Scarface (1983 film)
| Scarface | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Directed by | Brian de Palma |
| Written by | Oliver Stone |
| Produced by | Martin Bregman |
| Starring | Al Pacino Steven Bauer Michelle Pfeiffer Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio Robert Loggia |
| Music by | Giorgio Moroder |
| Distributed by | Universal Pictures |
Release dates | December 9, 1983 |
Running time | 170 min. |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $25,000,000 (estimate) |
Scarface is a 1983 motion picture directed by Brian de Palma, written by Oliver Stone and starring Al Pacino as Tony Montana, a fictional Cuban refugee who comes to Florida in 1980 as a result of the Mariel Boatlift. Kicked out of Cuba for being an assassin, Tony becomes a gangster against the backdrop of the 1980s cocaine boom; the movie chronicles his rise to the top of Miami's criminal underworld and subsequent downfall. The film is loosely based on the 1932 fictionalized Al Capone biopic, Scarface.
Plot
Template:Spoiler In 1980, young Cuban hitman Tony Montana, the son of a Cuban woman and an American man, is kicked out of his country during the infamous Mariel boatlift, in which Cuban president Fidel Castro exiled thousands of prisoners and others to Florida. There, Tony and several of his old prison friends, including his partner-in-crime, Manny Ray (or Manolo), find themselves being held in a detention camp beneath a highway while the U.S. government attempts to figure out what to do with the fugitives. Luck comes for them when they are hired by a Miami drug dealer, Frank Lopez, to murder a former Castro loyalist who has since fallen from favor. In exchange for carrying out the assassination, Lopez promises to obtain US immigration green cards for Manny, Tony, and another associate named Angel Fernandez. They eagerly agree and stab the man to death during a detention camp riot.
They go to work washing dishes at a Cuban food stand in Miami and, in the midst of daydreaming about becoming big shots, are approached by Lopez henchman Omar Suarez to unload a boatload of cocain. Tony thinks the offer of $500 each is insulting as the going rate is $1000, so the pair are then offered $5,000 to complete a drug deal with a Colombian couple. Tony and Angel walk into the hotel room while Manny and Chi Chi wait outside. The deal goes sour. Tony and Angel are ambushed by the Colombians, who want to steal the buy money and keep the drugs for themselves. They tie the men up to a shower curtain pole, Tony is forced to watch while Angel is dismembered limb by limb with a chainsaw. Just as Tony is about to suffer the same fate, Manny and Chi Chi burst in to save him, killing the Colombians. Tony chases the ringleader, Hector the Toad, outside and kills him dead in the middle of a crowded South Beach street. Tony, Manny and Chi-Chi leave in their get-away car. Tony turns both the cash and the llello (pronounced Yayo, cocaine) over to Frank Lopez, who, seeing that Tony has a knack for completing the dirty work, immediately hires Tony and Manny as enforcers in his criminal hierarchy. They discuss business at Frank's estate, where Tony falls in love with Frank's girlfriend. Over the next few months, Tony begins his meteoric rise up through the ranks of the Miami cocaine underworld in bloody fashion. He re-establishes contact with his younger sister, Gina, who eventually begins seeing Manny against Tony's wishes and behind his back.
While accompanying Omar to Bolivia, Tony begins to show his defiance to Lopez's authority when he negotiates a deal outside of the parameters specified by Omar with Bolivian drug lord Alejandro Sosa. Sosa then dismisses Omar to his helicopter as he and Tony take a walk outside his mansion. Sosa then explains to Tony that Omar was an informant for the police. Sosa hands Tony a pair of binoculars and Tony watches as Omar is thrown out of the helicopter with a noose around his neck. Tony then leaves Lopez's service and strikes out on his own, whilst making approaches to Lopez's girlfriend, Elvira Hancock. The full-blown conflict between Lopez and Tony over these matters result in an assassination attempt. Frank sends two men to kill Tony at The Babylon night club. Tony makes it out alive, killing the assassins in the process. Tony then unexpectedly visits Frank. Frank learns that Tony knows it was him, and begins begging Tony not to kill him. Tony decides not to kill Frank, but instead, has Manny do it for him. After Frank's death, Tony inherits his business, and Elvira. They get married. Behind them, Gina and Manny think of doing the same. Later, In control of most of Miami's cocaine ring, Tony's deal with Sosa allows "Montana, Co." to expand across the nation and bring in millions of dollars monthly. Tony buys "the world" as he stated earlier to Manny, getting a huge new mansion, new cars, a large new security camera system, new clothes, and so on. However, his addiction to his own product, his questionable intimate love for Gina, and his careless neglect of Elvira are enclosing that the period will not last.
