‘Scarface’ achieves cult status with Al Pacino in starring role

When Scarface premiered in 1983, starring Al Pacino as a Cuban drug trafficker in South Florida, the movie was regarded as a flop.

That didn’t surprise Pacino.

“The whole film was a blatant indictment of the 1980s, and it went against the status quo — the ‘Just Say No’ campaign of Nancy Reagan and the establishment of the time,” he writes in his new memoir, Sonny Boy. “It certainly didn’t fit into the Hollywood mold either.”

In the memoir, Pacino calls the movie a “flop — not commercially, but critically. Artistically. Spiritually.”

Pacino’s book begins with his difficult upbringing in New York City, where he is nicknamed Sonny Boy, and follows his professional path from a slow start to eventual breakthrough in The Godfather. In his 30s, Pacino finally achieved major star status in that 1972 film as Michael Corleone, a Marine Corps veteran and son of Don Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando). The movie was adapted from a best-selling novel by Mario Puzo, who co-wrote the screenplay with director Francis Ford Coppola.

After that performance, Pacino starred in other movies in the Godfather series, dramatizing Michael’s rise to head of the crime family. Pacino also signed on to high-profile lead roles in stage plays and films unrelated to The Godfather, winning numerous acting awards.

South Florida Cocaine Wars

By then a box-office attraction, Pacino became interested in making Scarface while walking down Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood and seeing the marquee at the Tiffany Theater, “a revival house that showed old movies.” In this case, the movie was the original Scarface, first released in 1932, featuring Paul Muni as a gangster based on Al “Scarface” Capone of Chicago.

“Back when it was made, Muni’s Scarface was a favorite film of a lot of people, including my grandfather,” Pacino writes in Sonny Boy, adding that Muni’s performance was especially impressive.

“He was like Brando in The Wild One,” Pacino writes, “a figure totally unrestricted by boundaries or conventions. He made me feel something. He was free.”

It would take some time before the updated version, written by Oliver Stone and directed by Brian De Palma, would go into production, with Pacino in the main role.

The setting for the 1980s Scarface was changed from the Prohibition-era Midwest to South Florida during the cocaine wars. While Muni played a gangster named Tony Camonte, the name given to Pacino’s character was Tony Montana, because Stone was a fan of San Francisco 49ers quarterback Joe Montana, according to The Ultimate Book of Gangster Movies. 

Other aspects of the updated movie reflect the era it portrays. Pacino writes that their version mocked “the whole idea of trickle-down economics and the grab-everything-you-can philosophy of the moment.”

“Oliver Stone would later boil it down to just three words — ‘Greed is good’ — in his film Wall Street,” Pacino writes. “We wanted to call out the avarice we witnessed and still make it entertaining.”

‘Give it some time’

When the 1983 version came out, some viewers found it entertaining, but others panned it. Michael Putney, a reporter at News Channel 4 in Miami, interviewed people leaving a theater where Scarface was showing, seeking their immediate on-camera reactions to the film. One man called it “weird.”

In a televised live shot, the reporter criticized the way Pacino delivered his lines and the accent the actor used throughout the movie. “What a mumbler,” Putney said. “And what an accent Al Pacino has here — a mongrel mixture of the South Bronx, Milan and Matanzas.”

The reporter wrapped up his live shot by concluding that Scarface is a “bad film.”

“You can sum up Scarface in two words: Bang bang, snort snort,” he said. “Bang bang is for gunfire, snort snort is for cocaine. There’s a lot of both in Scarface.”

That negativity extended to Hollywood people in Pacino’s circle.

“For weeks on end, I had some of the biggest directors in the world — even [Sidney] Lumet — haranguing me about how bad it was,” the actor writes. “Milos Forman said to me, ‘You made Dog Day Afternoon and you go and make a movie like this? How do you do that?’”

The criticism was relentless. One newspaper headline read, “Pacino Fails Miserably as Scarface.”

Pacino and others involved with the movie were hurt. “Those of us who had worked on Scarface were devastated for days,” Pacino writes.

But slowly things turned around, beginning with a rare compliment here and there. During a Scarface event at the Manhattan restaurant Sardi’s, Pacino was confronted by a “massive crowd of cold, unsympathetic faces” except for the actor and comedian Eddie Murphy, who approached “with that big smile of his.”

“He walked right over to me and said, ‘Al, that was fantastic!’ and he gave me a hug,” Pacino writes. “I think he was the only one in that whole room who understood and appreciated that film.”

Over time, others stepped up with encouraging words, including Warren Beatty, who “was more sympathetic” than most. In the book, Pacino writes that Beatty, urging his fellow actor to be patient, said, “We had a slow start with Bonnie and Clyde. Give it some time, Al.”

As Beatty predicted, the turnaround ultimately happened. Pacino attributes that to “the hip-hop generation,” who “related to the mythology of Tony Montana and gave it credibility.”

“Rap artists and their fans embraced the movie,” Pacino writes. “They recognized the film as a parable, a story about how you view the world when you’re taught that life is cheap and dispensable.”

Pacino says these supporters were “the catalyst and the springboard for the movie’s eventual success, because once they bought it, the world started buying it.”

The movie then became part of the counterculture, Pacino says, as the “legend of Tony Montana spread worldwide.”

“Tony Montana lets people break out of themselves and their situations — break out of your rut, break out of life as you’re told to live it,” Pacino writes. “There’s something about the journey that is sweet. That’s why the people who actually come from the world that it depicts, who have really walked that turf, related to it and survived it. They knew the joke from the drama.”

‘Unwieldy’ movie remains popular

Today, more than 40 years after the film was first released, its impact on popular culture remains strong, including several memorable lines that continue to crop up. One of these, “Say hello to my little friend,” is regarded as a classic. The Pacino character says this now-famous line while blasting rivals with a powerful weapon.

According to The Ultimate Book of Gangster Movies, that line ranks No. 61 in the American Film Institute’s list of Top 100 all-time quotes. “The line has come to define the Tony Montana character created by Pacino, a hopped-up kingpin, standing alone against the world, brandishing an assault rifle equipped with a grenade launcher,” the book states.

This kind of recognition doesn’t always happen overnight. In Sonny Boy, Pacino says movies like Scarface take time to sink in. “Sometimes an audience doesn’t know exactly what it’s seeing right away, and they need time to take it in and absorb it,” he writes.

Of all his movies, Scarface remains “the biggest film” in the 84-year-old star’s career. “The residuals still support me,” he writes in the memoir. “I can live on it. I mean, I could, if I lived like a normal person. But it does contribute, let’s put it that way.”

Even with that success, Pacino says the version of Scarface he performed in will always spark debate. “I think if they were to release Scarface tomorrow, it would get the same reaction, stir up the same controversy,” Pacino writes. “It’s just too damn unwieldy. That’s all there is to it.”

Larry Henry is a veteran print and broadcast journalist. He served as press secretary for Nevada Governor Bob Miller and was political editor at the Las Vegas Sun and managing editor at KFSM-TV, the CBS affiliate in Northwest Arkansas. Today, he is a senior reporter for Gambling.com.