SAT SEP 28, 2024 2:00 PM

SCARFACE

$25.00

Aero Theatre sponsored by NEON | Beyond Fest 2024

Q&A with actor Al Pacino. Moderated by Bernard Rose.

Stay tuned for Sonny Boy, Al Pacino’s new memoir releasing October 8, 2024

From an obituary by the New York Times' Amanda Holpuch:

Ángel Salazar, a stand-up comedian known for his wacky routines and an actor best known for playing Chi Chi in the 1983 cult classic “Scarface,” died on Sunday at a friend’s apartment in Brooklyn. He was 68.

His death was confirmed by a representative, Roger Paul, who said Mr. Salazar had an enlarged heart and was found unresponsive.

He was an established comedian and actor who built his career in New York City comedy clubs after fleeing Cuba when he was young.

He acted in stage plays, television shows and films, including “Carlito’s Way” in 1993, but none of these roles would surpass the renown of his part in “Scarface,” in which he played Chi Chi, a henchman of the drug lord Tony “Scarface” Montana (Al Pacino). In the 1983 film, Chi Chi backs Montana, a fellow Cuban refugee, on his violent campaign to reach the top of Miami’s cocaine trade.

In 2017, more than 30 years later, after the film had secured generations of fans, Mr. Salazar told The Record of Bergen County, N.J., that he still answered to “Chi Chi” and didn’t mind when people brought DVD copies of “Scarface” to his comedy shows to be signed.

Ángel Salazar was born on March 2, 1956, in Cuba. He acted in theaters there before fleeing the country in the early 1970s, swimming across Guantánamo Bay to reach the U.S. naval base there, as he told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1996. From there, he was flown to Miami and then moved to New York, where he was placed in a foster home in the Bronx.

Information on survivors was not immediately available.

In New York, he had trouble finding acting jobs, but he could make people laugh and at age 18 decided to test how far that could get him by performing at a comedy club’s open mic night.

“I had 10 minutes,” Mr. Salazar told The Inquirer. “And I think I had one joke. The rest of the time I said, ‘Check it out,’ over and over again.”

Eventually, he was a comedy club regular, and “Check it out” was a staple of his wacky comedy routines, which included costumes, props and impersonations of celebrities such as Madonna, Bruce Springsteen and Tina Turner.

Therefore, the 1983 Scarface focuses on the very specific concern of Cuban immigrant criminals. Across the Scarfaces, there is a migration from North to South, but also a dilation from a large, shapeless thug population to a specific, statistically expressed infestation by a single people. In keeping with the agitation expressed in their title cards, the films rely on the performance of real events to instill awareness and concern in audiences. Thus, the 1932 version depicts such real atrocities as the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, while the 1983 version includes real-life footage of Fidel Castro and the Mariel boatlift. Furthermore, both films rely on the real-life, criminal issue of trafficking—but the illegal substance has changed; the alcohol smuggling in the original, and in history, is a kind of gateway drug for the cocaine smuggling that emerges in the 1983 adaptation and its corresponding cultural moment.

Similarly, while Scarface is essentially the same character in both films, his background is changed; he is drawn the same way across the two, but colored in differently in each. Tony’s scar, for example, is in virtually the same place across both of his faces—and both times, when he is asked about it, he gives an ambiguous answer. It does not matter how he has become Scarface, as much as it matters that he is Scarface, a figure who comes to stand out from the crowd—a mold to be filled. Anthony “Tony” Camonte, though, is an Italian Scarface in a cultural moment when his nationality does not matter beyond its association with the mob (the known existence of Italian gangsters such as Al Capone, whose nickname was “Scarface”). Scarface is born again in 1983 as Antonio “Tony” Montana, a Cuban immigrant—because in the early 1980’s, the Mariel boatlift brought many Cuban criminals into the country, and because the emergence of Latin American drug cartels (operating largely from Colombia) at the end of the Cold War became a national concern. Therefore, a Latino Tony is a generalized amalgamation of two cultural “problems,” and not based on one concrete example; the film smashes together two contemporary social concerns to create a more fictional Scarface than the Capone-esque one.

