20 Great Movie Remakes With One Miscast Role

Scarface took the already successful Al Pacino and Brian De Palma and made them a permanent part of the ‘80s zeitgeist. The film tells the story of Tony Montana (Pacino), a low-level Cuban hood who works his way to the top in America, enriching himself by selling drugs and becoming a Miami kingpin.

It’s a classic rags-to-riches story with a dark crime twist, bringing Tony face-to-face with his misdeeds and morality, and it is exhilarating and infinitely quotable. Near flawless is a phrase often applied to Scarface, but there’s a reason why it’s not just flawless.

Casting Sicilian-American Pacino as a Cuban was fair game for the time, and by all accounts, he does a fair enough job with the accent, but casting Robert Loggia (another fellow NYC Sicilian) as Frank Lopez, Miami drug lord and Tony’s mentor, was another thing altogether.

Loggia has real trouble wrangling his New York brogue into Miami-Cuban, and winds up sounding like a mix between Dolmio Italian and Bumblebee Man Mexican. And, in fact, when he is in scenes opposite Pacino, Loggia’s accent seems to amplify the worst parts of Pacino’s. This leaves a few key moments - most crucially the one in which Tony kills Frank - feeling a bit SNL.