Say Goodbye to the Bad Guy: ‘Scarface’ (1983)
Scarface has been so much more than a movie for so long. In the 1980s the sampled dialogue of Tony Montana became — as it remains — a staple among rappers of every style and sensibility. Meanwhile, memes and posters proliferate. As for the merchandise: one hardly knows where to start. Over on Amazon, I punch in “scarface merchandise” and this is what shows up on just the first page of results: T-shirts, fleece blankets, refrigerator magnets, framed collages, flip-top lighters, table lamps, wall clocks, pillow cases, keychains, drinking flasks, and computer-tablet skins.
Oh, and a resin “The World Is Yours” statue.
And a garden gnome.
Scarface has been so much more than a movie for so long, it’s easy to forget there was a time when people considered it so much less.
Some people got it at first; a lot of people didn’t. There were problems that surpassed those normally attending the filming of such brutal material. The Cuban community of Miami was so aggressive in its protestations, the filming had to be completed in Los Angeles. To avoid an X rating, the producers had to assemble a panel of experts — drug-enforcement officers, psychologists, film critics — attesting (respectively) to the veracity, safety, and artistic value of the material.
Cooperation came in unlikely forms. The U.S. attorney’s office in Miami knew what the film-ratings board didn’t — namely, that this was not a movie that celebrated cocaine trafficking. They opened up their files and shared their expertise, doing all they could to make sure the filmmakers were able to get everything right.
This started with Oliver Stone, who’d been hired to write the screenplay. He engaged in a repertorial kind of research, hanging out with cops and crooks alike, to better understand a world he’d known primarily as a mere consumer. “I was doing cocaine a lot at the time…,” he remembered. “I started to hit the trail in ’79, and continued till ’82. I don’t think my writing benefited from cocaine, but I did write Scarface completely sober. The research was done stoned, but it allowed me an insight into cocaine.”
“The picture,” he added, “is about appetite, and I had that appetite, that madness.”
One thing Stone wanted to do when he came aboard is to make the so-called Drug War of the 1980s mirror Prohibition of the 1930s. That had been the subject of the original Scarface, the one directed in 1932 by Howard Hawks and written by Ben Hecht. The decision to remake that movie had been reached by producer Marty Bregman. Sidney Lumet, who’d worked on two films with Al Pacino, was originally chosen to direct, and it was he who came up with the idea of setting the piece in Miami amidst the Cuban culture of the Mariel boatlift. This means, of course, that his handprints are all over the thing, even though he became dissatisfied with the direction of the production and was replaced by Brian De Palma.
De Palma had just made a movie, Blow Out, that was not recognized for the masterpiece that it is, and he was confused as to what to do next. He couldn’t get funding for anything he wanted to do and even committed, briefly, to directing Flashdance. A couple weeks of that told him he should be doing something else. When Bregman approached him to take over Scarface, it was a natural fit; De Palma’s reasons for being attracted to the project went at least as deep as Stone’s. “I always look for the corrosive side of everything,” he told Esquire at the time.
Very few people seem to transcend that. And those that do are either executed or crucified or shot. For the same reasons, megalomania also fascinates me. Howard Hughes. Elvis’s last years. They all seem to wind up in hotel rooms with the drapes drawn, staring at movie screens or TV sets. Those people want everything to be an extension of their own reality. I can identify. Making a movie is a lot like that.
This is the movie that gave birth to the phenomenon we now recognize as Hysterical Pacino. His roles before had all been rather subdued, even if they were given to their own moments of outburst. This is the role that cemented the style, in the meantime plastering countless catchphrases across the culture:
I never fucked anybody over in my life didn’t have it coming to them. You got that? All I have in this world is my balls and my word and I don’t break them for no one.
Don’t get high on your own supply.
This town [is] like a great big pussy just waiting to get fucked.
You wanna fuck with me? Okay. You wanna play rough? Okay. Say hello to my little friend!
The world, chico, and everything in it.
In this country, you gotta make the money first. Then when you get the money, you get the power. Then when you get the power, then you get the women.
Who put this thing together? Me, that’s who! Who do I trust? Me!
It’s pointless to try to run through all of them, just as it’s pointless to identify those rappers who’ve sampled these lines in their songs. (An easier task might be identifying those who haven’t.) This humor serves an immensely helpful purpose to the story, making Tony, in the words of Pacino, “palatable. If he were funny, you could take him. I think also, if there’s humor there, you get a sense that there’s a certain intelligence working….[I]f he was just a brute, and went through it without any sense of irony, I don’t think he’s as interesting a character.”
The humor is necessary, too, in leavening the violence, not all of it Tony’s. That early scene when Tony has to witness his friend being carved up by a chainsaw: that was a deliberate move, on the part of De Palma (who acknowledges that Stone actually wrote the scene), “to establish a level of violence that nobody had ever seen before, ’cause this is a whole different level of mob interaction — not the sort of pleasant shootouts or the Godfather stranglings or people being stabbed in the hands. Now we’re into really terrible ways of killing each other. And I wanted to get it over in the movie to set it up: ‘This is what it is. We’re in a whole different world here.’”
