‘Scarface’ Is Primarily based on This Wild True Story

To this present day, it is one of the regularly quoted movies in fashionable cinema historical past. Anybody who’s ever heard the road, “Say whats up to my little buddy,” or, “For a inexperienced card, I gonna carve him up actual good,” is aware of they arrive from the 1983 masterpiece Scarface, director Brian De Palma‘s paeon to the gangster style. The film chronicles the rise and fall of Tony Montana, a refugee from the 1980 Cuban Mariel exodus who ascends the blood-stained rungs of the drug underworld to grow to be Miami’s “Cocaine King.” Al Pacino, whose unhinged and frenzied efficiency because the maniacal Montana earned him a 1984 Golden Globe nomination, was so convincing that some moviegoers believed the story of the horrifyingly deadly narcotic kingpin was about an actual individual. And it really was.

What’s stunning, although, is the invention that Scarface‘s Tony Montana is not based mostly on the lifetime of any modern-day nostril sweet overlord in any respect. No, Tony Montana is patterned after infamous Twenties and 30s racketeer, pimp, and bootlegging crime czar Al Capone. To grasp how the a lot feared cigar-chomping, fedora-wearing Capone morphed into the coke-snorting, M16-brandishing Montana requires a visit into the film world of yesteryear.

RELATED: The True Story Behind Why Remaking ‘Scarface’ Has Been Unattainable

‘Scarface’ Is Truly a Remake

De Palma’s Scarface was really a remake of the 1932 Howard Hawks and Richard Rosson-directed movie of the identical identify starring Paul Muni as Tony Camonte, the younger man of humble beginnings who rises by way of the illicit ranks to grow to be Chicago’s greatest bootlegging despot. The movie’s screenplay, penned by Ben Hecht, was derived from the 1930 novel Scarface by pulp fiction writer Armitage Path, which was a thinly veiled story of Al Capone’s rise to infamy. Capone’s nickname was “Scarface,” a incontrovertible fact that Path (a pseudonym for Maurice Coons) little doubt picked up whereas he was dwelling in Chicago within the Twenties and mingling with underworld figures related to Capone whereas researching his e book.

Within the 1932 movie, Tony Camonte turns into the pinnacle of a bootlegging syndicate, which occurred to be the real-life Capone’s main unlawful enterprise, although prostitution, playing, drug trafficking, extortion, and homicide have been only a small pattern of his different “facet hustles.” A very memorable sequence within the film is a montage of Camonte and his henchmen occurring a citywide slaughter of Camonte’s enemies, a transparent allusion to 1929’s St. Valentine’s Day Bloodbath, a violent occasion orchestrated by Capone that took out seven of his rivals. Though thought-about stunning for its time, the 1932 model of Scarface, hampered by Hollywood’s Hays Code, was restricted in its skill to depict the true violence synonymous with the identify Capone.

Al Pacino Noticed an Alternative for a Remake

Quick-forward 51 years later, the place Al Pacino is attending a screening of the 1932 film. “I went and noticed that movie and referred to as (producer) Marty Bregman after,” Pacino recalled throughout a 2011 query and reply session in regards to the making of the 1983 movie. “I mentioned, ‘I feel we might do that factor. There’s a remake right here.’” However a brand new model of Scarface would want a narrative with a recent angle, and that is the place screenwriter Oliver Stone enters the image. Within the authentic movie, Tony Camonte is a low life from the fallacious facet of the tracks who overcomes his meager circumstances to emerge as one of many world’s most outstanding mob bosses.

Stone had the concept to set the up to date model of Scarface amid the backdrop of the true life occasions of the 1980 Cuban flotilla from the Mariel Islands to the USA. A good portion of the immigrants arriving throughout this time have been rumored to be petty thieves and different lawless people, and Stone thought it could make sense to have Tony Montana, the brand new model of the lead character, be amongst these despatched over by Communist dictator Fidel Castro, giving the film a way of actual time relevance and accessibility. And that is how Al Capone, aka Tony Camonte, aka Tony Montana, turned a Cuban immigrant.

‘Scarface’s Characters Are Primarily based on Al Capone’s Actual Life Cohorts

Though De Palma’s model of Scarface revolves across the drug commerce, the story of Tony Montana echoes that of Capone, notably in its telling of how Montana turns into embroiled in his peccant universe. Capone, who ran with a road gang as a youth within the early 1900s, was taken beneath the wing of Frankie Yale, an Italian immigrant who presided over a World Conflict I period crime cartel that dabbled in quite a lot of rackets, together with prostitution and extortion. It was Yale who mentored Capone and helped him transfer up within the gangland subculture.

