Brian De Palma follows the standard rise-and-fall gangster storyline from the 1932 opus of the same name. Resettlement of it, however, in the Cuban cocaine underworld in southern Florida has sanctioned the director to give the thing a Godfather slant — the immigrant gangster as American Dreamer — as well as a commensurate Godfather length. But working with fewer clichés than the encyclopedic Coppola epic, De Palma must, in order to reach epic proportions, stretch out the ones here as if on a torture-rack. It is the viewer, of course, who suffers most. As in so many other contributions to the New American Cinema (especially those of the New Italian-American Cinema: De Palma, Scorsese, Coppola), progress is measured chiefly in terms of the amount of profanity and/or gore that can now be injected, by eyedropper or, as here, by turkey-baster, into the old formulas. With Al Pacino. (1983) — Duncan Shepherd
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