While exchanging $1+ million in cash into checks, undercover Miami police inform him it was a sting operation, resulting in his arrest and future trial for tax evasion. No matter how much money Tony throws in the face of his lawyer and the justice system, he can't buy his way out of the inevitable. Sosa and several other Bolivian elites with a CIA officer come to Tony and offer to help him out through their connections in. In exchange, Tony must help them rid themselves of their own problem, a Latin-American journalist who is planning to expose to the American public the extent of corruption in Bolivia, which includes Sosa and his comrades. Sosa explains that his assassin will do most of the work, but he needs Tony to guide him around the U.S. as he doesn't speak English. While on the mission to set and detonate a car bomb in New York City, Tony gets cold feet when the journalist's wife and two little children unexpectedly enter the car with him. Tony voices his disapproval, and when the assassin is on the verge of detonating the bomb, Tony shoots him to prevent it. Later on that day when Tony returns to Miami, he receives a call from Sosa who is angered that man gave his information and implies revenge.
Meanwhile, Tony is at a dinner party and in a drunken state, he insults Elvira in front of her. She is fed up and leaves him right at the restaurant. Tony goes to his mother's house and gets Gina's address. When he goes to Gina's new mansion, he is shocked when Manny opens the door and sees Gina at the top of the stairs. At the shock of seeing his sister and his best friend together, Tony shoots Manny twice. Tony and his crew take a hysterical, sobbing Gina back to his mansion. Tony goes straight to his office at the top of the grand staircase to sniff cocaine.
After a while, an army of Sosa's assassins break in through the back area of the mansion. This is visible through the security cameras, but Tony never looks. One of the men toss an anchored rope and climb up to Tony's balcony behind the office. Gina comes in the office in a purple robe. She thinks Tony is in love with her, because he does not let any man be with her. She pulls out a revolver and shoots at Tony about five times, but hits him only once in the leg. While Gina is shooting Tony, a man bursts through the balcony door and shoots Gina with a machine gun. Tony knocks him out of the window and into the pool and shoots a whole clip of ammunition at him. There, he sees the men bursting through the area. Sosa's assassin leader (seen in Bolivia) His crew puts up a fight against the intruders, but they all die one by one. Tony sees a lifeless Gina on the floor and goes to her, he comforts her dead body and says, "I'll be with you soon,". A servant shoots some of the men off from the staircase, but runs back up the stairs to Tony's locked office door. The man knocks on the door, begging Tony to let him in. The assassins come up and shoot the servant, and then regroup at the office door. Tony sees it on the cameras and arms himself with an M16 military machine gun fitted with an M203 grenade launcher. He walks over to the middle of the office and yells, "Say hello to my little friend!" He then literally blows the door wide open with the grenade launcher. He comes out of door and shoots as many of Sosa's assassins as he can with the assault rifle. Doing so, he is shot many times but keeps on shooting. Eventually Sosa's assassin leader makes his way into Tony's office from behind and shoots Tony in the back with a shotgun. Tony falls into the pool at the bottom of the stairs, with the "The world is yours" globe. The head assassin begins to walk down the stairs as the credits start to roll.
