97. A Star Is Born

A pretty young woman strolls singing through a dumpster alley, her talent undeniable yet undiscovered. Words form slowly around her, filling the screen, huge and red like the harbingers of apocalypse: “A” “Star” … “Is Born.”

Badness looms.

Ally meets a famous musician, Jack. He sees her sing, and cries. They fall in love writing and performing great songs together. She becomes… a star.

Jack struggles against addiction. Here’s an exchange between him and Ally late in the film:

“Why don’t you have another drink, and we can just get fucking drunk until we fuckin’ disappear, OK? Hey! Do you got those pills in your pocket?”

“You’re just fuckin’ ugly, that’s all.”

“Hey, you got-? I’m what?”

“You’re just fuckin’ ugly.”

“Get the fuck out! Get out! I said ‘Get out!'”

It worsens. Jack’s lows go so much lower.

My wife saw this movie three times in the theater, and not because she’s dark inside. She loves it because the first half is glorious with hope and joy. The difference between before and after Ally’s stardom is so stark that they’re like separate experiences. The happiness on Jack’s face as they’re meeting, performing (especially the first time), falling in love, and marrying is so authentically rendered that we feel this movie prickle our skin. It’s literally exhilarating.

A preening manager convinces sweaty, naturally brunette Ally to come out from behind her piano, go solo, sing with synthesizers and dance choreography. When she finally takes the Grammy stage to accept the Best New Artist award, she thanks the manager first. But what is she thanking him for?

Earlier, Jack takes Ally outside, pulls her close, says, “If you don’t dig deep into your fucking soul, you won’t have legs….” Cut to her performance: “Why you look so good in those jeans?/Why you come around me with an ass like that?” She swapped sweat for thick makeup, her brunette hair for shock-top orange.

“Maybe it’s time to let the old ways die,” Jack sings before their first date. Yeah, maybe. Maybe the only choice is resignation against forces as powerful as a sun.

96. Scarface

Scarface is all-out gang war in prohibition-era Chicago. The body count hits dozens, if not a hundred, as one crazy guy, Tony Comante, instigates until his glorious end. The three-hour Al-Pacino Scarface, from 1983, is great but it’s three hours. The 1932 Scarface plays the same main notes for an hour and a half. It’s tighter.

And funner, becoming a literal mind game as filmmakers signal which character will die next with an X; if an X appears anywhere on screen, it means death. There are so many Xs, until by the end only the principals remain. Tony’s sister wears a black party dress whose straps make an X across her back. Death! An X on the hotel-room door. Knock, knock. Death! Watching Scarface becomes an active experience.

The actor Paul Muni, as Tony, plays games for most of the movie too, until he sharpens at crucial moments toward its ending. Usually clownish – winking and fluttering his eyebrows as he lights cigarettes flamboyantly, flirting with the boss’s girl right in front of the boss – he darkens, hardens. By the bullet-ridden climax, he has put away the clown to become a furious tough-guy.

The killings are massacres, drive-by shooting after drive-by shooting. Mobsters in suits and fedoras light each other up with a fun new killing tool: the machine gun. “You can hold it like a baby,” Tony says, in awe. The massacres knock huge numbers of players off the board, but there are also inspired individual kills, like a mob boss shot dead as he bowls a strike. Again, it’s a game. Find the X with Crazier Al Capone.

A series of title cards at the front of Scarface, before the movie starts, chide the government for “callous indifference… to this constantly increasing menace to our safety and our liberty.” A fourth-wall-breaking moment halfway through sees a newspaper editor speaking into the camera as he lectures about the dangers of guns, that eternal issue America struggles with still.

These moments are bullshit, though, something wussy 1930s censoring wusses insisted the filmmakers add. Scarface loves guns. Movie violence well done is fun.