Gangster era depicted in Scarface (1932) and in Scarface (1983): A Comparative Analysis
The depiction of gangster era in the movies of different periods attributes to the social context of the specific epoch, demands of the viewers and changes which have occurred in the movie making through time. Comparing the products of different epochs allows to trace the changes in the genre, and how these changes have impacted the perception of the antagonists and protagonists of the movies. For the purpose of the present essay, a comparative analysis of two movies, “Scarface” of 1932 and “Scarface” of 1983, will be conducted.
To elaborate a comprehensive view, the figures of the main heroes will be analyzed, along with their interaction with other people and attitude to external world, and the way these movies present the certain developments (in terms of violence, morality and reflection of people).The discussed movies generally provide different approaches to depicting era of gangsters. First of all, it could be explained with the different time frame of the events: while original movie is depicting the events in gangster Chicago of 1930s, the remake is staged in Miami of 1980s.
The original movie is filmed belong to the noir genre, where the majority of actions are held in the night, a lot of gunshots is heard but blood is never visible, and the heroes and villains are strongly divided into moral terms. In that movie almost no ambiguity arises regarding who are good guys, and who are bad – the gangsters represent a malignant force with evil plans, and the police is devoted to combat corruption and shootouts, and prevent the violation of law. At the same time, the police is far from the image of heroes with nothing to lose – they are acting carefully and only within the framework of the legislation, even if they clearly know who is responsible for a certain crime. Instead, Miami remake is not a noir and even not a neo-noir: it is filmed in the bright colors, the weather is not resembling a rainy and gloomy Chicago at all, and the motives of heroes and villains are more complicated.
Speaking about the good-bad division, there is no clear difference, since unlike the original movie, the remake depicts some corrupted police officers who are allied with the mafia. It may be explained due to the taste of a viewer: in the movie of 1932, people were taught that police is always upon their side, yet in 1983 such paradigm was not so interesting for people: they wanted more conflict, more tangled and complicated setting with multi-vectored participants.Speaking about the way the movies present violence and morality of people, it is clear that the original movie was designated for people with higher moral principles. As it was noted above, this genre does not present blood and extreme violence, and all the murders which could be omitted to be off-scene are omitted. In the majority of episodes, only …
