"Scarface" - Reviewed by former Mafia Capo Michael Franzese

well it's mob movie monday got a great one for you today and i can only tell you this say hello to my little friend [Music] so [Music] hey everyone welcome to another sit down with michael francis and today is mob movie monday favorite of all of you out there and today we're doing the movie scarface not al capone scarface but scarface with al pacino produced in the early 80s a great film in my opinion i think was one of al pacino's best roles i liked him in that and donnie brasco two of my favorite roles of his uh but it was a great film i was uh received high acclaim it did pretty well at the box office and um it's something that i'm familiar with during the early 80s i was kind of running around miami at that time fort lauderdale florida doing a bunch of things had a home back then so i'm kind of familiar with what was going on with uh you know that whole drug scene down in miami during that time so we're going to review it today i hope everybody's doing well 2021 has started off good i hope for all of you um some interesting things happening i would say but we'll see how this year plays out i hope all of you that dealing with covid or have dealt with covid are improving getting by and hopefully things get back to somewhat normal this year so let's get into the film you know an interesting time uh for those of you that are mr history buffs it was the the cuban revolution when castro knocked batista out i think it was in january of 1959 communist rule comes over cuba things get very very tough back then in 1980 there was something called the mario boat lift where because the conditions were so bad in cuba they had no money no food no employment castro allowed people that wanted to migrate to the united states to go they got in boats and they headed over to the united states and we took in several hundred thousand at that point in time and um you know it's a real a real tough time for uh things that were going on in cuba back then and you know we spoke a little about this in prior videos about how the mob we had some interest in cuban gambling back at that time and when the revolution came we get we left also and that's when vegas started to come about and so on and so forth so we went through that but um you know some fun facts i think some facts about the film that you may not be aware of it was written by oliver stone directed by brian de palma great team great production team and tony montana was not based upon the character al capone as a matter of fact the whole movie was fictional there is some talk that it might have been uh loosely based upon some uh drug dealer from bolivia i don't know how true that is if you're aware of all of us aware of oliver stone he's uh he's pretty much a history buff he uh he also wrote and directed the movie jfk uh it was a great film so he's into these kind of you know historical political type of movies and uh he created the character tony montana uh scarface and uh the name montana was based upon his football hero which was joe montana from san francisco he played with the san francisco team so uh the 49ers so um that was where he got the name from so um and at that time you know there was a a big government crackdown on coke in the united states and it was something that i was very familiar with you probably know my sister and my brother both had a a cocaine problem during that time and you know so i was kind of battling things within my own life because of my family at that time so the government was really cracking down on coke that was kind of the number one drug at that point in time and uh another thing when this film was you're going to say it was very graphic i'm sure most of you seen it if you haven't you know watch it don't watch it with your kids or maybe your wife or your girlfriend i think it's a little bit too graphic but guys watch it it was brilliant in that regard uh but originally it was supposed to get an x rating the ratings board wanted to give it an x because it was so violent and that would have killed the film they were trying to get an r rating so i think brian de palmer and oliver stone actually went to the ratings board and said look some of the violence in this film it's accurate it's true it's in dea and fbi reports and we're trying to educate people by letting them see that the drug trade the drug business is no good so based upon i guess their juice and you know their uh power to convince them they got an r rating on the film you know at that time this was filmed for two weeks i believe in miami but all of the cubans uh they really rej they didn't want it they were they were really in an uproar over this film being produced they didn't like it they thought it gave the cubans a bad name and uh they protested so much that the production was moved after two weeks to los angeles and it was finished there you know another fun fact about this film you know in uh through many scenes or at least a couple of scenes uh pacino has seen uh sniffing cocaine and the coke that they used was actually powdered milk but pacino complained after that that his nostrils were never the same he had trouble with his nostrils for years you may still have it i don't know but it was powdered mick there was some story at the time i remember that it might have been really cocaine on the set because there was so much cocaine around i remember in studio 54 and all these places that we hung out you know cocaine was everywhere uh but you know that's never been verified but that is as a fact he was sniffing uh powdered milk and it did affect his nostrils so it shows you don't sniff anything you know another interesting fact about the film you know there was a lot of money laundering there's a couple of scenes in there which we're going to go through the scenes uh where they had to launder the money and one of these days i'm going to do a video on money laundering because as you know gasoline had a lot of cash and we had to do uh you know a lot in in laundering the money so that we could make it legit and spend it properly uh but i'll get into that in another video so that's a couple of little behind-the-scenes facts uh about the film and the kind of atmosphere that it was produced in back then real stuff going on in miami a lot of drugs coming in from different places and i i got to tell you too i