Bovie Movie

Tod Hackett, fresh out of Yale, wants to make it as an art director in late 1930’s Hollywood - but he finds himself increasingly distracted by his new neighbor Faye, a would-be starlet with possible designs of her own on a lonely, morose accountant. As Tod is drawn deeper into the lurid private lives of studio bosses and film industry workers, he gradually becomes desperate to know if Faye - or anyone - is capable of real love.

Completed in mid-1930, Scarface, based on Armitage Trail’s novel of the same name, might have been the first of the great talkie gangster flicks, but it was held up for release until after that honor was jointly usurped by Little Caesar and Public Enemy. Paul Muni stars as prohibition-era mobster Tony Camonte, a character obviously patterned on Al Capone (whose nickname was “Scarface”). The homicidal Camonte ruthlessly wrests control of the bootlegging racket from his boss, Johnny Lovo (Osgood Perkins), and claims Lovo’s mistress, Poppy (Karen Morley), in the bargain. But while Poppy satisfies him sexually, Tony has a soft spot in his heart only for his sister Cesca (Ann Dvorak). The film’s finale is one of the longest and bloodiest of the 1930s, maintaining suspense and concern for the characters involved even though Muni has deliberately done nothing to make Tony likeable to audience. The grimness of Scarface is leavened by a few choice moments of black humor. Forced to leave a stage production of Rain in order to commit a murder, Tony returns to his theater seat and anxiously asks his buddies how the play came out. Some of the film’s funniest moments belong to Vince Barnett as the mentally deficient, illiterate gangster secretary, who at one juncture gets so mad at a caller on the phone that he shoots the receiver. Scarface features a famous “‘X’ Marks The Spot” logo, inspired by news photos of gangland murders: whenever a character is killed, the letter “X” appears on screen in one form or another. Example: When a rival gangster (played by Boris Karloff) is killed at a bowling alley, the camera cuts to his bowling ball knocking down all the pins — a strike, denoted, of course, by an “X.” Producer Howard R. Hughes couldn’t release Scarface until he toned down some of the violence, reshot certain scenes to avoid libel suits, added the subtitle “The Shame of the Nation” to the opening credits, and shoehorned in new scenes showing upright Italian-Americans banding together to wipe out gangsterism. After its first run, Scarface was completely withdrawn from distribution on Hughes’ orders; the film would not be seen again on a widespread basis until it was reissued by Universal in 1979, shorn of 8 of its original 99 minutes.

In return for Warner Bros. greenlighting his pet project White Hunter, Black Heart (1990), Clint Eastwood directed and starred in this more commercial film, an action caper about a mismatched pair of auto theft cops. Eastwood is grizzled veteran detective Nick Pulovski, who’s determined to bring down the chop-shop operation being run by a pair of German crooks, Strom (Raul Julia) and Liesl (Sonia Braga). Although he’s been officially removed from the case and partnered with a green, recently promoted detective, David Ackerman (Charlie Sheen), the hard-drinking Nick’s not about to let the car thieves get away with murder. David, in the meanwhile, is dealing with his own issues, including the death of his brother (for which he was responsible), his unhappy girlfriend Sarah (Lara Flynn Boyle) and his estrangement from his wealthy father Eugene (Tom Skerritt).