Essay about Film Analysis Scarface vs. The Departed

The gangster or mob film genre has captivated audiences for nearly one hundred years, dating back to the silent film era. Introduced through films such as The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912) and Underworld (1927), the genre has become increasingly complex in its development, evidenced by the sophisticated narratives and advanced cinematographic techniques of more recent films such as Road to Perdition (2002) and The Departed (2006). This paper will serve to analyze only two of these brilliant works, and will do so through a compare and contrast format. Howard Hawks’s Scarface: The Shame of the Nation (1932) focuses on gang warfare and police intervention during a power struggle for Prohibition-era Chicago. This pre-Hays Code gangster film†¦show more content†¦Martin Scorsese effectively uses a complex twist of plot in which the narrative of the main antagonist of the film, Staff Sergeant Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon), is paralleled and intertwined with that of an opposin g character, William Costigan Jr. (Leonardo DiCaprio). Colin Sullivan, raised in a poor Irish neighborhood of South Boston and trained to become a mole for Irish mobster Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson) after his acceptance into the Massachusetts State Police, not only must pretend to flush out the suspected mole on the force (himself), he must also find the opposing infiltrator (Costigan Jr.) which the State Police have planted in Costello’s crew. The level of complexity that arises from this scenario is unprecedented in the genre and conclusively demonstrates the development of this type of film from its introduction to the present day. Although the differences in overall plot of these films may vary greatly on a macro scale, The Departed is hauntingly reminiscent of Scarface when analyzed with a higher level of detail. First of all, the name of the reigning mob boss who controlled the illegal alcohol trade that is murdered by antagonist Tony Camonte (Paul Muni) in the openi ng scene of Scarface is named Big Louis Costillo. This name is strikingly similar to that of Frank Costello, the Irish mob boss