Pacino’s Scarface Shocker | Photoplay Movies & Video (UK)
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Photoplay Movies & Video | March, 1984
PACINO’S SCARFACE SHOCKER
Updated from the 1932 gangster classic starring Paul Muni, it has Al Pacino in the title role as a young Cuban who becomes king pin of Miami’s drug underworld. Colin Dangaard reports on the background of this excessively violent movie.
FIDEL CASTRO releases 125,000 prisoners and sends them in the direction of Miami, where they are enthusiastically welcomed as refugees from Communism.
They are given money, directed to accommodation and issued promises that they’ll be able to play the Capitalist’s game and, possibly, win the American Dream.
Many of the refugees are hardened criminals. One is a guy with a scar on his face. He takes a quick look at the big bucks following drugs down the streets of Miami and decides that, for him, the American Dream is much closer than he had anticipated.
He becomes a drug kingpin in an industry that today is said to be the largest in the world – grossing 100 billion dollars, much of that through Florida.
Film producer Martin Bregman took the above story, hung it on actor Al Pacino, and rendered a shocker of a movie he insists all kids should see.
It is called Scarface, an updated version of the 1932 classic from Howard Hawks.
Fifty years ago Hawks borrowed from the story of Al Capone and weaved it through the gangster-filled twilight world of bootlegging and the Mafia.
Sitting in a New York City hotel room one night, Bregman happened to catch the old Scarface on television – and he was knocked out by its raw power.
Moreover, he immediately recognised it as the vehicle he had been wanting for his close friend and first actor-client, Al Pacino.
Ever since Bregman saw Pacino on Broadway – back when the actor was parking cars between assignments – he was captivated by his special kind of menacing presence; just walking into a room, Pacino conveys the message that somebody other than himself is about to die.
Bregman cast him in Serpico, and Dog Day Afternoon - movies that together won a total of seven Oscar nominations.
But still, those roles did not plumb the depths of Pacino’s sloe-eyed malevolence.
Even in The Godfather, Pacino played a rich man’s son; to him, the street was something you drove on, not a classroom for culture lessons.
What Bregman had always dreamed about for Pacino on film was more in line with what he did on stage, with productions like “Does A Tiger Wear A Necktie” and “The Indian Wants The Bronx“.
“Scarface“, says Bregman, in his offices at Universal Studios, “is Al Pacino’s best work, the one role that he can do better than anybody else.”
Pacino, as usual, consumed the character, spending weeks in Malibu with Robert Loggia - who plays the older drug kingpin whose empire Pacino takes over – as he spoke only in Cuban-accented street language.
“After a while,” says Loggia, “I began to think of Al as a Cuban refugee!”
Loggia feels it is fitting that the new 1983 Scarface be Cuban in its central character, insisting: “The centre of cocaine is in Cuba. Much of it funnels through Cuba. That’s part of what this movie is about. The Cubans don’t like that as an image, but it’s fact. Yet the picture does not hold them up in a bad light. It holds up drugs and crime in a bad light.”
Interestingly, Loggia’s first break in 1955 was playing a junkie in an off-Broadway production of “The Man With The Golden Arm”. He recalls: “Eight performances a week doing withdrawals, that was not easy!”
Martin Bregman also feels Scarface is the best movie he has ever made which, for him, covers a lot of territory.
Besides producing Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon for Pacino, he did The Next Man, a spy thriller with Sean Connery; The Seduction Of Joe Tynan, a tale of political power with Alan Alda; Simon with Alan Arkin, an adventure in mind manipulation; and The Four Seasons, a funny look at contemporary marriage.
In Hollywood, Bregman is known for his strong “story sense”, invariably working from his own script. This is his first gangster-style movie. It is also not his script.
The words are from Oliver Stone, who had the imprisoned hero of Midnight Express bite out a guard’s tongue.
The director is Brian De Palma, who highlighted his career with Dressed To Kill and Blow Out, for John Travolta.
Pacino, says Bregman, was a fairly easy sell, but Brian De Palma came aboard only after Sidney Lumet had pulled in his options.