Production and Controversy
Scarface was directed by Brian De Palma, and written by now famed director Oliver Stone while he battled a cocaine addiction. Stone consulted the Miami police and the Drug Enforcement Agency while writing the film, incorporating many true crimes into the film (one set of crime scene photos Stone was shown depicted a man who had been dismembered with a chainsaw and stuffed into an aluminum trashcan). Also, there is some controversy regarding the origin of the character Tony Montana. Some people believe that the character was originally based on a character which appeared in the World Wrestling Federation in the late 1970s. Others liken Tony with the real-life Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar. Ironically, a popular wrestler in the 1990s by the name of Razor Ramon was believed to be based on the character Tony Montana. Writer Oliver Stone claims in an interview first featured on the Collector's Edition DVD release, that he took the character's last name from his favorite football player at the time - Joe Montana of the San Francisco 49ers.
The film was originally to be filmed in Florida but it received criticism from the Cuban community, which objected to the film's representation of Cubans as drug dealers. Leaders in the Cuban community wanted Stone and the movie's producers to include scenes which would show Anti-Castro activity in Miami as part of the movie's plot. After protracted negotiations over the script, the producers ultimately refused to give in to their demands, saying that the film was about cocaine and not the politics of Castro's Cuba. As a result, the exception being obvious exterior shots, the movie was filmed in and around Los Angeles. The film does contain scenes where other Cubans are disgusted by Tony's actions. One of the undercover officers during the sting was a Cuban commenting, "You make a real Cuban throw up!"
When the film was submitted to the MPAA, it was rated X for the graphic language and violence. DePalma would edit the film two additional times, toning down the violence but still getting an X-rating from the MPAA. After the film was rejected for a third time, DePalma, when he appealed the MPAA's decision, convinced the MPAA with help from a panel of various real life police officers and narcotics officers, who told the MPAA that the violence in DePalma's films was an accurate portrayal of real life drug dealers and that the film should be released with its violence intact so as to show and educate to viewer towards how violent the drug trade was. After a vote of 18 to 2, the MPAA agreed to give the third cut of the film an R-rating. But DePalma, who felt that there were no real differences between the two "clean" cuts he put together and the original director's cut version, arranged to have his original "X" cut released to theaters with an R-rating.
For the remainder of the 1980s, Scarface held the record for the movie containing the most uses of the word "fuck." (A popular Internet rumor states that the group Blink 182 got their name from a mis-count of how many times Tony says "fuck" in the film.) It lost this title in 1989 to Born on the Fourth of July. In 2006, a video entitled Scarface (Short Version) began circulating the internet. Consisting solely of clips of the word "fuck" (and its variations) from the film, it runs one minute and thirty seconds.
USA Network announced in 2003 they would be producing a mini-sries based on the movie, however the series' current status is unknown.
Scarface and pop culture
Scarface has been frequently referred to in other movies and on television. Memorable lines are quoted in Jane Austen's Mafia!, The Simpsons, and South Park, among others. Tony Montana's style of dress (along with that of Don Johnson's Sonny Crockett character on Miami Vice) became synonymous with both the cool and sleazy aspects of 1980s pop culture.
Scarface is also notable for its extensive popularity with many hip-hop artists and fans, in particular those affiliated with gangsta rap. A number of rappers single out Tony Montana as a role model for his transition from poverty to wealth. Many Latino and Hispanic rappers dress like characters from the film, though they only opt to emulate the "street clothes" Tony's crew wears in the beginning of the movie, neglecting the flashy suits which he wears for the majority of the film. It has also become very popular to embroider or emboss images of Tony onto leather jackets and pants.
Lines from the film are also frequently sampled on hip-hop songs. The Houston-based Geto Boys was one of the earliest rap groups to sample the lines and dialogue. During Public Enemy's "Welcome to the Terrordome," Flavor Flav recites several lines from the film. Music from the movie has also been sampled in the instrumentals for hip-hop songs such as Mobb Deep's "G.O.D. Pt. III" and "It's Mine". Nas recorded a song "The World is Yours" based on the motto Tony Montana lived by. One hip-hop artist - Brad Jordan (later a member of the Geto Boys) has even gone so far as to name himself Scarface after the film, and another goes by the name Tony Montana. A Houston-area art car artist is known to wear flashy pimp suits modeled after the ones seen in the film. Various Latin rap artists such as Fat Joe, Big Pun, Cuban Link and The Beatnuts sample famous lines from the movie Scarface and pay regular homage to the lead character, Tony Montana.
