Scarface: 20th Anniversary DVD
October 2, 2003
“I am Tony Montana, a political prisoner from Cuba,” goes Al Pacino during the famous interrogation scene opening the 1983 epic “Scarface”, as an introduction to one of the most flamboyantly overacted and endlessly quoted characters in film history. It has been two decades since Pacino, writer Oliver Stone and director Brian DePalma unleashed Tony Montana onto the American consciousness, creating an instantly memorable, hotly controversial, and, at the time, universally criticized portrait of a refugee turned hood, turned drug lord, turned burned out maniac that has become something of a cult icon. To mark the anniversary, Universal has re-released its purely 80’s gangster saga with a new double disk DVD that captures all of the flair, colors, guns, drugs (lots of drugs) and synthesizer music of Miami beach onto a pristine wide-screen transfer that looks, although the film itself never is, quite beautiful.
It is, to put it bluntly, one of the great film mysteries of the past 20 years as to why DePalma’s bloody, flawed guns-and-drugs picture has become such a cult classic, with a virtual catalogue of easily recognizable lines. Upon close inspection it really is nothing more than an often slow and plodding, yet oddly exciting restaging of the landmark 1932 Howard Hawks classic that starred Paul Muni as the titular gangster in prohibition era Chicago with a coin flipping George Raft as his sidekick. The legend has it that the ’83 “Scarface” has accumulated such a following, primarily in urban cities and in hip-hop cliques where tales of loyalty and coming up from the ghetto a rich man are legendary, precisely for the reasons it was originally lambasted by critics, namely, the violence, dialogue, and the weird, energetic, ambitious performance by Pacino, in a thick, sometimes laugh-out-loud awful Cuban accent. It’s almost as if its champions (which include Chicago Sun-Times critic Roger Ebert, who, at the time called it a “wonderful portrait of a real louse”) look at it in bits and pieces, a small cog in a ceaselessly moving mechanism, rather than as an overly stylized, sometimes operatic excessive whole, that ultimately is more spectacle than spectacular.
On the DVD’s 50-minute retrospective we learn of how the project came to fruition and how Oliver Stone (already an Oscar winner for his “Midnight Express” script) went about updating an already well-known 50-year-old early sound classic. It’s told that Brian DePalma, as well as producer Martin Bregman, originally wanted to do a flat out remake, set in 1920’s Chicago amongst Italian-American mafia, bootlegger types. It never came to be, at one point Martin Scorsese showed an interest for his main man Robert DeNiro, but the project was lost for some time before director Sidney Lumet got involved in its resurrection. Lumet came up with the idea to set the film in Miami, not Chicago, with the lead character a Cuban refugee from the 1980 Mariel Harbor boatlift, which produced 125,000 refugees when Castro expelled his undesirables from his communist island to South Florida.
Bregman sent Stone to research the political and socio-economical climate of the region, and with his classic leftist views subdued, jetted to Paris to round off his script, which included, a sign of the times, plenty of cocaine, as Stone was having serious troubles with the drug. The finished script was too violent and non-political for the gritty Oscar winner Lumet (who had previously directed Pacino in one of his best performances of the 70’s in “Dog Day Afternoon”), which freed up directing reigns to the projects original backer, Brian DePalma, a year after the murky waters of his Antonioni remake, “Blow Out”, and with the originality and spontaneity of the New Hollywood, for which he was a key participant, all but vanished.
The 80’s were a weird, trying time for the revolutionaries of the New Hollywood; it was a decade where Scorsese would go musical (“New York, New York”), Spielberg would go literary (“The Color Purple”), Coppola would flat out lose it (“The Cotton Club”) and DePalma, the least important of the group, was to dive into social realism, ala a totally artificial world of flash, guns, drugs and greed. If the 70’s were to be marked, in gangster pieces anyway, by “The Godfather” and the ‘90’s would see “Goodfellas” and ‘The Sopranos’, than it’s only fitting that the forgettable Me-decade’s most notorious amalgam was to be the less than substantial hot-air of Pacino in “Scarface”.
