Scarface
We tend to imagine that “indy” films – movies made independently and outside the studio system – are a recent phenomenon in Hollywood. This is untrue as demonstrated by Howard Hawks’ Scarface.
Armitage Trail, a pen-name for the unfortunate Maurice Coons, published his bestselling novel Scarface in 1929. Trail was something of a child prodigy, an immensely fat kid who sublimated his fury at those who teased and tormented him into lurid crime novels – his first book was published when he was 16. Scarface is the product of Trail’s maturity: the book appeared when he was 27. Trail liked the movies and was watching some forgotten potboiler in the Paramount Theater in Los Angeles when he dropped dead from a heart-attack. This was in 1930. Trail had just sold film options in Scarface to Howard Hughes.
None of the major studios showed any interest in making the book into a movie. The subject matter was thought to be too ferocious for popular consumption. Furthermore, there were rumors that Al Capone, the Chicago mobster who served as a model for Tony Camonte in the novel, was not amused by the publicity and that his thugs might “rough-up” (or worse) anyone presuming to adapt the novel for the pictures. Obstacles like this didn’t deter the aggressive and ueber-tough Howard Hughes – he relished a challenge, particularly one that might involve fisticuffs. Hughes decided to invest his own money in the picture. He hired his drinking buddy, Howard Hawks, to direct the movie and shooting commenced in September 1930. (When Capone mob thugs approached Ben Hecht, the film’s screenwriter, and tried to intimidate him the enterprising Hecht simply put them on the payroll as “consultants.”)
Hollywood Metropolitan Studios was a silent-era movie factory where Harold Lloyd had shot his own independent comedy features. It was one of a number of studios near the intersection of Hollywood and Cahuenga, a place where trolley lines stopped – it is well to remember that LA was a factory-town and most of its workers in the twenties took public transportation to work. The studio was small and, as Lloyd became increasingly successful, he moved his operations a few blocks west abandoning Metropolitan. (This history is complex: Metropolitan, as a separate film production company, was merged into Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1920 – this made the Metro studio superfluous, the reason that Lloyd was able to lease the place to make his comedies between 1921 and 1924.) In mid-summer 1930, Hughes rented the shuttered Metro Studios to make Scarface. The picture was shot in that place as well as at Harold Lloyd’s production studios and on the premises of the Mayan Theater.
Production lasted three months with cast and crew working seven days a week. The set was dogged by misfortune. Harold Lloyd’s brother, who was on-set to kibbutz during one of the showy machine-gun battles, lost an eye when a live-round hit him in the face. A piece of scenery collapsed on George Raft and seriously injured him. George Raft had no credentials as an actor – he had been a driver for bootleggers, a gigolo, and a ballroom dance instructor. On camera, he was hopeless – he didn’t know where to look or how to hold his hands. Hawks told Raft that he needed a bit of business, something to manage his stage-fright and distract him from the ominous and unsettling glare of the camera. “Why don’t you flip a coin?” Hawks suggested. Raft followed the director’s advice and an iconic film gesture was born.
The movie was complete by November 1930. Distributors were appalled by the film’s violence. No one would show it.
Censorship
In this country, censorship is usually not a matter of molding opinion or restricting access to unpopular ideas. American censorship is typically devised to protect market-share or an economic advantage. If something sells, it won’t be censored. At least, this has always been the case in Tinseltown. Hollywood has always opted to self-censor so as to protect itself from real censorship that might be imposed, in a blundering manner, by legislators, cops, and other self-appointed (or elected) protectors of public morality. Hollywood adopted ratings (G, PG-13, R, and X), for instance, as a preemptive measure against those who might claim that the Studios were marketing their unsavory, or morally reprehensible, wares to children – the last thing a Studio Executive wants is a crusade by aggrieved mothers and Christian families against Hollywood immorality. So to protect market-share, Hollywood voluntarily, if haphazardly and inefficiently, purports to regulate itself.
Scarface is a pre-Code picture. That is, the film was shot before the Hays Code, a self-imposed standard for what could, and could not, be shown on screen was widely adopted. Nonetheless, at the time that Hawks and Hughes were exposing footage, it was well-known that the Hays Code “standards and practices” were under consideration and likely would be adopted. Hawks took counsel with Howard Hughes and asked him how he wanted the picture to be made. Hughes said: “Screw the Hays Office – make it as realistic and grisly as possible.”
