“The film is filled with that stuff”: the classic gangster movie homaged in ‘The Departed’
The crime genre has been a cinematic staple for decades, because if there’s one thing people love, it’s the idea of solving a great mystery.
From the comfort of your sofa (or cinema), you can immerse yourself in a thrilling world of criminal activity, scot free. You’re safe from the events of the narrative, but that sensationalistic aspect, the excitement of being caught up in a world likely very foreign to us, keeps us on the edge of our seats.
The Departed is one of the finest crime thrillers of the 21st century, standing as further proof of Martin Scorsese’s genius. By assembling some of Hollywood’s finest stars, like Leonardo DiCaprio and Jack Nicholson, he crafted a film that perfectly mixed Hollywood accessibility with real artistry – it’s what Scorsese does best, after all.
While the film took inspiration from the Hong Kong movie Infernal Affairs, which was released just several years prior, Scorsese also paid homage to a classic crime flick, which, in a way, set the benchmark for the genre. Before Al Pacino was guzzling bottles of champagne and snorting lines of cocaine as Tony Montana, Paul Muni played Tony Camonte in 1932’s Scarface. The film might’ve been made in the Pre-Code era, but it still wasn’t as explicit as Brian De Palma’s 1983 version, which revelled in pure goddamn excess and unfettered debauchery.
Scorsese looked at the ‘30s version, directed by Howard Hawks, when crafting The Departed, borrowing a few motifs that would provide essential symbolism to the film’s narrative. Talking to Michael Goldman, Scorsese revealed, “Every time somebody is killed, there’s an ‘X’ in the frame, across. Sometimes I put it, you’ll find it when you look at the film, it’s either in the lighting or the shadow.”
He continued, “Boris Karloff is a gangster he’s playing, he’s bowling, and he’s hiding out, he’s bowling, and he gets shot off camera by Scarface, by Paul Muni, I think or George Raft, and you see the ball going in the runner. The ball just drops, you don’t see his body, and then you see somebody put an ‘X’ on the scoreboard for a strike.”
Scorsese decided to use the same technique for his movie, placing an X in the frame every time someone was going to die. “So those ‘X’s’ became ‘X’s’ everywhere in the film. […] They’re the departed, they have crosses on their graves.” That wasn’t the only thing that the director put in the project as a nod to the classic crime drama – he even borrowed a musical motif.
“These elements go back to the idea, the noir and then the gangster film itself, the genres that we were talking about. They’re all references to genres. The opera that Jack Nicholson goes to see is Lucia di Lammermoor, and it’s a sextet, and that sextet is the scene that Paul Muni whistled every time he killed someone in Scarface.”
So, by adding in these references, keen cinephiles were able to draw parallels between The Departed and Scarface, a movie that truly made the crime genre into what it is today. “There’s a direct reference there. And it goes back to… just for those who are interested, the film is filled with that sort of stuff,” Scorsese concluded.
Would we even have The Departed without Scarface? Made just before Hollywood cracked down on censorship, Scarface shocked many, but the goddamn controversy that surrounded it allowed it to become iconic, and its legacy has had a vital impact on the crime genre.
