Cartels! Cocaine! Carnage! How Scarface became a cult hit… by a razor’s edge

Brian De Palma knew how to sell his wares. “Cubans! Cocaine! Al Pacino! Machine Guns! Girls! Wow,” the director rhapsodised to Esquire magazine on why, in his professed opinion, his new feature, Scarface (1983), was the greatest movie of the last 10 years.

It’s doubtful the director actually believed his own assertions. The film, which is being re-released in December to celebrate its 40th anniversary, had a famously troubled production involving some very combustible personalities. Equally troubled was its eventual release, mired as it was by divisive reviews and the threatened stigma of an X rating against its name. Regardless, Scarface has long since entered the pantheon of Hollywood gangster movies.

Perhaps the greatest testament to the film’s behind-the-scenes drama is the near death of its maverick writer Oliver Stone, who was almost killed by drug dealers in the Bahamas where he was completing research for the script. As Stone wrote in his recent autobiography, Chasing the Light, like his protagonist, he too was taking plenty of cocaine at the time. After saying the wrong thing to his Colombian drinking partners, he became convinced he and his wife would be shot and their bodies dumped “in some swamp to be devoured by crabs”.

Scarface’s eventual script proved too violent for some, with original director Sidney Lumet (Dog Day Afternoon) abandoning the project on the grounds that Stone’s vision was exploitative. Once shooting began, the Cuban community in Miami ran the production out of town, claiming it was damaging their image. Some went as far as to put about the outlandish rumour that Fidel Castro was financing the picture. There was even more trouble brewing on set – a place from which Stone was soon banished for talking to the actors too much. The star Al Pacino – who played Cuban anti-hero Tony Montana – did damage to his nasal cavities by ingesting mountains of fake coke. “I don’t know what happened to my nose but it changed,” he later said.

When Scarface was finally released, it sharply divided opinion. Some reviewers opened fire on it. Influential New Yorker critic Pauline Kael dismissed the film as “crude, ritualised melodrama” and complained that Pacino’s performance showed a “star whose imagination seems impaired”. Others compared the movie unfavourably to Howard Hawks’s earlier adaptation of the same novel. The 1932 Chicago-set version starred Paul Muni as Tony Camonte, the Al Capone-like Italian immigrant turned crime boss. Reviewers also did not care for the gaudiness of De Palma’s interpretation. There was far too much sunshine given the terrible things happening on screen. Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather films had been lit in suitably dark, sepulchral tones, but Scarface was flashy in the extreme, shot in bright primary colours. Its protagonists wore white suits, jewellery, and open-top Hawaiian shirts.

One of the rules of the gangster genre is that the anti-hero must meet a bad end. In the Muni Scarface, Tony dies terrified and distraught “like a yellow rat” as he whimpers “don’t shoot, don’t shoot” at the cops who’ve already killed his beloved sister with a stray bullet. In the Pacino version, Tony goes out guns blazing. His death scene is one of the most operatic and overwrought in all of cinema history, a shootout in which he takes on an army of Bolivian killers who have invaded his red-carpeted mansion with its sweeping Gothic staircases. Pacino makes his exit in a blaze of glory, firing off bullets and yelling obscenities (“You need a f***ing army if you’re gonna to take me”) before landing headfirst in his own pool.

Scarface is deceptive. It begins in gritty style with newsreel footage of Cuban refugees on overcrowded boats, heading to the US. “Of the 125,000 refugees that landed in Florida, an estimated 25,000 had criminal records,” the audience is told. Castro has just emptied his jails and among the “dregs” he’s ferried away to the States are Tony and his best friend Manny Ribera (Steven Bauer). In its early scenes, Scarface comes across like a film that Sidney Lumet might make, a hard-hitting social realist drama about immigration, police corruption and the devastation wrought by the drugs war. That tone, though, soon changes into ultra-violence with a hint of disco-era high camp.

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For their part, the American censors – the Motion Picture Association of America – were appalled by an early scene in which Colombian mobster Hector the Toad (Al Israel) cuts off the arm of Tony’s friend Angel with a chainsaw. (While you never see the actual severing of said limb, the blood spatter over Tony is suggestively graphic.) They weren’t keen on Pacino’s relentless swearing, either. Producer Martin Bregman had to scramble to get the film’s X rating (then generally reserved for porno movies) overturned.