don't recall that the cubans were the big drug dealers back then obviously it was the colombians and you know had the cartels and you know all that history yes from mexico wasn't really the cubans but this story was built around tony montana who was a cuban refugee so let's get into some of my favorite scenes you uh you may have seen it and have another one if you do let me know we can get into it but a couple of my favorite scenes it starts off where uh you know you see the refugees coming over in the boat and then they have to get into the united states and they're questioned and they're questioned by law enforcement and uh great immigration agents and tony montana pacino is in there and he's being you know interrogated his answers are classic he was terrific you know you'll enjoy it uh the cops and i call them cops just because they were agents uh were pretty rough on him you know they were they were trying to really find out who was coming in whether they were criminals so at one point in time though in this scene i thought it was great um pacino gets pretty upset and he tells him you know what i'm a political refugee he said i ate octopus three times a day for several years i had to work for pennies he said that's communism so whatever you do to me here you want to throw me in jail whatever you want to do to me is going to be better than what i lived through for the past several years there and people i'm telling you something he gave you a little glimpse of what communism is all about okay you don't want to live in cuba you don't want to live in communist china you don't want to live in places where there's communist rule your freedom is not there anymore your life is not your own and i'm only telling you this if you see socialism in this country starting to gain traction be beware because socialism normally leads to communism and that's something we never want in america and i'm not talking about republican democrat i'm talking about the word socialism and the ideology socialism we don't want it leads to worse things so that's that it was a great scene another great scene for me was um when he visits his mother after a certain amount of time his mother had migrated over and his sister he hadn't seen them for a while and he goes and visits his mother she's very cold to him because she believes that he's doing criminal activity cuban people are very proud and they didn't like the fact that you know some of the people were dealing in drugs and some of them were criminals they didn't like that same like italians i'll be honest with you too a lot of legal legitimate italians they resent the mafia they resent the fact that you know we give them a bad name we gave them a bad name at the time that's understandable these are hardworking people and they didn't like the criminal you know uh aura that was put around their their uh their ethnicity and i understand that so she was very cold to him the sister was warm to him she loved him she liked seeing him uh but the mom didn't want any part of it he said no you clean up your act or you get out of here i don't want you around the system it's a great scene you know great family kind of scene another scene that i thought was great is um there's a scene with money where he starts to you know get involved in the drug business he's making a ton of money he's got money counters everywhere and you know it's it's just a great scene when you see all this cash flying around and look i can kind of relate to that i'm not going to say i was making the kind of money that he was making there you know billions maybe but we were doing pretty good we had a lot of cash at one time i'll tell you one quick story um i was dealing with a bank out in long island and the bank officer there was great and um our business had really exploded we brought the russians in we were making a lot of money bringing in a lot of cash and as far as the banker was concerned we were doing legit business so one day i called him i'm not going to tell you his name a great guy though he was brought in front of the grand jury stood up and he was a great guy but anyhow i said to him so and so you got a basement in this bank he says yeah i said come on let's go downstairs so we go downstairs and the basement is there and it's kind of empty it wasn't finished and i said look business is really increasing i'm going to have a lot of cash i'm going to have you wiring it out to different people it's going to be brought in on a daily basis here's what i want you to do i want you to make this basement just for me we're going to put encounters i'll pay for everything we're going to put in a safe we're going to put in counters hire a couple of uh attendants we'll give you some money counters and i want this basement to be for me and believe me you won't be sorry so he said hey fine no problem you know do it so i did i spent about 30 grand at the time we finished the basement we we put in counters we bought uh you know the money counting machines at that time we hired a couple of uh attendance and uh we started to bring cash in a couple of million dollars a week down there he was happy as can be and he was wiring it out for us so i got to tell you it's a nice feeling when you're seeing all that kind of cash and you know it's yours or you know a good portion of it is yours but so i can kind of relate to that uh that scene and then he had to start to wash the money you know you got to wash it and that's uh uh it's not easy you know and i'm going to get into that because that's a whole other video but i can tell you some of the ways that i did it we can see in the movie some of the ways that he was doing it but uh there's a lot involved in in a scheme like that another scene a drug deal is going bad tony montana goes into a an apartment house in miami to meet these guys to do a drug deal well they want to rob him and um you know there's a scene in there when they have him in the bathroom and the uh the guys rob and tony the other drug dealers have a chainsaw and they're gonna cut up they cut up his friend and now they're going to cut him up a very graphic scene as a matter of fact this scene was supposed to be taken out of the movie however it was based upon a true scene oliver stone got this from looking through dea and fbi records and seeing that that was a a real event that really happened in another situation