Scarface

Why do remember Howard Hawks's version of "Scarface" better than Brian de Palma's version. Both were pretty violent movies telling the story of the rise and fall of a fictional crook resembling Al Capone. Both were blessed with two astonishingly good character actors in Jewish Paul Muni and the American, but maybe of Italian stock, Al Pacino. All I can recall from the de Palma film is Pacino's terrifying use of a hand-held machine drill - maybe a Black and Decker? - and that his Scarface came from Cuba in a batch of the lowest of the low criminals that Castro had shipped in to Florida. Though I saw Paul Muni's "Scarface" many moons ago, I still remember a lot of it: the opening scene of a shooting of a rival gang member making a telephone call from a kiosk; a later shooting up of a restaurant, quite a comic piece if memory doesn't fail me here; the end with a great shoot-out of Scarface who had, safely he imagined, walled himself up in a building with the windows made of sheet metal.
A man named Plato, a Greek, used to attend extra mural philosophy classes with me on Wednesday mornings a few years ago. I can't say I liked him much chiefly because he had an uncontrollable temper which occasionally erupted if he felt that the professor, conducting the lectures, made some comment he didn't care for. He would stand up and go into a tirade of hateful diatribe directed at the professor who never combatted him, he just sat silent until the storm was over. I often felt like telling him to stuff his cake-hole with something large, like a grapefruit, but didn't have the guts to do so. Nobody did. We all just sat there like the professor and waited for him to calm down.
But like a lot of men with idealistic views (e.g. Green peace members, Globe-warming enthusiasts, Communists) he believed that what he stood for was right and all its teachings irrefuteable. I have known others like him.
One day Plato said: "All men have some goodness in them". I couldn't believe this coming from him, one who was always condemning others for their beliefs, but he followed it up with a story that he had experienced. He was with his wife standing on a corner of a Chicago street when a limo rolled up, a couple of men got out and bundled him and his wife into the car and took them down a street where they let them out. Soon after he heard an explosion: on the corner where they had been standing was a restaraunt which was now no more: the Mafia gang had blown the place to smithereens.
I miss Plato. Like I miss toothache.