Bregman turned instead to Sidney Lumet, who suggested updating the Prohibition-era tale to contemporary Miami and using the rise and fall of a Reagan era gangster to reflect the then-recent troubles with the "Marielitos," Cuban refugees who flooded Miami as part of the 1980 exodus from Cuba's Mariel Harbor. Bregman and Lumet hired Oliver Stone to rework an earlier screenplay by playwright David Rabe; then struggling with a debilitating cocaine addiction, Stone proved to be the perfect choice to chronicle the devastating effects of the drug trade on Miami in the early Eighties, a blight personified in the corporeality of Tony Montana, a petty criminal of no particular talent who, through sheer determination and ruthlessness, becomes a criminal kingpin. Source novelist Armitage Trail had based his antihero on Chicago mobster Al Capone but had called his Scarface Tony Guarico. The Howard Hughes-Howard Hawks film adaptation in 1932 had changed the character's surname to Camonte while Stone elected to change the name yet again, in honor of pro footballer Dan Montana. Eventually Stone's highly personal and explosive additions/alterations to the material drove the thoughtful, modulated Lumet out of the picture, leaving Scarface (1983) without a director.
The failure of Blow Out at the box office brought Brian De Palma back to the table and soon producer Bregman had his production team, with Al Pacino signed to play Tony Montana. With casting underway, many A-list actresses vied for the role of Tony Montana's gun moll Elvira Hancock (among them, Glenn Close, who shelled out for a professional makeover), a role that went to relative newcomer Michelle Pfeiffer (fresh from the featherweight Grease 2, 1982). Though De Palma's frequent leading man John Travolta was considered for the role of Tony Montana's right hand man, the part went instead to Cuban-American actor Steven Bauer, whose insights into the Cubano lifestyle were plumbed by Pacino during production; Pacino also based his performance on leonine pugilist Roberto Duran and, strangely enough, on Meryl Streep's Academy Award winning performance as an immigrant in Sophie's Choice (1982). With considerable trepidation voiced by the city fathers of Miami, who feared how the film would reflect on their beleaguered municipality, principal photography for Scarface began in Los Angeles in the spring of 1983, with Beverly Hills, West Hollywood, and Santa Barbara standing in for various Florida locations. Filming wrapped in May after shooting exteriors in Miami and Key Biscayne, Florida, where key members of the production team received death threats from local underworld figures wanting a piece of the action... or else.
Scarface's syllabus of beatings, shootings, stabbings, strangulations, chainsaw amputations, and grenade launcher eviscerations was too much for the Motion Picture Association of America, whose ratings board threatened to brand the December 1983 release with an X for violence and profanity (in the form of over two hundred f-bombs). Coming to the film's defense was a small army of psychoanalysts, narcotics experts, and even MPAA president Jack Valenti himself, who argued that rating the film "for adults only" would deny the young and impressionable the service of its anti-drug message. However unlikely, the tack worked and Scarface went before American moviegoers with an R-rating. If the production team had skirted disaster at the hands of the Marielitos, they were not so lucky with the critics. Andrew Sarris branded Scarface "... so much more a disaster than an outrage" while David Denby sloughed it off as "a sadly overblown B-movie." Brickbats also came from John Simon, Pauline Kael and Rex Reed but there were dissenting opinions. In The Chicago Sun Times, Roger Ebert awarded Scarface four out of four stars. In the New York Times, Vincent Canby found the film "a revelation..." and in Time Richard Corliss claimed "Pacino creates his freshest character in years."
If Scarface fell short of its true potential as a box office earner during the Christmas holidays of 1983 (outpacing it was Clint Eastwood's fourth go-round as maverick cop Dirty Harry in Sudden Impact), the film found its audience mid-decade during the VHS boom. Repeat viewings gave Scarface cult credibility, as its dialogue zingers ("Say hello to my little friend!") trickled down into popular culture, parroted in hip-hop and rap videos and even spoofed on the animated satire The Simpsons. Tony Montana became Al Pacino's signature performance, more endearing to his legion of international fans than even Serpico (1973) or Michael Corleone from The Godfather and its sequels. When the twentieth anniversary of its original theatrical premiere was marked with the release of a commemorative DVD, Scarface sold over 2,000,000 copies in only a matter of weeks. Graphic novel and video game incarnations soon followed, imagining that Tony Montana survives his well-earned demise at the end of Scarface and goes on to rebuild his shattered empire, while the film figures into many Top Ten lists generated by The American Film Institute. Rights holder Universal Pictures has announced a remake of Scarface, without the blessing or participation of Brian De Palma, but whether that property gets the green light or goes into turnaround one thing remains certain: Tony Montana lives.
By Richard Harland Smith
Sources:
Scarface Nation: The Ultimate Gangster Movie and How It Changed America by Ken Tucker (St. Martin's Griffin, 2008)
Al Pacino: In Conversation by Lawrence Grobell (Simon & Schuster, 2008)
Al Pacino: A Life on the Wire by Andrew Yule (Sphere Books, 1992)
Brian DePalma interview by Lynn Hirschberg, 1984
