The true story behind ‘Scarface’
Despite being the remake of a movie based on a novel, Scarface was hardly a slavish recreation of its cinematic or literary forebears, leading to one of the most iconic movies of the 1980s.
Uniting two of the decade’s defining off-screen talents, Oliver Stone penned the screenplay for Brian De Palma to direct, with Al Pacino delivering one of his most unforgettable performances as Tony Montana, a Cuban immigrant with dreams of taking over Miami’s drug trade by any means necessary.
Of course, the original novel by Armitage Trail had to draw its own inspirations from somewhere, and given that it was first published in 1930 and dealt heavily with the world of organised crime, Al Capone was the obvious touchstone.
His nickname just so happened to be ‘Scarface’, and it’s hardly a coincidence the book was released during Capone’s stint as the head of the Chicago Outfit, which fittingly ended the same year Howard Hawks’ film with Paul Muni in the role of Tony Camonte was released when Capone was imprisoned for tax evasion.
In 1932’s Scarface, Camonte heads up a bootlegging enterprise, which was Capone’s primary method of amassing his illicit fortune. Hawks’ feature also takes its cues from the 1929 St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, a citywide elimination of his enemies orchestrated by Capone to take out seven of his most heated rivals, with the movie seeing Camonte embark on a very similar rampage through Chicago.
More than half a century later, and the main character was refitted to better suit the social and economic climate of the time, when Cuban immigrants regularly came to America, many of whom were viewed by the locals and the authorities as being thieves and criminals. Culturally relevant and rooted in real-world concerns, the modern take on Scarface carried a narrative much more reflective of its era.
As well as Capone’s own rampant cocaine habit, Pacino’s Montana was taken under the wing of Robert Loggia’s Frank Lopez, who shows him the ropes in exchange for criminal tutelage and citizen status. In the former’s case, he had Frankie Yale as his mentor and father figure, learning how to move up the criminal underworld at the feet of somebody who’d already accomplished their own climb up the ladder.
Steven Bauer’s Manny Ribera has more than a touch in common with Capone’s right-hand man Frank Nitti, too, a first cousin who was always at his side and stepped into the breach to head up the Chicago Outfit when its leader was put behind bars. Their fates aren’t identical, but neither are they coincidental in relation to the roles they play in the lives of Montana and Capone.
Capone and Montana also shared the fate of dying at their palatial Florida estates, albeit under completely different circumstances. Whereas Pacino’s scenery-chewing kingpin goes out in a blaze of bullet-riddled and drug-addled glory, Capone suffered a cardiac arrest following a long period of illness.
If anything, Capone’s demise is more akin to that of Marlon Brando’s Vito Corleone in The Godfather, who has a heart attack while quietly tending to his property. Scarface was never designed with the intention of being a biopic, but it nonetheless took more than a couple of cues from its thinly-veiled inspiration.
