The World is Yours

Film: Scarface: Shame of a Nation, Scarface
Format: DVDs from personal collection on kick-ass portable DVD player.

At the start of every quarter in school, I ask my students to answer a few questions for me juts to help me learn their names a little better. One of those questions, naturally, is their favorite movie. Scarface gets named with relative frequency, and when it does, I ask the student in question if he (it’s invariably a guy) means the original or the remake. “The original!” he’ll say each time. “The one with Pacino!” And so I sadly shake my head and explain how that’s the remake, and that particular class never again gets in my grill about my movie knowledge.

The original, frequently called Scarface: Shame of a Nation will be familiar to those much more comfortable with the remake, because the remake really is a remake in a lot of ways. In this case, though, we are dealing not with a Cuban cocaine lord but a Prohibition-era Italian beer runner named Tony Camonte (Paul Muni). Camonte is the muscle for a booze runner named Big Louis, but Big Louis doesn’t make it past the first ten minutes of the film. It’s pretty evident that Camonte is the man behind the trigger, and that he is working at the behest of Johnny Lovo (Osgood Perkins).