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Scarface is a 1983 film directed by Brian De Palma, written by Oliver Stone and starring Al Pacino as Antonio "Tony" Montana. A loose remake of the 1932 Howard Hawks gangster film of the same title, it tells the story of a fictional Cuban refugee who comes to Florida in 1980 as a result of the Mariel Boatlift.

Tony becomes a gangster against the backdrop of the 1980's cocaine boom. The film chronicles his rise to the top of Miami's criminal underworld and subsequent downfall in Greek tragedy fashion.

The film is dedicated to Howard Hawks and Ben Hecht, who were the writers of the original Scarface.

Plot

In July 1980, Cuban Hitman Tony Montana (Al Pacino) claims political asylum in Florida in the United States after departing Cuba in the Mariel boat lift of 1980. At first Montana is held at a detention camp called 'Freedomtown' with other Cubans. To be released and given a green card Montana and his best friend Manny Ray (Steven Bauer) kill a former aide to Fidel Castro who has tortured to death the brother of a wealthy politically connected car dealer, Frank Lopez, who is also heavily involved in the cocaine trade. After getting their cards Montana and his friend Manny are set up to work at a corner sandwich shop when a Lopez henchman, Omar Suarez (F. Murray Abraham), offers Tony and Manny a job unloading marijuana.

Tony insults Omar by turning down the job so Omar sets him up to pick up a sample of coke from a Colombian dealer, Hector. Tony, Manny, and two other Marielitos in his crew, Angel Fernández (Pepe Serna), and Chi Chi (Angel Salazar) then set out to meet Hector (Al Israel) at a seedy motel on the beach. The meeting does not go smoothly, as Tony grows irritated with Hector, who is slow to give him the cocaine in exchange for money. Suddenly, Montana and Angel are double-crossed in a rip off move by the Colombian. To convince Tony to give over the cash, Angel is dismembered in a shower stall with a chainsaw by Hector. After Angel is dead, Montana, about to suffer the same fate, is saved by Chi Chi and Manny who arrive in the nick of time to gun down Hector's henchmen in the hotel's room. Hector escapes but Tony vengefully confronts him in the street and shoots him dead in the middle of Ocean Drive, the now famous Miami South Beach boulevard. Tony and his crew then get away with both the coke and the money before the police arrive. Montana then impresses the money's owner, López (Robert Loggia), with not only the return of his cash but with a gift of the coke, a prize from the botched rip off. Frank immediately hires Tony's crew into his criminal hierarchy. But during this initial get together Tony also meets Lopez's lady, the blonde and beautiful Elvira Hancock (Michelle Pfeiffer), who will eventually become the source of tension between the two men. Thus, Montana begins his rise through the ranks of the Miami cocaine underworld.

While on business in Bolivia to help Omar set up a new distribution deal for Lopez, Montana, feeling that Frank is "soft," begins to show his defiance to López's authority when he negotiates a deal with Alejandro Sosa (Paul Shenar), the ruthless and powerful Bolivian drug lord. Sosa finds out that Omar is an informant during the trip and has him murdered to show Tony his intolerance for disloyalty. Upon his return to Florida Tony gets into trouble with Frank over the deal, who accuses him of "stealing" it. Montana then leaves López to strikes out on his own. This allows him to seek out Elvira to whom he makes an unexpected marriage proposal. Lopez is none too happy and decides to take out Tony.

But his move to assassinate Tony fails as two hitmen, hired by Lopez to kill Tony at the Babylon Club, cannot get it done. A vengeful Montana decides to take over Frank's business. That same night he and Manny kill both Frank and the cop on his payroll, Miami Chief of Narcotics Mel Bernstein, who had already shaken down Tony for a hefty monthly payment and airline tickets to London. His problems apparently solved, Tony begins a profitable relationship with Sosa, marries Elvira, buys a new mansion, and sets his sister Gina (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) up in business with her own beauty salon.

But as Montana's business grows, so does his cocaine addiction and paranoia. It is the beginning of the end. His wife, now hopelessly addicted herself, becomes distant. His banker informs him that he will be charging higher fees for washing the increasing flow of drug money. After Manny convinces him that he has a way to save money on the laundering of the coke cash, Montana is arrested in a sting operation by Manny's contact, an undercover cop. He is charged with tax evasion.

Sosa, not wanting to lose his main distributor, steps in to intervene by offering Tony a way out of going to prison. He introduces Montana to his cocaine "board of directors" a group that includes Bolivia's military chief and a mysterious American, known only as being "from Washington." We assume he is a CIA officer because Sosa guarantees that the IRS will not be able to send Tony to jail. In exchange, Montana must assist in the assassination of a journalist attempting to expose Sosa, his partners, and the ongoing corruption in the Bolivian government. Montana agrees but later has second thoughts backs when the journalist, now in New York to expose the cartel at the UN, unexpectedly picks up his wife and children. Tony, saying that the team was only supposed to kill the journalist, instead then shoots the assassin to prevent the journalist's family from being killed. Thus he seals his fate with Sosa.