In Scarface, Frankie Vale is Frank Lopez (Robert Loggia), the automobile seller/cocaine trafficker for whom Montana commits homicide in change for authorized non-resident alien standing. Lopez rewards Montana with a number of different jobs that contain shootings and dismemberments, thus assuring Montana’s place in Lopez’s aberrant enterprise enterprise. Montana’s buddy all through his exploits, Manny Ribera (Steven Bauer), is probably going based mostly on Capone’s right-hand man Frank Nitti, Capone’s first cousin who faithfully served the mob boss and who stepped in to maintain the felony companies operating after Capone was imprisoned in 1932.

Along with his cousin Frank, Capone assembled a cadre of lackeys to each help and shield him as his energy and affect grew. Among the most well-known in Capone’s circle have been formidable hooligans like William White, Murray Humphreys, Marcus Looney, Charles Fischetti, and William O’Donnell, all of whom helped orchestrate a few of Capone’s bloodiest workouts of affect and revenge. In Scarface, these goons are amalgamated into two main bruiser characters, Ernie (Arnaldo Santana), Lopez’s former thick-headed bodyguard, and Nick the Pig (Michael P. Moran), Montana’s long-time buddy who turns into one among his high robust guys. Sadly, each Lopez and Nick meet their makers late within the movie in a drug-fueled rendering of Capone’s St. Valentine’s Day bloodbath.

The Movie’s Feminine Characters Are Largely Fictional

Though the occasions and characters in De Palma’s Scarface carefully align with the world of Al Capone, the tales of the ladies in Tony Montana’s life are largely fictionalized and barely coincide with the feminine figures in Capone’s life. In Scarface, Montana has one sister, Gina (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio), over whom he is fiercely protecting and who begins a romance with Montana’s confidant Manny. Capone got here from a big household of six brothers and two sisters, one among whom died earlier than her first birthday. Capone’s one surviving sister, Mafalda, was not a big a part of her brother’s life, avoiding his felony entanglements altogether. In Scarface, Gina is gunned down by successful man intent on focusing on Montana, one thing that clearly by no means occurred in Capone’s life. Then there’s Montana’s girlfriend – and later, his spouse – Elvira (Michelle Pfeiffer), the mistress of Montana’s former mentor Lopez.

In Scarface, Montana involves America as a single man who steals Elvira away from her slimy benefactor, however in actual life, Al Capone had a spouse, Mae, who he married when he was 19 years previous, with whom he had a son, and with whom he remained till his demise in 1947. It is largely accepted that Capone had a collection of extramarital affairs all through his marriage, however whether or not he had a single long-term mistress stays in dispute. Some historians have written that Capone saved a 15-year-old girlfriend hidden away in a Chicago condominium, whereas one other outlandish story entails a mysterious French girlfriend named Vera (therefore the similarity to the identify “Elvira” in Scarface), whose ghost as we speak haunts a house in Halifax, Florida. No matter escapades Capone could have engaged in with girls aside from his spouse, they appear to have been discreet and with out the drama depicted in Scarface.

Tony Montana’s Downfall Was Nothing Like Al Capone’s

One other liberty Scarface takes is in its depiction of the title character’s final downfall. The movie ends in a virtually six-minute-long frenzy of white cocaine mountains, naked breasts, Sandinista-style swarming, and hundreds of bullets fired amid a sea of purple velvet carpeting and spiral staircases, culminating with Montana’s remaining plunge into an indoor swimming pool earlier than a gaudy gold-plated sculpture that reads, “The World is Yours.” Fairly a distinction to the precise ending of Capone’s life. In 1931, Capone was convicted of the relatively unsexy crime of tax evasion. After being imprisoned at Alcatraz, he was launched in 1939 resulting from well being issues from syphilis (which lends credence to the idea that Capone had many girlfriends all through his life).

The one actual parallel between Capone’s demise and Montana’s is that they each died at their properties in Florida – Montana in a blaze of gunfire, and Capone from a coronary heart assault in 1947. Mockingly, Capone’s demise most resembled that of one other fictional film mobster, Marlon Brando‘s Don Vito Corleone, who, in The Godfather, succumbs to cardiac arrest in his backyard. However a quiet demise would not have sufficed in Scarface, a film remembered most for its intense and protracted violence.

Al Capone’s Lasting Presence in Pop Tradition

Maybe what’s most attention-grabbing about Scarface, each the 1932 authentic and the 1983 model, is the unimaginable affect and endurance of the notorious Al Capone, a person so abominably immersed in lawlessness and corruption that he impressed a novel and two movies and stays within the public consciousness to this present day. One can not help however marvel what Capone would have considered his depiction by Paul Muni within the authentic movie, in addition to his reincarnation by Pacino as a Cuban drug lord within the remake. Realizing Capone’s merciless and nefarious methods, although, it is probably he would have been flattered and entertained by all of it.