Pacino’s flashy thug amasses money, power,legions of rap imitators

Take a scroll down the fashion Web site HipHopCloset.com and you’ll find a corner devoted to the “Scarface Collection,” a line of pricey T-shirts imprinted with pictures of Al Pacino and his lead-filled “little friend.” They’re fresh off the press, as seen in rapper 50 Cent’s “P.I.M.P.” video. Earlier this year, 50 Cent traded lyrical disses with another rapper who calls himself … Scarface.

Twenty years later, “Scarface” — the movie, which begins an anniversary theatrical run today, not the rapper — is still a touchstone for gangsta subculture, in ways both superficial and substantive.

Mr. Pacino’s memorable cocaine kingpin, Tony Montana, is still a pinup boy for hip-hop couture, with his garish chest medallions and flashy threads.

When MTV’s “Cribs,” a pop update on “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous,” tours the opulent digs of rap artists, “Scarface” memorabilia is an omnipresent decorative touch.

The influence doesn’t stop at interior design or the drug lord’s fashion sense; to this day Tony Montana is an emblem for a glamorously criminal version of the American dream.

“He’s an underdog figure,” says Charlene Gilbert, a visual media professor at American University and an independent filmmaker.

Freshly arrived ethnic minorities in America have long turned to “quasi-legal” enterprises and outright crime, she says, because that’s often the quickest way to the top.

“This is the only means of access they have to real power or status,” says Ms. Gilbert, and “Scarface” “struck a chord of familiarity with some hip-hop artists.”

“Outside of the drugs, he lived the American dream,” says DeVone Holt, a deacon of St. Stephen Baptist Church in Louisville, Ky., and author of “Hip-Hop Slop: The Impact of a Dysfunctional Culture,” due in local bookstores this month.

A Cuban refugee, Montana worked his way to the upper echelons of Miami’s drug underworld. He wasn’t selling widgets, and he had to waste more than a few humans, but Montana had gumption and guts; he lived fast and hard; he made capitalism work for him, on his own terms.

Disenfranchised-feeling blacks were in Montana’s thrall when “Scarface,” the Brian De Palma-directed remake of Howard Hawks’ 1932 classic starring Paul Muni, was released in 1983.

Last year’s “Paid in Full,” a movie directed by Charles Stone III about a rags-to-ill-gotten-riches kingpin in mid-‘80s Harlem, paid tribute to “Scarface’s” enduring influence, showing a packed house of young blacks taking in their favorite gangster flick.

The same holds true today: Mr. Holt, who mentors at-risk youth at his church, says he’s “amazed” at how many children know the movie but who weren’t even born when it first came out.

“Scarface,” too, is a now meme in hip-hop lingo: The proper name has been vulgarized to generally mean “gangster,” or someone who bases his mack machismo on that of Montana.

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