The picture was cut and completed by December 1930. Hughes, then, entered into negotiations with the censorship commission for the State of New York. (Hughes thought that if he could get the movie approved in New York and premiered on Broadway, other states would follow suit in authorizing distribution of the film.). After much wrangling, it was decided that Hughes would have to shoot an alternative ending. The film, as cut by Hawks, with its defiant anti-hero gunned down in a hail of police bullets. This was too glamorous an ending for a bad guy. Crime wasn’t supposed to be romanticized or shown as profitable. So Hughes was told that he had to show his protagonist expiating his crimes on the gallows. By this time, Hughes and Hawks had lost access to Paul Muni – that actor had moved on to other projects. So Hawks had to contrive an aerial vantage on the gangster’s execution to avoid showing the condemned man’s face. The alternative ending was shot by September 1931, containing a vehement denunciation of the hero by a black-robed Judge and the aforementioned hanging, and the re-cut film was again shown to censors. More changes were demanded. Enraged, Hughes decided to simply ignore their demands.
In March 1932, Scarface, with Hawks’ original ending, was world-premiered in New Orleans. Censorship has never been the Big Easy’s forte. Hughes, then, took the film on the road showing it in states where no censorship codes existed. The film was an enormous success both at the box-office and critically. American censorship is economically motivated. As it became apparent that people wanted to see the picture in an uncensored form, state boards relented, first New York, then, California, then, the other states that had demanded changes in the picture’s final cut. Hughes’ only concession to the critics was the film’s subtitle: “The Shame of the Nation” and an introductory title suggesting a moral purpose for a film that was, and remains, a glorification of gangster violence. But, as David Thomson notes, Al Capone was always “America’s number one entertainer.”
Howard Hawks
The great American film makers who began their careers in silent pictures didn’t think of themselves as artists. They were adventurers and businessmen. “Art” was something for longhairs and dames, a chump’s game to be scoffed-at. Howard Hawks slid into directing films accidentally. In fact, the reason he happened to be in Hollywood during the golden age of the silent cinema was not due to artistic aspirations but a matter of luck based on the cold climate in Wisconsin.
Howard Hawks, born in 1896, was the first son of a paper-milling tycoon in Indiana. His father was the chief executive officer of the Goshen Milling Co., an Indiana firm. Following the timber westward, Hawk’s family operated paper mills in the Midwest, including a big plant in Neenah, Wisconsin. During the frigid winter months, Hawks traveled with his mother to Pasadena where the family owned a mansion. Hawks liked southern California and was enrolled in Pasadena High School. He spent his adolescence playing craps, drinking, and chasing girls, ignoring school although he read lots of trashy novels.
Around 1915, Hawks became interested in racing motorcars on dirt tracks. He acquired a race-car and participated in competitions on weekends. Several important Hollywood producers and directors were interested in motorsports and Hawks met Victor Fleming at the race-track. At that time, Fleming, who was later to become Irving Thalberg’s most important and trusted director (Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz both in 1939), was working as a car mechanic and, also, part-time cameraman, moonlighting from his day job as a technician for D. W. Griffith and Alan Dwan. Fleming was impressed with Hawks’ mechanical proficiency and encouraged the teenage boy to apply his technical skills to repairing and operating cameras in the film industry. Before his twentieth birthday, Hawks began working as a camera assistant and, then, photographer, employed mostly on Mary Pickford films. As the legend goes, one day, one of Pickford’s directors came to work too drunk to successfully manage the set and the star told Hawks to take over. Hawks directed on that day, showed promise, and, by his 21st birthday was making pictures on his own. America’s involvement in World War One intervened. Hawks joined the U.S Army Air Force because he wanted to add aviation to his accomplishments involving motorsports. He quickly became an highly skilled pilot and was so proficient that the Army would not assign him a combat role but, instead, sent him to Texas to train other young men to become fighter pilots. (Hawks’ interest in aviation was the basis for his first encounters with the eccentric producer Howard Hughes, also a flying enthusiast.)
After the war, Hawks returned to Hollywood where he directed eight or nine silent films. His movies were successful and he made the transition to sound easily. As was the case with many early film makers, Hawks wrote scripts (he worked on von Sternberg’s 1925 Underworld, generally thought to be the first gangster picture), occasionally edited films, and understood all aspects of the production of motion pictures – he could run a camera, build a set, choreograph fist fights and gun battles, write gags, and design lighting effects. And, like most of his contemporaries, he could do these things effectively when he was drunk – which was much of the time.
Hawks was a handsome man, lean and aristocratic, and a philanderer. He was married three times and had innumerable affairs with his leading ladies. (He was nicknamed “the gray fox.”) He made many iconic films including Bringing up Baby (1938), the famous screwball comedy with Cary Grant, Only Angels Have Wings (1938), His Girl Friday (1940), The Big Sleep (1946), Red River (1948),and Rio Bravo (1951). One of the first films that I recall seeing, a picture that a strong impact on me, was Hatari, a movie starring John Wayne about capturing wild animals in Africa – I still recall the thrill of the men chasing a rhinoceros from inside a battered jeep and the thud of the animal’s horn on metal when the beast gored the side of the vehicle. Hawks continued to make Westerns until 1970 – his last film was Rio Lobo. He died in Pasadena in 1977. Scarface was his favorite film.