Ticket sales were modest. Scarface only just turned a profit (it came in 40th for the year at the US box office, eventually grossing $45m) but this was no blockbuster. De Palma was such a slow and painstaking director that the project had gone way over schedule and budget. According to Stone, the director was so disenchanted by the process of making Scarface that he skipped the wrap party and fled town on the first available flight. “Do you think I want to be around these people another day? I’m outta here,” he supposedly told the writer as he abandoned ship.

Forty years on, Scarface stands as one of the most influential films of its era. TV dramas from Miami Vice to Narcos owe it an obvious debt – as do countless other drug-fuelled gangster movies. And early critics be damned, Tony Montana is almost certainly Pacino’s most celebrated performance. The actor’s fascination with Shakespearian villains is well chronicled. He later made a film (1996’s Looking for Richard) about his obsession with Richard III. In certain moments here, for example, when he confronts his sleazy, double-crossing mentor Frank Lopez (Robert Loggia) and the crooked cop (Harris Yulin), he behaves as if he is on the Old Vic stage in some blood-soaked tragedy. He’s hammy but magnificent.

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Scarface may not have received a single Oscar nomination but it is now listed at No 10 in the American Film Institute’s top 10 of the greatest gangster movies ever made. There has, then, been a reversal in attitudes toward a movie initially treated with such scorn. It certainly helped that Pacino’s gangster epic enjoyed a massive new lease of life after it was embraced by rappers and hip-hop artists. “Since I am not a big fan of hip-hop, I knew nothing about it until people basically told me about it,” De Palma said in 2015. “Universal came to me and asked if I would approve a hip-hop soundtrack. I said ‘Absolutely not!’” Soundtrack or no soundtrack, the attention from the music industry was flattering and played a major part in changing perceptions of the film. A 2003 compilation album including music inspired by Scarface, featuring songs by Jay-Z, Ice Cube, NWA and many others, sold briskly.

Gamers loved the picture, too. Action-adventure video game Scarface: The World Is Yours – in which users play as a revenge-hungry Tony –shifted more than 2 million copies. There is an obvious irony here. Stone’s screenplay satirises US consumer culture, corruption and greed in vicious fashion. It shows Tony living out his own warped and grotesque version of the American Dream. He’s the Cuban refugee who arrives in Florida with nothing, washing dishes to make ends meet, before making his way to the top by stealing, wheeling and dealing. Not to mention murdering. He ends up with the cars, the mansion and the trophy wife Elvira (Michelle Pfeiffer in one of her breakthrough roles) and yet is more wretched and miserable than when he started. “You know what capitalism is? Getting f***ed,” is one of his more perceptive insights. The gamers and the hip-hop artists ignored this rather inconvenient message, choosing instead to concentrate on the bling, the nightclubs and the machine guns. It helped too that the movie had such memorable dialogue. “I want what is coming to me,” Tony proclaims early on. “What’s coming to you?” he is asked. “The world, Chico, and everything in it,” Tony replies.

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Three years ago, the Italian director Luca Guadagnino (Call Me by Your Name) announced plans to direct a new Los Angeles-set version of Scarface from a script by the Coen brothers. Perhaps wisely, he seems to have thought better of it. De Palma’s film is so extreme – in its stylisation, violence, and swagger – that Guadagnino couldn’t possibly trump it. De Palma, a 2015 documentary on the director by Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow, features a revealing still of De Palma with his pal, Steven Spielberg, who had visited the set just as they were filming Scarface’s final battle. Pacino had seared his hand after grabbing the red-hot barrel of a gun and was off work for two weeks. De Palma spent that time filming the movie’s finale. “Needless to say, I shot every conceivable way somebody could shoot at somebody else while I was waiting for my star to return,” he recalled. Spielberg joined in orchestrating the carnage, suggesting different angles and elaborate set-ups for blasting away the Bolivian hitmen.

By then, De Palma and Spielberg were bearded men in early middle age, but the expression on their faces in that photograph is one of two delighted little kids who’ve been let loose with the neighbour’s fireworks. Cubans! Cocaine! Al Pacino! Machine Guns! Maybe it was the perfect combination after all.

‘Scarface’ is re-released in cinemas on 1 December