In a nod to the allegiance many rappers have towards Scarface, the title character in the Krazee-Eyez Killa episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm tells Larry David that he is thinking about having Scarface run 24/7 on various screens in his new bedroom. Krazee-Eyez, played by Chris Williams, is a caricature of the standard gangsta rapper.
In 2003, in preparation for the release of Scarface on DVD, Universal made controversial plans to have modern hip-hop artists record an entirely new musical score for the film, which would take the place of the original 1980s New Wave soundtrack. The move was decried by fans of the film, and DePalma, who had a contractual final cut on the film, refused to edit it.
Rockstar North, the creators of the Grand Theft Auto video games are evidently quite fond of the film; Grand Theft Auto III features nearly the entire soundtrack of the film as one of its in-game radio stations and the following game in the series, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City is a reimagining of the film and even includes a replica of Tony Montana's lavish mansion. Club Malibu is also a replica from Scarface, and the main protagonist of the game, Tommy Vercetti, can unlock the 'Vercetti Suit' which is similar to Tony Montana's towards the end of the film. There is also a hidden bloody room with a chainsaw pick-up as a sort of re-enactment of the chainsaw torture scene.
Tony's line "Say hello to my little friend!" has become something of a pop culture saying, usually (but not always) pertaining to firearms or any other sort of projectile weapon. This usage is incorrect however; he is referring to the first grenade he launches at the door of his second floor office. The quote has been refrenced in several video games and movies.
In Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls, Ace parodies this line by saying "Say hello to my stinky little friend!" before spraying a pair of poachers with a skunk.
Troll units from the WarCraft games will also say this line if clicked on repeatedly without being given orders.
The famous Scarface quote has also made its way into the video game Hitman, in which one of the stages is called 'Say hello to my little friend.' The level is based in Latin America and the antagonist of the level is a man who is dressed identically to Montana and dies with a similar re-enactment of the end scene where Montana dies in the movie. The line also comes into use in Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory in the opening level, where if spotted a guard will parrot this line word for word.
A licensed video game, Scarface: The World is Yours is currently being developed by Radical Entertainment and is scheduled to be released by Vivendi Universal Games sometime in 2006. The game is reported to be a pseudo-sequel, and goes on the premise that Tony actually survived the raid on his mansion from the end of the film.
The song "Scarface (Push It To The Limit)" that is played when the movie shows Tony's wealth and success, was also used in one of the South Park episodes depicting Cartman training to win a disabled olympics. The hook of the song is used in Rick Ross' song "Push it". "Scarface" reappeared in a recent episode of South Park when Cartman quotes a lot of the movie's lines during a South Park Talent Show.
Actual Cuban emigrant of the famous 1980 exodus-and famous Hip-Hop artist-Cuban Link; has written a follow up script to Scarface titled: "Son of Tony".
Videogames
A video game is set to be released around fall 2006 it changes the ending scene so that Tony doesn't die but is able to shoot his way out of his mansion and escapes. the rest of the game deals with Tony getting his revenge on Sosa. It has been confirmed to be a free roaming game similar to the Grand Theft Auto titles and it will include a lot of freedom over drug running, laundering money, buying items for your mansion, buying cars and protecting shipments of drugs from the police.
Cast
- Al Pacino - Tony Montana
- Steven Bauer - Manny Ray
- Michelle Pfeiffer - Elvira
- Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio - Gina
- Robert Loggia - Frank Lopez
- Miriam Colon - Mama Montana
- F. Murray Abraham - Omar Suarez
- Paul Shenar - Alejandro Sosa
- Harris Yulin - Mel Bernstein
- Ángel Salazar - Chi Chi
- Arnaldo Santana - Ernie
- Pepe Serna - Angel
- Michael P. Moran - Nick The Pig
- Al Israel - Hector The Toad
- Mark Margolis - Alberto
References
- "Scarface Politics" in Vassilis K. Fouskas. 2003. Zones of Conflict. London: Pluto Press. ISBN 0745320295. Pp. 34-62.
External links