Jean-luc Godard wrote that “Howard Hawks is America’s greatest artist.” The young critics at Cahiers du Cinema, who later became the French New Wave, called themselves Hitchcocko-Hawksians. Godard proclaimed Scarface to be the “greatest of all American sound-films.” At the time that Godard made these declarations, Scarface had become pretty much inaccessible in the USA – Henri Langlois had a good print in Paris but that was believed to be unique. The film had been withdrawn from distribution in the United States around 1940 and was thought to be lost. Ownership of the movie was legally murky – a fate that afflicts many independently produced pictures. In 1980, the film’s negative was rediscovered and legal issues were negotiated to a resolution. The picture was revived in that year to great acclaim.
Orson Welles, asked to compare Hawks with John Ford, famously said: “Hawks is great prose; Ford is poetry.”
Style
Films by Howard Hawks have come to exemplify the classical mode of Hollywood narration, that is, a style that is so unobtrusive as to be invisible to audiences schooled in its norms. Hawks is said to film everything from eye-level, avoiding showy close-ups and, also, eschewing long-shots posing his characters against landscape. This style is functional, the outcome of economies and a Hollywood predilection to make films in the studio and not on-location. Ordinarily, Hawks shows only that portion of his set that is motivated by the film’s narration. In other words, Hawks’ characteristically films action from a location close enough to the actors to reveal their expressions, but sufficiently far away to sketch their environment as required by the plot. This kind of staging avoids unnecessary expense with respect to set decoration that is irrelevant to the action and allows the director to use sophisticated lighting techniques to create highlights that are, also, ordinarily motivated by narrative. Hawks avoids flashy editing and uses fairly long-takes designed according to the rhythms of the dialogue that he films. If “style” is defined in terms of an “excess” – that is, effects that are overtly superfluous to the narrative needs of the film – Hawks’ movies, often, appear to be “without style.” (Of course, as film making norms change, the audience perception of Hawks’ “styleless style” will also change. Hawks’ preference for filming everything on a sound-stage looked antiquated by the time that he shot his last film, Rio Lobo, in 1970. I vividly recall noticing that Hawks’ late Westerns didn’t look like movies, but, rather, like old cheap TV shows – this was because Hawks, a great outdoorsman and director of Westerns, staged almost all intimate dialogue scenes indoors or on obviously false studio sets: the typical single cactus, styrofoam boulder, scatter of dust and campfire used to show nighttime scenes in TV westerns. This seemed strange to me and was distracting because norms with respect to shooting films on location had changed.)
Like all great narrative film makers, Hawks’ style can’t be accurately characterized in abstract terms because he varies his technique according the needs of the story. In Scarface, a most “invisible” classically inflected style is bracketed between a showy beginning and ending. The film’s opening shot is derived from Murnau and the German expressionists, a bravura three-minute long tracking shot that passes through a (studio) wall and, then, follows the action through the banqueting hall where a gangster is murdered by a figure shown only in ominous silhouette. The decor in the scene is redolent of the aftermath of a similar gangland party in Von Sternberg’s Underworld, a picture on which Hawks had worked in 1925, and, it seems, that this stylistically impressive sequence has, at least, two functions – the movie begins with an image in which the camera penetrates a wall, establishing a trope for the movie’s magical ability to see everything from all plausible angles, and, second, harkens back to silent pictures: the gangster about to be slain is an anachronism, a figure from an earlier era and so the film’s tracking camera invokes an earlier epoch in movie-making. Scarface ends with a sequence showing an army of coppers converging on the hero’s apartment, a suite equipped with steel shutters. Tony is not able to close these shutters – an image for sealing a space against penetration (referring us back to the penetration of the camera in the opening sequence). Rather, he is exposed to view – and the moviemaker equates “shooting” with a gun to “shooting” by camera. This is made explicit by images showing the police aiming banks of large Hollywood-style lights at the rooms where Tony is hiding. In the final minutes of the film, we seem to be on a set in which a movie is being made – imagery that reflects the picture’s self-reflexive and divided consciousness: we get speeches about the evils of glorifying gangsters in a picture that is, in fact, a glorification of crime. Footage that looks like the making of a movie, accordingly, supports the film’s contention that it is movies of precisely this sort that have led to the culture of criminality that the film simultaneously denounces and revels in.
