Scarface arrives the way few films dare to: at full volume and without apology. Brian De Palma takes Tony Montana off a boat from the Mariel exodus and drops him into a Miami lit like a neon furnace, and from that first squint the film never once lowers its voice. Al Pacino plays the Cuban exile who turns a dishwasher’s wages into a cocaine empire, and Oliver Stone wrote him as a man who wants the whole world and is then genuinely surprised when the world bites back.

It is a rise-and-fall told as opera rather than as tragedy. Excess is not only Tony’s flaw here — it is the film’s entire method, from Giorgio Moroder’s pulsing synth score to the gold-and-chrome interiors to a final act that buries restraint under a mountain of gunfire. De Palma knows exactly what he is doing; the vulgarity is the point.

The film

Loosely remade from the 1932 Howard Hawks picture, by way of the Armitage Trail novel, De Palma and Stone relocate the gangster myth to the Reagan-era drug trade and let it swell to nearly three hours. The shape is classical — hunger, ascent, paranoia, ruin — but the texture is pure 1980s: white suits, pastel nights, the smell of money and powder. De Palma stages the violence with a showman’s relish, most infamously the bathroom chainsaw scene, which terrifies precisely because he keeps the worst of it just outside the frame.

The craft underneath the noise is real. The camera glides and cranes, the production design turns the nightclub and Tony’s fortress mansion into monuments to bad taste, and the editing lets scenes run long enough to curdle. This is a director in total control of a film about a man losing all of his.

Al Pacino, at full throttle

Pacino does not so much play Tony Montana as conduct him. The accent is thick, the gestures enormous, the line readings tipped toward aria — “Say hello to my little friend” has long outlived the movie around it. It is a performance with no interest in subtlety, and that is its courage: he commits so completely that the excess becomes a kind of truth.

Around him, Michelle Pfeiffer is all brittle ice as Elvira, the trophy wife numbed by her own glamour; Steven Bauer brings warmth as Manny; Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio sharpens the incestuous undertow as Tony’s sister Gina; and Robert Loggia and F. Murray Abraham fill out the food chain Tony is so determined to climb.

Why it endures

At release it split the room. Roger Ebert gave it four stars and found a human being inside the monster; other critics recoiled at the body count and the moral squalor, and the MPAA fought De Palma over an X rating. Then something stranger happened — the film outgrew its reviews. Hip-hop adopted Tony Montana as a patron saint of self-made hunger, the poster became dorm-room iconography, and Scarface settled into the language as shorthand for the American dream turned cannibal.

Our verdict

A gangster opera that never pretends to be anything other than what it is — loud, garish, morally bankrupt and completely alive. Scarface earns its three hours by believing in its own excess more than any film of its decade. Forty years on, it still says hello.