“Toward the end there’s a scene I think where he falls face down in a mound of cocaine and I said loudly ‘I hope he’s dead’ and the entire audience burst out laughing. It was a debased vile movie then and I assume it still is since nothing has changed”
You’re right, and he was more objectionable even than other cinematic mass-murdering drug kingpins, including Pacino’s own Michael Corleon, who at least valued his family in ways other than wanting to have sex with them. It would be unpleasant but nevertheless purposeful if “Scarface” were a morality tale. For instance “MacBeth,” in which we see how awful is wealth and power in the hands of the illegitimate and depraved. We don’t even get that, however, as Oliver Stone feels the need to add a scene where Scarface informs his fat, rich, lilly-white fellow restaurant patrons that he’s a bad guy because they need him to be one.
Know what, Tony? We don’t need you to be bad. We don’t want anyone to be bad. We wish you were dead, and that’s that.
The punchline of the restaurant scene is that the others are really the bad guys. Tony is honest (the only time in the whole thing he ever breaks his word it gets him killed) while they make all their profit from lies; he sells a drug, which eventually winds up in their noses; and yet according to the rules of the world they’re the fine upstanding bastions of industry and he’s the crook. They do need him to be the bad guy, otherwise the national attention will look to them. And if you don’t believe him look at who the “villains” of our society are now, it ain’t drug kingpins anymore.