hong Kong genius Yuen Woo-ping, it's easily the most memorably brilliant sequence in the
entire Tarantino oeuvre.
At least until Volume 2.
That's not to say that all of this allusive game
playing and genre movie infused cinemania should come as news to anyone, after all
Tarantino has been quoting De Palma since as far back as RESERVOIR DOGS, and has
repeatedly stated his admiration in several interviews and articles. In one of my personal
favorites, Tarantino recounts how De Palma was the first director that the then teenaged
QT followed on a regular basis, even going so far as compiling a scrapbook of press
clippings and movie reviews that filled to overflowing. Of course, such obsessive
movie-love has positively informed Tarantino's work from the get-go, and is quite
literally the stuff that KILL BILL is made of. It's also what makes him so endearing to
other discerning cinephiles, you know, the kind that choose to worship at the unholy altar
of Brian De Palma. A compendium of seemingly every kung-fu picture-Yakuza
gangster-spaghetti western-blaxploitation-samurai warrior epic-biker chick and b-movie
revenge flick that Tarantino has ever seen, KILL BILL plays like Quentin's Greatest Hits,
all in one neat, albeit frustratingly divided, two-part package. That Volume 1 alone is
actually one of the best movies of what's been an admittedly lackluster year, is something
of an accomplishment. Movies this rich in imagination, this daring in execution (in every
sense of that word), just don't come around too often.
Volume 2 (without the four month wait).
 In the fall of 2003
however, there was at least one other film that has shared the same white hot spotlight as
KILL BILL, a movie that without which, it would be hard to imagine Tarantino's entire
career, let alone just his latest film. One of the truly surprising highlights of the year
has been the overwhelmingly successful theatrical re-release of De Palma's 1983 landmark
crime epic SCARFACE. The film's enduring popularity and near legendary status among both
movie geek and Hip Hop cultures led to Universal's decision to mount a 20th anniversary
re-release. An initially modest booking schedule was hastily expanded, and the movie,
first planned for a limited one week run that was primarily designed to boost sales of a
new special edition DVD, was actually held over for several weeks in some areas due to the
unexpectedly high demand for tickets. A companion CD of Gangsta rap tunes by the likes of
NWA, Notorious BIG, and, of course, Scarface, that'd been influenced by the film was also
a hot seller; and that new DVD has been setting sales records as well. The surprising
result of all this activity, is that Brian De Palma, who was busy casting and cobbling
together international independent financing for his next project, the horror-thriller
TOYER, as well circling at least two other very promising Hollywood studio projects, but
who hadn't had a mainstream box-office hit since MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE in 1996, suddenly
found himself at the center of American film culture with a twenty year old film that, in
it's original release, had suffered a near fatal combination of apathy, infamy, and
vilification at the hands of critics and audiences alike.
Well will wonders ever cease? Just what is it that makes SCARFACE, a movie even most De
Palmaphiles, the late Pauline Kael chief among them (she sneeringly referred to it as the
"De Palma movie for people who don't like De Palma movies"), didn't seem to care
too much for, so damned important? Could the vaunted Kael and so many others who've so
closely followed De Palma in the years since have been so off the mark? In a word: YES.
SCARFACE is indeed special, very special. In the canon of the modern day gangster film
(read post-GODFATHER), it stands with Coppola's masterful trilogy, Sergio Leone's
meta-epic ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA, Scorsese's sacred and profane MEAN STREETS and
GOODFELLAS and yes, Tarantino's PULP FICTION, as the very pinnacle of a genre that has
become the most significant and creatively interesting in American cinema over the past
three decades. It was made at a time when De Palma wished to branch out and establish
himself in genres other than those of the thrillers and horror films with which he'd made
his reputation in the previous decade. The resulting unremarkable response, with the
advantage of 20/20 hindsight is easy to understand. De Palma, his screenwriter Oliver
Stone, his leading actor Al Pacino, and a production team of truly gifted artisans that
included CHINATOWN cinematographer John Alonzo, and Bernardo Bertolucci's production
designer Ferdinando Scarfiotti, were so incredibly ahead of the curve, that it took the
rest of us the better part of two decades to catch up to just what they had rendered.