The history of it all is captured well in the various supplements of the DVD, which include 22 minutes of deleted material, a funny comparison between the original, profanity laced wide-screen version and the edited, full-screen TV-friendly cut, and a 20 minute documentary on the films immense influence on hip-hop culture and hardcore rappers who find its themes prophetic, with a high hit-home factor. It’s only a bit ironic to hear these hardened rappers gush over the hybrid performance of an Italian-American doing a Cuban accent, in full 80’s garb, complete with tacky cabana shirts and pure white suits, unbuttoned enough for full chest hair machismo, but then again, rappers have a tendency to be overly stylized and ridiculous themselves, so it’s only common sense (as I’m sure Thomas Paine would agree) they’d take such a character to heart.
What Oliver Stone’s script does to the original film (DePalma dedicates his remake to Hawks and original script writer Ben Hecht) is inject the story with profanities and blood that couldn’t possibly fly in 1932. The original was violent and suggestive for its day, and featured a thinly veiled subplot involving the gangster’s beloved younger sister that borders on incest, but Stone pumps up the volume so much that the film barely escaped with its R rating. All of the earlier films earmarks are still present, and Stone even leaves room for some social criticism, such as the treatment of refugees in temporary internment camps, with the symbolism of Tony Montana’s rise to power as a commentary on American capitalism (remember this is the same Oliver Stone who would contribute heavily to the 80’s greed zeitgeist five years later with “Wall Street”) but a lot of the juicy stuff gets overshadowed by DePalma’s excess, which lasts nearly three hours. Stone wasn’t big enough at the time (coming off the flop “The Hand”) to direct his script, but one can imagine how differently he might have handled it, (perhaps a conspiracy theory on the murder of Tony Montana as related to the Bay of Pigs?) but it is said that DePalma stayed close to the script, so I doubt it would have been all that radically different.
DePalma, to his credit, is a fine craftsman, even if he is sometimes guilty of cinematic robbery, often stealing (as a kind of homage) from more established auteurs like Eisenstein, Antonioni and especially Hitchcock, while getting off easy because his films always look so glossy, with incredibly intricate long takes and moving crane shots. For “Scarface” he perfectly created Tony’s worlds; the internment camp, the mid-story underling worlds of hotel rooms (with the infamous and bloody chainsaw massacre) and tiger-striped Caddy’s, to the final phase of lavish mansions with huge bathtubs, vast surveillance rooms and an office with cases of machine guns and a desk lost beneath a mound of cocaine that ultimately contribute to Tony’s downfall. In the end, after his wife leaves him and he upsets the wrong people, hordes of Colombian henchmen storm his compound in the grand final shootout which features his most famous line, in broken English, holding a huge machine gun, before taking out some 30 enemies, “Say hello to my little friend”, or, “Chay hallo to my leetle fren.”
I suppose when you look at it, “Scarface” is a guilty pleasure. You know it’s a B-movie at best, with some awkward dialogue and acting, and maybe too much violence (though the chainsaw scene is memorable for what isn’t shown) but for a film three hours in length it’s hardly ever boring. Pacino is a riot, though Montana is hardly his best character, and the supporting cast of Michelle Pfeiffer, Steven Bauer, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio (in the important sister role) and prolific character actor Robert Loggia (with the famous line “Rule number one: Don’t underestimate the OTHER guys greed.”) all have their moments to shine.
Admittedly, this was my first viewing of the film. As a big fan of the classic Hawks original I was always put off by the negative reviews, and just the general notion of Al Pacino as a Cuban refugee drug lord who says stuff like, “When you get the money, then you get the power. Then when you get the power, then you get the women” (which amused me to no end because Homer Simpson says the same thing in an homage as he obsessively guards a mound of sugar he found on the side of the road) and who takes the creed “the world is yours” as his own, but with slick cinematography by “Chinatown” cameraman John A. Alonzo and a synth-happy score by Giorgio Moroder, the ’83 “Scarface” isn’t without its charms. It’s just that, as a purist (and not a hardcore rapper), Howard Hawks and Paul Muni could do more for me with one rat-tat-tat-tat of a Tommy gun and a well placed “X” mark than DePalma and Pacino could do with all the cocaine, camera movements, cabana wear and Cuban accents in all of South Florida.
“Scarface: 20th Anniversary Wide-screen edition” retails for $26.98 and can be rented locally at Blockbuster Video.
by Adam Suraf