Returning to Miami, Tony discovers that both his sister Gina and right-hand man Manny have disappeared. Tony has long harbored an apparent unnatural obsession for his sister and is overly protective of her for reasons that he may not understand himself. After getting Gina's address from his mother, who doesn't know who lives there, Tony goes to the house. Manny unexpectedly opens the door. Tony then sees Gina in a night gown at the top of the stairs. Enraged that another man has obviously slept with his sister, Tony kills Manny. Hysterically, Gina reveals that they had just been married. Tony has Gina taken back to his mansion where all hell is about to break loose.

In revenge for the missed opportunity to kill the journalist, who has now exposed him to the world as a drug lord, Sosa sends an assassination team to Montana's mansion to kill him. Sitting at his desk snorting from an enormous pile of cocaine, Tony realizes and regrets what he has done to his best friend. Suddenly Gina enters his office armed with a pistol to confront him with the truth about his feelings for her. She now realizes that Tony loves her in an unnatural way and demands, at gun point, that he make love to her. She begins to shoot at him while demanding he take her. A Sosa assassin hiding on the balcony, thinking Gina is shooting at him, leaps in and riddles her with bullets. Tony, enraged, throws the man off the balcony and kills him.

As his men are being killed in a gunfight inside the mansion, Tony kneels over Gina's dead body and begs forgiveness. With the assassins just outside his door, he then arms himself with an M16 assault rifle and an M203 grenade launcher, shouts the often imitated quote "Say hello to my little friend!" and single-handedly takes on Sosa's men, who by now have killed all of Tony's crew. Though extremely high on cocaine and able to take dozens of bullets, he is eventually killed when Sosa's chief assassin shoots him from behind with a shotgun.

Production and controversy

Scarface was directed by Brian De Palma, produced by Martin Bregman, 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, including using crime scene photos to inspire the infamous chainsaw scene. Stone also admitted 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 thus explaining why Tony does not have a traditionally Hispanic surname.

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. Also, leaders in the Cuban community wanted additions to the script which would have made Tony a Castro spy and depict subsequent Anti-Castro activity against him 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. In order to ensure the safety of the crew and to avoid confrontations, with the exception being obvious exterior shots, the movie was filmed in and around Los Angeles.

When the film was submitted to the MPAA, it was rated X for its extreme violence and graphic language, with the chainsaw scene the primary object of concern. DePalma cut the film twice, but it still received an X-rating. After the film was rejected for the third time, DePalma, with the help from a panel of experts including real narcotics officers, told the MPAA that the violence in DePalma's film was an accurate portrayal of real-life drug dealers and that the film should be released with its violence intact to show viewers how violent the drug trade was. With a third vote of 18 to 2 in favor of an "R," the MPAA agreed. But DePalma, who felt that the differences between the two "clean" cuts he put together were insignificant, arranged to have the uncut version released to theatres with an R-rating.

The word "fuck" was used 207 times in the film

Music

Main article: Scarface (soundtrack)

The music in Scarface was produced by Academy Award winning Italian record producer, Giorgio Moroder. Like Moroder's style, the soundtrack consists mostly of synthesized new wave, electronic music.

Video games

Main article: Scarface: The World Is Yours

Scarface The World is Yours, a video game based on the movie Scarface was released on different platforms in 2006 and 2007.A licensed video game, Scarface: The World Is Yours was released in September and October 2006 as well as an update in June 2007, developed by Radical Entertainment and published by Vivendi Universal Games. The game is a pseudo-sequel, and goes on the premise that Tony actually survived the raid on his mansion at the end of the film. Nintendo Wii, PS2, Xbox, and PC versions have been released.

Books and comics

Dark Horse Comics' imprint, DH Press, released a novel called Scarface: The Beginning by L. A. Banks.

In 2007, IDW Publishing released a new series called Scarface: Scarred for Life, which picks up where the film ends; as in the video game, it depicts Tony Montana barely surviving the film's climactic shotgun blast and, with the aid of two corrupt DEA agents, recovering to rebuild his empire and seek revenge on Sosa. This series was written by John Layman, with art by Dave Crosland. IDW followed it in July 2007 with a prequel comic mini-series called Devil in Disguise, by Joshua Jabcuga and Alberto Dose, which shows Antonio's pre-boatlift days as a boy learning his way around the Cuban criminal underworld.