 Controversial
director Brian De
Palma was not even interested in
seeing Pfeiffer
for his remake of 1932's Scarface.
It was produced by Martin
'Marty' Bergman
who had had a long association with Al
Pacino, whom De
Palma had cast in the title role.
The script was by Oliver
Stone who had won the Best
Screenplay Oscar for Midnight
Express in 1978. The 1932 version
was directed by Howard
Hawks and co-written by Ben
Hecht, and in it the mobster, in
a legendary performance by Paul
Muni, was a thinly disguised and
romanticized version of Al
Capone. Stone
who would go on to direct Platoon,
Born on the
Fourth of July, and JFK
brought a more contemporary if brutal
feel to his Scarface.
Tony Montana
is a Cuban washed ashore in the 1980 wave
of 125,000 refugees. The immigration people
herd the refugees, good and evil, into
a holding pen in Miami. Pacino's
Montana tells
the authorities, 'My father ta'e me to
the movies. I watch the guys like Humphrey
Bogart, James Cagney, I learn how to spe'
from those guys. I li’e those guys.'
His cohort Manolo (Steven
Bauer) wishes for his American
dream: 'I'd like my own blue jeans with
my name written on chicks' asses.'
Tony Montana
set his sights higher: 'I want what's
comin' to me the world an' everything
in it.'
 Their
dreams, of course, turn into gory nightmares,
in what was regarded as one of the most
bloodthirsty and violent films ever made.
Chainsaws and cocaine are readily available.
Pacino's
Montana keeps
a grenade launcher in his living room.
And bullets spray around like the word
“fuck”, which if you pay close
attention you hear a minimum of 183 times.
The Motion Picture Association ratings
board first gave it an X, which is a box
office killer as it cuts off the majority
of the moviegoers. Not since 1972, when
Marlon Brando
had dabbled in decadent sex and butter
and vice versa in Last
Tango in Paris had an X rated major
studio film been released. De
Palma re-cut the film four times,
while Marty Bergman
appealed the rating and got an R for restricted.
That allowed millions to see the film,
in which the amoral and appalling Montana
manoeuvres and machineguns his way to
be South Florida's billionaire cocaine
king pin before developing too strong
an attachment to his own product. Tony
Montana shoots his way to the top
and then snorts his way back down to the
gutter, gorging in the final scenes from
a Mount Everest of cocaine. On his way
up the ladder he goes to work for  drug
dealer Frank Lopez
played by the always watchable Robert
Loggia. Lopez
has two things Montana
wants power and an uppity mistress Elvira
who powders her nose from the inside and
whom Lopez
wears like a diamond pinky ring. She's
a seductive status symbol.
Elvira,
the icy, cocaine queen, who came across
like Grace Kelly
on dope, was no bimbo role. And Pfeiffer's
acting teacher had told her to heighten
her expectations. Pfeiffer
knew it was the correct advice, the only
way to escape bimbo limbo. But could Michelle
Pfeiffer who had most recently
graduated from Hollywood's fictional Rydell
High School handle the role? And
Brian De Palma?
And Al Pacino?
 In
Scarface
audiences first see Pfeiffer
as Elvira,
elegant and bare backed, gliding down
in a glass elevator to join her lover's
guests for dinner. Pacino's
Montana leaves
no doubt what he wants, and that's to
possess her. Pfeiffer
possesses the scene. It is one of the
sexiest entrances in screen history.
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