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Scarface Review

'SCARFACE,'' Brian De Palma's update of the 1932 classic directed by Howard Hawks and written by Ben Hecht, is the most stylish and provocative - and maybe the most vicious - serious film about the American underworld since Francis Ford Coppola's ''Godfather.'' In almost every way, though, the two films are memorably different.

This ''Scarface,'' which was written by Oliver Stone, contains not an ounce of anything that could pass for sentimentality, which the film ridicules without mercy. ''The Godfather'' is a multigenerational epic, full of true sentiment. ''Scarface,'' which is actually a long film, has the impact of a single, breathless anecdote, being about one young hood's rapid rise and fall in the southern Florida cocaine industry.

Where the Coppola film worked on our emotions in unexpected ways, discovering the loves and loyalties that operated within one old Mafia don's extended family, ''Scarface'' is a relentlessly bitter, satirical tale of greed, in which all supposedly decent emotions are sent up for the possible ways in which they can be perverted.

''Scarface'' opens today at the National and other theaters.

To someone who never felt completely at ease with Mr. De Palma's flashy, big-budget exercises in grand guignol (''Carrie,'' ''The Fury''), or even with his far more witty and more successful ''Dressed to Kill'' and ''Blow Out,'' which were as important as examples of film criticism as they were as films, ''Scarface'' should be a revelation. Here is a movie of boldly original design that looks like some crazy cinematic equivalent to those gaudy Miami Beach hotels, the ones with inappropriately elegant names and interior decorations that suggest that Madame du Barry might have been Louis XV's minister of culture.

Tony Camonte, the Chicago gangster in the 1932 ''Scarface,'' the role of the Italian-American mob boss that made Paul Muni a major star, is now called Tony Montana and played by Al Pacino with such mounting intensity that...