SCARFACE, with it's heady mixture of gangster movie lore, social and political satire,
profanity-laced dialogue, outrageously over the top violence, and spaghetti western meets
Kurosawa sensibility, was just way too much of a sensory overload for folks to handle in
the staid era of Ronald Reagan and TERMS OF ENDEARMENT. Looking back, SCARFACE seems to
have anticipated and influenced nearly every major cultural, musical, cinematic and even
sociological trend that has followed in it's wake. This bitterly funny, three-hour paen to
the twisted nightmare that was once the American Dream, is much more than just another
gangster picture. It's become something of a mirrored reflection of the past two decades
of crime, greed and decadence, of the moral rot that has seen this country fall sway to
increasingly corrupt politicians, fixed elections, falsely-waged wars, and an isolated and
arrogant international stance, that in turn has brought forth vengeful acts of
near-biblical proportions and more comparisons to the Fall of the Roman Empire than any
happy camper would really care to hear. All the while, these so-called leaders continue to
line their own, and their cronies pockets, and push a fundamentalist, Draconian social
agenda that would appear to be completely at odds with their own moral bankruptcy. Money,
Power and Sex: Tony Montana knew full well the gilt-edged reality of those great American
truths.
SCARFACE may have been so scathingly received by it's initial critics, so ignored by those
early audiences precisely because of the way it so clearly stated, in the manner of Tony's
wonderful grasp of the English language, a giant "Fuck You," to everything
that's gone wrong in America. Which is also why it has since been picked up as a rallying
cry by the poets and prophets of the underclasses, by cultural outcasts at every level and
of every stripe. In the great literary tradition of Mark Twain, Sinclair Lewis, Nathaniel
West and Thomas Pynchon, SCARFACE is a cry of moral outrage, a scathing attack on the
rampant dangers of capitalist greed gone unchecked and out of control. In an era of
political correctness, here is a movie that openly celebrates it's own sense of
impropriety. It is to De Palma and company's credit that SCARFACE can now been seen as the
first truly post modern American gangster film. A movie that embodies, and self-knowingly
comments on it's own excesses of style, substance and vision, and serves as a vast
repository of nearly every rags-to-riches-to-inglorious-death crime saga from Josef Von
Sternberg's silent classic UNDERWORLD, Howard Hawks' original 1932 SCARFACE, all of those
Warner Brothers gangster films of the thirties and forties, on to the corrosive works of
Nicholas Ray, Anthony Mann and Sam Fuller in the 1950's, the loving pastiches of Godard,
Truffaut and the French New Wave, to Leone, Bertolucci, and Argento in Italy, the
iconoclastic BONNIE AND CLYDE and THE WILD BUNCH, right up to and including the early
films of Coppola and Scorsese. That it also anticipates and so fully informs everything
from MIAMI VICE to THE KING OF NEW YORK to Tarantino, the Coen brothers, John Woo and
scores of Hong Kong action films, Steven Soderbergh's TRAFFIC, THE MATRIX, anime, manga,
the current wave of Japanese pulp films, and a plethora of imitators and pretenders,
bespeaks of the hold that it has maintained on just the medium of the visual arts. Add all
of the music, fashion, cultural and sociological influences to the mix, and then ask
yourself to name one other film that has so centered itself in and of it's time as has
Brian De Palma's impure masterpiece.
Still thinking? Sorry, my friend, it can't be done.
Quentin Tarantino, in every way a lightning rod of controversy and criticism that De Palma
was in his heyday, is perhaps the true heir apparent to De Palma's post modern legacy. His
movies, as much about movies as they are about anything else, play like running dialogues
with De Palma's, the master and the student are now both, however fleetingly, at the
forefront of American film. The two are directors who share a gift for knowing and loving
how to make cinema that does what it was always meant to do: touch us and change us at our
very core. Tarantino, in the span of a decade has made some of the most influential,
innovative, inventive and sheerly pleasurable movies since well, since Brian De Palma. De
Palma at 63, is coming off a masterpiece in FEMME FATALE that showed him to be at the
height of his powers, a visual genius of unparelled skill, but also a thinker, with the
unlikely combination of an innate sense of romantic grandeur and a deep, dark cynicism
that brings a complexity to his work that other directors, save a very few, can't even
begin to approach. Tarantino himself is not yet there. As good as he is, he displays the
limitations of one so in love with genre and the world of the movies, that he hasn't yet
displayed the level of moral resonance found in the work of masters like De Palma,
Scorsese and Kurosawa. He can and he will get better. His stated goal is not to burn out
the way most filmmakers do over a long career (something the prolific De Palma has also
managed to avoid), but to continually top himself, to make a great movie every time out.
He's done that so far, so the bravado is not false, and once again, in this age of safety
and conformity, it's more than welcome. So bring on the skeptics, KILL BILL, Volume 2 will
almost certainly open 2004 with a bang; and with any amount of luck, TOYER and/or THE
BLACK DAHLIA will be around to close it with an unmerciful shudder.
I for one can't wait.
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