Indeed, the film’s opening scrawl states that 25,000 out of these 135,000 boat arrivals had criminal records – though revised estimates suggest that only around 2,700 of these were hardened criminals. Jimmy Carter would complain that his open-arms policy for these refugees meant that Castro sent him the dregs of his jail population, virtually as a middle-finger salute. Lumet won him around, by coming up with the idea of setting it in Miami and making it about “Marielitos” – the Cuban immigrants banished to Florida by Fidel Castro in 1980. Stone wasn’t keen at first – “I didn’t want to do an Italian Mafia movie”, he has said. Pacino and his producing partner Martin Bregman (Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon) both separately liked to claim that they caught a revival of Hawks’s film, and excitedly proposed doing their own version, approaching Stone and their go-to director at that time, Sidney Lumet. Remaking the 1932 pre-Code classic by Howard Hawks, starring Paul Muni as a ruthless Italian hoodlum, had not been De Palma’s idea – or even that of screenwriter Oliver Stone, a hot commodity after his Oscar-winning job on Midnight Express (1978). De Palma, whose slow methods had caused this haemorrhage, pushed back and appealed the rating, staking his whole reputation on the film’s success. Lumping it in the same category as hardcore pornography, an X would have lost a fortune for Universal, who had seen the budget climb alarmingly from an initial $10m-$15m to something north of $30m. They stamped De Palma’s film with a dreaded X rating, for “excessive and cumulative violence and language”. As we chart Montana’s quick rise from street rat to kingpin, the orgiastic bloodshed, unparalleled coke-snorting, and wall-to-wall expletives were enough to scandalise America’s ratings board, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). Martin Scorsese, midway through watching, turned to Pacino’s co-star, Steven Bauer, and warned him the reaction in Hollywood was going to be apoplectic. 25 minutes into Brian De Palma’s seething gangster epic, Cuban crime-lord-in-waiting Tony Montana (Al Pacino), while handcuffed, watches his colleague Angel (Pepe Serna) dismembered by a chainsaw in a bathtub, after a drug deal gone spectacularly sour.Ĭoming so early, this unhinged scene shocked the novelists Kurt Vonnegut and John Irving so much that they walked out. Scarface is available to stream on Netflix.Scarface was the most controversial film of 1983 before it even came out. Scarface is a movie that still packs a punch after 40 years, the Brian De Palma movie has remained prominent in pop culture throughout the decades thanks to the many memorable quotes. These impactful Scarface quotes help to define the lasting legacy of Brian De Palma's 1983 masterpiece and showcase why Tony Montana was a career-defining role for Al Pacino. Scarface is a warped and violent take on the American dream and so much of the dialogue reflects Tony's twisted ambition that leads a path of violence in his wake. He is a terrifying, brutal, and unpredictable force of nature, however, he is also fascinating as his journey to become a man of power is incredibly entertaining, and filled with unforgettable Scarface quotes. Al Pacino created one of the most iconic movie characters of all time with the Cuban immigrant turned drug lord Tony Montana. The best Scarfacequotes are a key reason Tony Montana has gone down in history as one of the greatest movie gangsters of all time.
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