Both films, however, have cast Tony with an actor who does not share his heritage. Paul Muni (born in the region of Austria-Hungary that is now the Ukraine) plays the Italian-accented Camonte, while Italian-American Al Pacino plays the Cuban Montana. As committed to their accents as these actors are, it is audible that they are not of the nationalities they play. This consistency reinforces the adaptation Scarface as performing the original, but also calls into question the importance of Scarface’s cultural origins. In the 1932 Scarface, his mother has a thick Italian accent, Tony’s accent is less pronounced but still there, yet his younger sister Cesca speaks like a perky, fast-talking All-American gal. This is confusing, but nowhere is it explained where Tony Camonte was born. In the 1983 film, Montana’s mother and sister Gina have thick Cuban accents—having immigrated to the United States (before he did).

Therefore, Montana’s rise to power is more of an immigrant’s deranged pursuit of the American dream than Camonte’s quest for riches and power. The 1983 version reflects the worry that someone from somewhere else can enter the United States and take over or wreak havoc; Montana migrates over, and then climbs up. This, plus the 1983 version’s alignment of the Mariel boatlift with the 1932 film’s angry appeal for civilians to protest the government’s inefficient regulation of problems in the county, illuminates the main social problem in de Palma’s film’s not as gang violence or cocaine trafficking—but, rather problematically, immigration.

The film is xenophobic on its own, but it also attempts to undertake xenophobia as a theme, muddying its overall sympathies and concerns. The film’s attempt to critique xenophobia is expressed immediately—the first shot of the movie has Montana fiercely interrogated in English at an Immigration office. The officers, whose faces are chopped off by the camera’s suspicious, lingering revolution around Tony’s face, are surprised that he can speak the language so well, but still insensitively and disinterestedly accuse him of lying and smuggling and send him to “Freedomtown.” These officers are clearly represented as racist. “They all sound the same to me,” says the head officer about the Cubans he has spoken to, ordering Tony out. This scene, contrasted with the same moment in the 1932 version, where Camonte is interrogated in a police station and the question of nationality is never an issue, presents his immigration into the United States as a problem even before it becomes apparent that he is, actually, a dangerous criminal. Montana has to transcend oppositional cultural barriers just to get to America, and still faces them after he has arrived.

The adaptation of Tony’s love interest—the glaring, frowning, rail-thin blonde with a low-cut neckline—also transforms prejudice in the first Scarface into racism in the second. Poppy, the girlfriend of Camonte’s boss, is initially not interested in Camonte because he is poor; he grows on her when he begins to make money. Elvira, the 1983 counterpart, is originally averse to Montana also because he is poor as well as an immigrant. “I have enough friends, I don’t need another one,” she tells Tony, when he informs her that he would like to be her friend, “Especially one that just got off a banana boat.” A few seconds later, when they begin to argue, she snaps back at him, “Hey, José.” Poppy and Elvira are exactly the same character (in both films, for example, Tony needs to buy a new car to impress “her”)—but Elvira’s dialogue has been manipulated from Poppy’s to include a kind of modern, “white,” ignorant, agitation directed at immigrants. But, overall, in its ultimate representation of the immigrant Montana into a slimy crime boss, the film ultimately presents a case study in which white racist anxiety about immigration is represented as not entirely misplaced. In this way, the 1983 Scarface is a giant contradiction in a way that the 1932 film is not.

As Poppy does in the 1932 film, Elvira, too, warms up to Montana after he has made a lot of money; as the neon sign flashing “The world is yours” (on a blimp and then replicated on a statue in Montana’s home, and on a flashing billboard outside Camonte’s living room) predicts, Scarface does “get it all.” He also loses it all, at the pinnacle of greed. In both conclusions, he takes up a weapon to fight against the angry hoards invading his house, and his demise is spat out by the skinny mouth of a machine gun, and he collapses in close proximity to the flashing sign.

Therefore, regardless of the films’ interaction with their zeitgeist’s sociopolitical agendas and trepidations, the villains who represent the problem are ultimately defeated; when the Scarfaces end, the Scarfaces meets their ends. However, as cinema’s cyclical story-consumption reinforces, the Scarfaces (movies and archetypes alike) are always evolving, just as much as America’s own attitudes towards those it perceives as outsiders.

Paragraph from Glenn Kenny's new book, The World Is Yours: The Story of Scarface:

From another phone booth, this one at the 60th Pan Am Metroport, an airport shuttle for the very comfortably well-off in a hurry, Tony learns that things have gone off at home, too. The bodyguard nicknamed "Nick the Pig"-who Elvira called her "only friend" before walking out on Tony (she was being sarcastic, they weren't close), tells Tony that Manny's been gone the past couple of days. Also, Tony's mom called, looking for Gina. Hmm. Elvira has not called.