A substantial portion of Scarface’s initial audience was repulsed by this violence — was blinded by it and couldn’t bear to look, like Tony in the bathroom while his friend’s being carved up like firewood. Even observers who should have known better believed that the over-the-top nature of this violence qualified the film as a slasher flick, something low-grade and exploitative. It’s only in the years since that the movie’s been appreciated for the myriad layers it demonstrates.
When Tony gets his green card and begins working in America, it’s at a cheap food shack in the shadow of a larger restaurant called Little Havana. The camera pans down to Tony’s joint from the huge Little Havana sign advertising quintessential Miami glamor. This, the camera seems to be saying, is the fantasy, and this is the reality. Similarly, when Tony is being chastised for his extravagant ways by Frank — the drug lord who’s given him his first chance in Miami of crime that pays — Tony hears him out, and then dismissively walks walks through a door that’s been cut into a beach panorama very similar to that on the billboard seen earlier. He walks into the sunset, essentially, of a fantasy vision of what Miami has to offer. On the darkened side of that door lies his eventual doom.
There are other hidden doors in Scarface through which we can walk.
Lowenbrau — the product itself and its signage — is seen at various points throughout the film. Translated, the name means Lion’s Brew. Pacino has said that in conceptualizing the Tony Montana role, he derived inspiration from “the boxer Roberto Duran a little bit. There was an aspect of Duran, a certain lion in him that I responded to in this character.” Stone, for one, noticed this leonine quality in Pacino’s performance: “When I watched him in rehearsals, I saw how he turned Tony Montana into something very feral.”
The standup comedian performing at the nightclub where Tony is attacked by Frank’s gunmen is Richard Belzer. It’s funny to remember that the movie was written by Oliver Stone, Kennedy-assassination buff extraordinaire, and that Belzer himself wrote a book about the assassination, called Hit List, an inquiry into the mysterious deaths of all those Warren Commission witnesses. These two conspiracy theorists here conspire to make memorable this scene of violent conspiracy between Frank and his men.
Finally, it’s a Pan Am blimp that seduces Tony with the promise that “The World Is Yours.” Tony buys in to the promise, but later on, when the world has started to renege on that promise, we see a different aircraft come into Tony’s life. Again, it’s from Pan Am, but this time it’s a mere helicopter, and it’s coming in for a landing.
The current Blu-ray release of Scarface has made it easy to compare similar scenes from this and the 1932 version. It’s amazing how much of that original scaffolding remains intact. Through a picture-in-picture feature on the disc, one can concurrently see parallel scenes — from Tony falling for his boss’s wife (played here by Michelle Pfeiffer), to glimpsing a giant sign reading “The World Is Yours” outside his window, to surviving the attack at the club, to catching his sister with his best friend and partner, all the way up to the final bloody shootout. To be sure, all these sequences are handled much more elaborately and extravagantly in the 1983 version — in their acting, their music, their set design, their cinematography, and, of course, their bloodshed.
That bloodshed is a strong part of the movie’s conscience — without it, where are the wages due for Tony’s lifestyle? The film conveys its righteousness in less subtle ways, too, and it’s remarkable how often these moments of righteousness are overlooked. Vincent Canby, reviewing the movie for the New York Times, wrote that the movie “contains not an ounce of anything that could have passed for sentimentality,” apparently missing the gallons of sentimentality that wash over us when Tony — to save the lives of two little kids — refuses to detonate the bomb that will save his empire and his freedom.
Much more subtle, and much more under-acknowledged, is the scene closer to the beginning, when Tony visits the modest home of his struggling mother, who refuses his gifts, saying, “I don’t need your money, gracias — I work for my living. I don’t want you in this house anymore! I don’t want you around [his sister] Gina. So come on. Get out! And take this lousy money with you — it stinks!” She’s exactly the kind of decent, law-abiding Cuban-American that so many claim is absent from the film.
Subsequent events certainly validate her philosophy, but I’ll always prefer the poetry of Tony’s own, madman philosophizing, so wonderfully transmitted in his drunken soliloquy when he loses control at the restaurant, finally starting to break under the pressure of his paranoid fantasies coming to life. “What you lookin’ at?” he says to the diners.
You all a bunch of fuckin’ assholes. You know why? You don’t have the guts to be what you wanna be. You need people like me. You need people like me so you can point your fuckin’ fingers and say, “That’s the bad guy.” So … what that make you? Good? You’re not good. You just know how to hide, how to lie. Me, I don’t have that problem. Me, I always tell the truth. Even when I lie. So say goodnight to the bad guy!
The original Scarface came with a slippery disclaimer, purporting itself to be an indictment of not only “gang rule in America” but of “the callous indifference of the government to this constantly increasing menace to our safety and our liberty….[T]he purpose of this picture is to demand of the government: ‘What are you going to do about it?’ The government is your government. What are YOU going to do about it?”
The 1983 Scarface snuck in an equally subversive disclaimer in the ostensible interest of capital-r Responsibility, assuring us that “it would be erroneous and unfair to suggest that” these characters represent the Cuban-American community as a whole. “The vast majority of Cuban-Americans have demonstrated a dedication, vitality, and enterprise that has enriched the American scene.”
The escape clause here, if intentional, is sly. Do you think the filmmakers were being deliberate by identifying the very traits — dedication, vitality, enterprise — that define Tony Montana? Do you think they could have anticipated all the ways in which he would enrich the American scene?