The city of Miami as a location was the hardest sell of all, with some of Dade County’s 800,000 Cubans taking strong exception to Hollywood casting Al Pacino to play one of -their number dealing drugs.
Miami City Commissioner Demetrio Perez Jr., himself a Cuban, drafted a resolution to ban the production company from the city streets.
Bregman was not amused.
“Perez did that before reading the script. In fact, they’ve never read the script. They just assumed this ‘movie would be anti-Cuban, or pro-crime, or both. We tried to explain to them that you couldn’t get a major actor Pacino, Hoffman, Redford – to play an out-and-out heavy. The story has been told before in other gangster films – and this is basically a gangster film, where not all the gangsters are Cuban.”
Just days into shooting, Bregman took stock of the flak Perez was sending out and decided it was time to pull out.
“Making a movie is like mounting a military campaign. You want nothing coming suddenly from left field. Demonstrations, that’s what worried me. How do you shoot a movie in a street with a demonstration in progress- It’s hard enough to do it with everybody’s co-operation. It angered me, that nobody asked to see the script before they made judgments. When they did ask, I told them to go to hell. When Perez attacked me for making Serpico, which he said was an offensive film – well, that did it.”
Scarface is rich in shock value, and every other word is a four-letter one but Bregman still insists it is much less violent than “any of the Dirty Harry series.”
Also, his early doubts about the size of the drug industry were put to rest when he was assured by US Government officials that it is indeed a 100-billion-dollar-a-year business.
It also did not escape his notice that Miami is light on industry but strangely heavy on banks.
With Oliver Stone he explored the bizarre world where two kids with 10,000 dollars in cash buy raw cocaine, cut it, and within a year, “be turning over 4 or 5 million dollars.”
Thus Miami has become a city where mattresses really are stuffed with money, and aluminium foil packages in freezers do not always contain cod.
This is a city, as Bregman noted, where 2,000 dollar-bottles of wine are on the menu to be sold, not looked at.
But Scarface, according to Bregman, will not serve as a motivational training film for would-be drug kingpins.
“In this movie,” he says, smiling as one who knows, “crime does not pay.”
SCARFACE
REVIEW
SCARFACE (18). “Every day above ground is a good day,” somebody remarks in Scarface, which just about paraphrases this, extremely violent, often engrossing film.
Directed by Brian do Palma it’s set in 1980 when Castro opened the harbour at Mariel and Cubans, both criminal and otherwise, flooded hungrily into America (and various refugee camps). One was Tony Montana, Scarface, one of the many guys “with steel in their balls,” a clever, tough, resilient operator who quickly and quietly taps into the cocaine trade.
The film starts off promisingly with some sharp, stylised observations of class and kind in the grossness of dried-out Florida and its resident Latin America underworld which is held together by nerveblanching murders and totally immoral plots to gain or keep power in the kingdom of the corrupt.
As Scarface Pacino (with a remarkable Cuban accent and ambience) is the boy who makes good, the one who lusts after it all. What Scarface wants he makes sure he gets – the cool automobile, the cut on the deal, then the whole deal including cool blonde, mansion in Miami and a security system to clamp it together while he coins the millions from his white mountain built in the gateway to the American Dream.
Pacino turns out an extraordinary performance backed up by an excellent supporting cast. For the first couple of hours they held me rivetted. But the film is too long (2 hrs 40 mins). By the time Scarface climaxes ones natural momentum for a movie has begun to abate and the last third of this dramatic and deadly story (loosely related to the 1932 Chicago gangster film of the same name) lets the film down badly.
M.G.
Director – Brian de Palma. Producer – Martin Bregman. Screenplay – Oliver Stone. Photography – John A. Alonzo. Music – Giorgio Moroder. UIP. 160 minutes. Tony Montana AL PACINO; Manny Riviera STEVEN BAUER; Tony’s wife MICHELLE PFEIFFER; Tony’s sister MARY ELIZABETH MASTRANTONIO
Transcript and scans by PfeifferTheFace
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