“Life’s a bitch,” snarls Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman, avenging anti-hero for the Riot Grrrl era, midway through 1992’s Batman Returns. “Now, so am I.” It may not be her most subtle work, yet there’s something about that brash, bratty aphorism that cuts to the essence of the former SoCal pageant queen turned Hollywood’s most luminous—and perhaps unusual—late 20th-century superstar. The line on Pfeiffer has long been that she had to prove her talent against the limitations, such as they were, of her remarkable looks, but her beauty—and the ways in which she toyed with and subverted it—is inseparable from her craft onscreen. No two Pfeiffer performances are the same, yet each is infused with her gestural flair, her essential humanity, and her empathy for eccentrics and outsiders.

For all of Pfeiffer’s pop culture ubiquity throughout the ’80s and ’90s, few multiplex stars were as elusive, as hard to get a handle on. Though a sex symbol, she was never a femme fatale like Sharon Stone; she could play quirky and romantic, but she wasn’t an American sweetheart like Julia Roberts or Meg Ryan; a serious talent, she was rarely considered in the company of Meryl Streep or Jodie Foster. None of them, of course, could go toe-to-toe in a warehouse with Coolio—as Pfeiffer did, cheekbones tilted to infinity, in the rapper’s iconic music video for “Gangsta’s Paradise”—let alone whip heads off mannequins while shrink-wrapped in a leather cat-suitor hold a live bird captive in their mouth. (Surely the wildest performance in a multi-million-dollar blockbuster with a Happy Meal tie-in.)

Pfeiffer’s unlikely journey from surfer chick to super freak might begin with her childhood relationship to her image. “When I was very young I never thought I was attractive,” the self-described tomboy, nicknamed “Michelle Mudturtle” in elementary school, told Interview in 1988. “I looked like a duck.” Born to working-class parents in Midway City, Orange County, the young, wild-child Pfeiffer spent a listless adolescence hanging out with surfers at Huntington Beach and working a checkout job at Vons, before entering, and winning, the Miss Orange County Beauty Pageant in 1978 (“A softball player who also oil paints, she’d like to become an actress,” announced the emcee). A run of movie and TV bit parts followed, invariably featuring the aspiring starlet in hot pants or padded bras (she was billed only as “The Bombshell” on the 1979 series Delta House). Her first major role arrived in 1982’s ill-fated Grease 2, as the gum-snapping gang leader of the Pink Ladies: sassy in leather and full of bad-girl longing, like Debbie Harry if she’d been a Shangri-La. When the movie flopped, she could barely convince Brian De Palma to cast her in his 1983 remake of Scarface. It turned out to be a career-maker. Gliding into the picture in a bias-cut silk dress as zonked-out trophy wife Elvira Hancock, she’s colder than Giorgio Moroder’s beats, all elbows and doomed malaise: a disdainful, dead-eyed foil to Al Pacino’s hubristic Cuban drug lord. Debuting the killer eye-roll that would become an ace in her arsenal, Pfeiffer’s Elvira is a mistress of the dark whose soul is more corroded than the criminals she’s caught between—a rotted avatar of WASP consumption and American complicity.

Pfeiffer’s performances in both films—sizzling with “don’t call me baby” insouciance—have a sly, comedic edge; she knows when to play off and when to undercut the tough-guy pretense with which she’s surrounded. Still, it would take time before Hollywood recognized the gift beyond the glamor. If George Miller’s The Witches of Eastwick (1987)—a pop-feminist whirligig in which Pfeiffer, Cher, and Susan Sarandon summon the devil (Jack Nicholson) to do their bidding—had tapped the actor’s comic abilities and made her a marquee star, then it was Jonathan Demme’s Married to the Mob (1988) that opened up her full, expressive range as a performer. Outfitted in leopard print, frosted lipstick, and a Long Island accent, Pfeiffer’s low-rent mob princess on the lam sparkles with charisma and screwball timing—not to mention a ferocious right hook, delivered to camera, and by extension, any lingering doubters. The performance showcases Pfeiffer’s keen sense of rhythm, her versatility, and empathy; fusing inventive physical comedy with emotional vulnerability—her posture can sharpen and slacken on a dime—she transforms what might have been a caricature into a rich portrait of a woman stumbling toward a liberating sense of self.