'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......
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