Tony Montana, an uncouth, narcissistic, swaggering outsider, fought his way to the inside, rose to the top and then burned everything down in a violent, paranoia-driven attempt to retain power. Any prescient resemblance to a now-omnipresent political figure was strictly coincidence. The fictitious Miami drug lord played by Al Pacino in Brian De Palma’s controversial crime thriller “Scarface” (1983) suffered a bloody execution in the film’s over-the-top, practically balletic concluding gun battle.
A similar fate nearly befell the movie itself, an ambitious, nearly three-hour remake of the Howard Hawks noir classic from 1932. De Palma’s version, made for between $25 million and $37 million (depending on who you ask), took in less than $5 million at the box office on opening weekend. It elicited some snarling reviews — Pauline Kael called it a “crude, ritualized melodrama” — and was assailed by charges of racial stereotyping.
But unlike its Cuban-born protagonist, the film lived to see another day and subsequently became a bestseller on video, inspiring generations of hip-hop artists, spawning popular video games and enjoying a theatrical rerelease on its 35th anniversary. Its best-known catch phrase — “Say hello to my little friend,” uttered by Montana while brandishing his AR-15 with a jury-rigged grenade launcher attached during that cataclysmic final shootout — will apparently live on forever. (Most recently, it’s the title of a new comic novel by Jennine Capó Crucet about a character who aspires to be Montana-like.) Even in today’s Little Havana, posters, T-shirts and wall clocks emblazoned with Montana’s face or the “Scarface” movie poster are as ubiquitous as guava pastries.
The genesis, creation and afterlife of “Scarface” make for a fascinating, surprisingly complex tale, engagingly told by Glenn Kenny in “The World Is Yours: The Story of Scarface.” Kenny, a New York-based critic who has also written a making-of book about another notable crime film, Martin Scorsese’s “Goodfellas,” and a study of one of that movie’s stars, Robert De Niro, offers what amounts to a hybrid full-length biography of a movie. Drawing from new and old interviews, he offers extensive stage-setting and pop-culture context, along with thoughtful film analysis, sections that feel like oral history and a few extended detours.
“Prohibition invented the American gangster movie,” Kenny writes. Similarly, President Ronald Reagan’s war on drugs paved the way for the likes of the “Scarface” remake. The cocaine cowboys from the land of “Miami Vice,” an international crossroads for drug distributors, replaced the Chicago-based Italian American bootleggers and gun runners of the Hawks movie.
The ’83 “Scarface” got its start thanks to Pacino, who decided he wanted to star in a remake after seeing the Hawks film for the first time. “He was struck by its real, positively grand feeling and especially by [Paul] Muni’s tremendous performance,” according to Pacino biographer Andrew Yule. The actor then contacted his old friend Martin Bregman, a producer with whom Pacino had worked on “Serpico” and “Dog Day Afternoon.” Sidney Lumet, director of both of those films, signed on and made the suggestion to give the story a Miami-and-cocaine makeover before leaving the project, reportedly over creative differences: He had planned to focus on the story’s political aspects — the cocaine wars, the alleged involvement of the CIA and the DEA in the drug trade, and the impact of all the above on the relationship between the United States and Cuba. Enter De Palma, who “had this idea about turning it into an opera … that it should be bigger than life,” as Pacino said during a public appearance last year. Oliver Stone, tapped to write the screenplay, went to Paris to work in relative seclusion. He envisioned Montana as an industrious businessman who just happened to operate on the wrong side of the law. As the Oscar-winning director of “Platoon” and “Born on the Fourth of July” told Kenny: “Tony Montana is the ultimate, ultimate free-market proponent. Sort of the Milton Friedman of cocaine economics.”
Kenny spikes his entertaining narrative with plenty of amusing, frequently insightful observations and anecdotes about the world that made “Scarface” and the world that “Scarface” made. That notorious death-by-chainsaw scene, which caused novelists Kurt Vonnegut and John Irving to walk out of preview screenings? It was inspired by Stone’s discussions in the Bahamas with real-life Gangland types. The Pacino-fueled rumor that De Palma’s pal Steven Spielberg “had a crack” at shooting a portion of the final symphony of gunfire? Never happened, De Palma says. The movie’s continuing hold on hip-hop artists? Montana “makes things happen. Things don’t just happen to him, and he really is a self-made man,” music critic Harry Allen explains.
“The World Is Yours” isn’t the first book-length examination of “Scarface”; Nat Segaloff’s “Say Hello to My Little Friend” was published last year, following Ken Tucker’s “Scarface Nation” in 2008. But Kenny’s book comes off as authoritative, the final word on the subject. At least for now.
Philip Booth writes about film and music, including in his Substack newsletter, “Culture Pop: Sound & Screen.”
The World Is Yours
The Story of Scarface
By Glenn Kenny
Hanover Square Press. 320 pp. $32
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