so they left it in again they got an r rating for this this alone could have been an x rating but a very graphic scene but you know pacino was terrific in that scene also so another one and this this kind of hits home you know cubans italians i don't know but uh there's a scene in there when um stephen bauer who's uh tony montana's right-hand guy is falling in love with his sister i mean they're really falling in love well tony don't like that because in tony's mind he's a drug dealer his brother's a drug dealer and that's not good enough for his sister now i gotta tell you something i can really relate to something like this because people you know i'm telling you there's a lot said about you know mobbed life and who kills who and this and that and that i want to tell you this you know when my sister was strung out on drugs um seeing her with some of the company that she kept guys that i knew were putting you know needles in her arms and supplying her with drugs i'm going to be honest with you the worst thing i ever did in that life was in retaliation for those people hurting my sister and i can't say i have any regrets about it i'm being perfectly honest with you because you know she was a young girl she was in her 20s she was a beautiful kid and uh you know seeing her in some of the situations that she was in hanging around some of these drug dealers it was it just it it made me crazy i mean i just couldn't help it and uh in a rough couple of years with her not only me my whole family my brother too but it's different with my brother he was a guy he was a boy he was in control of what he was doing but when you see somebody that you love that's a woman your sister you know god forbid one of your children strung out on drugs knowing that somebody is doing that to her it's a hard thing to uh to accept believe me and i didn't accept it and um you know as a result i do what i did back then but uh so tony in this he he was upset you know he didn't want his sister hanging out or being involved with a drug dealer it gets to a point where they get married there's a scene where they get married tony doesn't know that he walks in the door he sees his friend and his sister is coming down the stairs kind of dressed in a nightgown doesn't realize that they're married he's so enraged that he shoots and kills his best friend right there horrible scene uh but again i can somewhat relate to that because of situations that happened in my own life my sister died of an overdose of drugs at 27 years old but she started earlier she was on it for at least 10 years and uh very very difficult to see something like that great scene at the end uh you know they come into his compound and they could they come with machine guns and tony montana is a crazy guy his sister actually gets killed during that time he's in his office but he's fighting back he's not giving any easy he's fighting back a real tough guy and uh you've probably all seen that scene it's very famous he's shooting them they're coming up the stairs he's well outnumbered but he uh he opens up the door to his office and he says say hello to my little friend and he starts shooting everybody it's a brilliant scene uh and they end up uh they're shooting him he gets killed i mean he's he's talking through all the bullets hitting his body it was very very graphic but an amazing scene and finally he falls uh headfirst into a pool that he had in the middle of his his house there you know a fountain but it was a great scene so all in all that's how it ends again totally fictional story but i will tell you this people you know we did a lot of bad things in the mob no question about it and i know i get hit on this all the time when i say that we weren't allowed to deal with drugs i don't know why some people have a problem with that i never said that guys were not dealing with drugs but they weren't supposed to it's not something we were able to do and i can prove it to you you know in many different ways whatever yes guys we're doing it but we weren't supposed to and if we in our family dealt with drugs we got killed that was the bottom line it's a dirty business it really is it's a ruthless business i don't have to tell you you've seen all the stories you know in mexico and and and colombia and alden you know el chapo you know the whole thing a lot of bodies uh in the drug business and it's very very unfortunate and uh but you gotta understand something you know people in the united states they want the drugs you know it's supply and demand supply and demand people took advantage of that it's a tremendous business financially you know a lot of money to be made in it but i can only tell you this from personal experience i saw what it did to people i hate anything to do with the drug business i hate anything to do with drugs i visited so many people in prison that had drug problems that were in there in there because of drugs i'm telling you now if you if you're dealing with a drug issue get it out of your life somehow some way whatever you got to do whether it's rehab whatever you got to do to get the drugs out of your system do it it'll be nothing but destructive destruction in your life that much i tell you so that's it for today you know another great movie and i hope you all enjoyed it and enjoyed my review of it i want to thank everybody again subscription rate is going up michael francis.com we've got almost 12 000 people now in the community uh being encouraged all the time great content going on so we appreciate all of those of you that have been coming on board and just growing every single day thanks a lot so that's it for today how do i always leave you my friends be safe be healthy god bless i will see you next time you

Channel: Michael Franzese

Views: 1,004,652

Keywords: michael, franzese, michael franzese, mafia, mob, mobster, mob boss, mafia boss, capo, caporegime, colombo, colombo family, gambino, gambino family, bonanno, lucchese, lucchese family, genovese family, al capone, john gotti, american mafia, italian mafia, prison gangs, fat tony, sonny franzese, mob movie monday, mob movies, mob monday, mafia movies, scarface, al pacino, scarface movie, scarface scense, tony montana, say hello to my little friend, drug cartel movies, movie clips

Id: FfbPyXsZ1Lk

Length: 18min 31sec (1111 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 01 2021