There’s not much that I can add to the discussion on Scarface, but when you’re doing an entire week of the films of Brian De Palma, skipping it can’t happen.

Loosely based on the Armitage Trail novel and serving as a loose remake of the Paul Muni-starring film, Scarface came about when Al Pacino saw that 1930s gangster movie and thought it could be remade. While he and Sidney Lumet got as far as the idea that Tony Montana was a Cuban arriving in the United States during the Mariel boatlift, but artistic differences between the director and producer Martin Bregman meant that they couldn’t work together.

Lumet wanted a political movie that blamed Reagan for the influx of cocaine into the United States which wasn’t the movie Bergman wanted. He was replaced with Brian De Palma and Oliver Stone was picked to write it. He didn’t want to make a mob movie until he learned that it was to be set in Miami. He had to go to Paris to beat his cocaine addiction, as he felt he couldn’t write the movie while snorting lines.*

Speaking of Miami, this wasn’t even shot there. It’s LA. The Miami Tourist Board declined the request to film there as it feared that Scarface would deter tourism with its themes of drugs and gangsters.

Ah, Miami. In 1980, Cuban refugee and ex-convict Montana (Pacino) arrives there and soon emerges from a refugee camp alongside Manny Ray (Steven Bauer, the only Cuban in the main cast), Angel (Pepe Serna) and Chi-Chi (Angel Salazar). They get their green cards when they kill a former Cuban general for Frank Lopez (Robert Loggia), the drug lord of Miami. After that excitement, being dishwasher seems like a major step backward.

They start to work for Lopez and it nearly ends for Tony just as quickly as it started. Under orders of Lopez’s main henchman Omar Suarez (F. Murray Abraham), Columbian dealers screw them on the deal and kill Angel with a chainsaw while Tony is forced to watch. When Martin Scorsese watched this scene, he turned to Bauer and told him: “You guys are great, but be prepared, because they’re going to hate it in Hollywood… because it’s about them.”

He was right. Critics lost their minds and audiences walked out during this scene.

Manny and Chi-Chi save Tony and kill the Columbians, as the three get the money and the drugs back to their boss.

Given more power, Tony meets Alejandro Sosa (Paul Shenar), a Bolivian drug dealer who quickly figures out that Omar is a police informant. Tony makes a deal without Frank’s approval, but before long, Frank doesn’t matter. Tony has his empire, Frank’s woman Elvira (Michelle Pfeiffer) and a giant mansion that becomes a fortress.

But that can’t last. Tony has moments of actual conscience that doom him and moments of sheer insanity that damn him even further, finally winding up inside his gigantic palace doing a mountain of coke and battling wave after wave of crime soldiers before getting shot in the back, dying in a fountain that says, “The world is yours.”

As you can imagine, this movie barely made it into theaters with all the violence. It was given an X rating for excessive and cumulative violence and for language even after De Palma cut the movie three times. Universal would not release this with an X, which meant they couldn’t advertise the film, so an appeal board composed of twenty theater owners, studio executives and independent distributors voted that an R-rated cut would be released. De Palma claimed that the changes between his final cut and the R were unnoticeable. The MPAA demanded that only the R cut would play, so De Palma released the uncut print and didn’t tell anyone until months after the movie had been playing.

Beyond the music and pro wrestling — say hello to the bad guy Razor Ramon — that were inspired by this, so much of Grand Theft Auto was directly from this movie. It was paid back when two video games came out, Scarface: The World Is Yours — in which Tony somehow survives and gets his revenge on Sosa — while Scarface: Money. Power. Respect. was a prequel to the movie.

It seems like everyone has seen Scarface and probably has the poster and t-shirt. That said, it’s made by a master director and fills every moment of its running time with manic energy. Kind of like the cocaine it was based on.

*Powdered baby laxative was what people were snorting in this. Pacino did so many rails of the fake drug that his nasal passages were torn to bits.