Some of the early footage is documentary, showing news coverage of the arriving refugees and speeches by Castro explaining how he was happy to be rid of counter-revolutionary elements. But the De Palma movie is not a remake in any conventional sense it takes a familiar story arc, which may even contain echoes of " Macbeth," and uses it to look at a new character in a new terrain - the Florida of the early 1980s, after Fidel Castro briefly allowed large-scale immigration from his island, sending us boatloads of his tired and weary masses and seizing the opportunity to empty his jails at the same time. Both movies were assailed for their violence, both are about the rise and fall of a criminal entrepreneur, both characters are obsessed with their sisters, and both die because they used their own product - in Montana's case, cocaine in the case of the syphilitic Capone, prostitutes. It takes the name and some of the story structure from Howard Hawks' famous "Scarface" (1932), starring Paul Muni and inspired by the life of Al Capone. Just as a generation raised on "The Sopranos" may never understand how original " The Godfather" was, so "Scarface" has been absorbed into its imitators. The movie has been borrowed from so often that it's difficult to understand how original it seemed in 1983, when Latino heroes were rare, when cocaine was not a cliche, when sequences at the pitch of the final gun battle were not commonplace. There is even a documentary on the new "Scarface" DVD about the movie's influence on hip-hop performers. If the crime expert Jay Robert Nash is correct, and American gangsters learned how to talk and behave by studying early Hollywood crime movies, then "Scarface" may also have shaped personal styles. Montana is one of the seminal characters in modern American movies, a character who has inspired countless others.
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