Most of the rest of the film is constructed according to the paradigm of classical Hollywood narrative – the invisible style. The effect, to paraphrase Manny Farber, is a series of muscular bas relief friezes, generally perceived from the same perspective and capturing several figures in the frame engaged in some kind of gestural action. The movie is built like the Greek Bassae friezes on display in the British Museum – the images are tailored to the size of the characters, shows them mostly in their full stature and the action is cut so as to reveal gestures that demonstrate the nature of the (often violent) interaction between the figures depicted. Even this model, however, is subject to deflection as required by the narrative. Hawks’ typically avoids the shot/reverse-shot rhythm that is ubiquitous in later Hollywood pictures – that is, we see someone speaking with the shoulder of the listener in the foreground; the listener responds and the film is cut to a reverse angle that reiterates the previous composition but from the opposing perspective. Hawks’ sensitivity to editing and composition is so austere and precise that he seems to view shot/reverse shot mise-en-scene as possibly intrusive and overly explicit and so he often avoids that technique. But in the scene in which Tony and his boss, John Lovo, first quarrel – Tony wants to attack the North side gangs – Hawks uses a close shot/reverse-shot of the tense interaction between the two men. The effect is momentarily jarring and meant to be; we are supposed to sense something is amiss, that the rhythm of the men’s relationship has been subtly disrupted and that the conflict between them is irrevocable and, potentially, deadly.
Hawks’ classical style runs the risk of becoming dull. So the director enlivens his compositions with elegant lighting effects. His sensibility is fundamentally comic – the gangsters are ridiculous in their own way – and Hawks’ demonstrates this repeatedly, often syncopating violent action with farce. Hawks’ also interrupts the classical flow of his narrative with musical or quasi-musical performances – this is another way to prevent the smoothly fluent narrative from becoming too oppressively seamless. Noteworthy in Scarface is Ann Dvorak’s slinky dance at the nightclub (Hawks was involved in an affair with her when the picture was made) and her later serenade at the piano to her inamorata George Raft. Hawks’ also employs non-narrative motifs as a means of unifying the film and energizing what risks becoming blandly uniform – the scar on Paul Muni’s face which morphs into an increasingly delirious series of “x’s” is the most overt example in the picture. Another motif that Scarface deploys obsessively is imagery of telephones and people talking on the phone – I’m not sure what exactly this means in the context of the late twenties and early thirties, but the number of images that revolve around telephones and phone conversations is astounding. The black telephone seated in its niche like a medieval image of a saint seems somehow equated with the equally instrumental and dark machine guns – both exemplify action at a distance. But this imagery requires further analysis and study.
Manny Farber on Hawks
Hawks, with Raoul Walsh, was Farber’s favorite film director and the critic praises the director and Scarface throughout his published work.
Farber thought the picture “raw and ferocious.” The picture is not “flat-footed” but shows “maximum speed” and “inner life”. It has the “swallowed-up intricacy of a good soft-shoe dance.” (By “swallowed-up,” I think Farber means that the picture is not overly demonstrative but folds into itself – it’s effects are internally motivated as opposed to not imposed from outside on the subject matter.)
Here is an important quote:
Howard Hawks is a bravado specialist who always makes pictures about a Group. Fast dialogue, quirky costumes, the way a telephone is answered, everything is held together by a weird Mother Hen instinct. The whole population in Scarface, cavemen in quilted smoking jackets, are like the first animals struggling out of the slime and murk toward fresh air...(they are) creations of a man who is as divorced from modern angst as Fats Waller and whose whole movie-making system seems a secret preoccupation with linking, a connections business involving people, plots, and eight-inch hat brims. The Mother Hubbard spirit gives the film a kind of romance that is somewhat WASP-ish with Gatsby elegance and cool. Both the girls in Scarface, like Zelda Fitzgerald, would fling themselves away over a Russ Columbo recording of “Poor Butterfly.” Ann Dvorak, dancing with a big bland-faced clod who is bewildered by her passion and herky-jerky cat’s meow stuff, is so close to Tender is the Night in her aura of silky recklessness...
Later, Farber writes:
...the deep quality in any Hawks’ film is the uncannily poetic way an action is unfolded...sometimes, this portrayal of motion is thrilling...funny..gracefully dour (Karloff’s enigmatic cockiness in a bowling alley, like a Muybridge photograph) or freakishly mannered (Karen Morley’s sizing up Scarface’s new pad: “It’s kinda gaudy, isn’t it?) but it is always inventive, killingly expressive, and gets you in the gut. One blatantly colloquial effect is slammed against another. The last section of Scarface builds detail on detail into a forbidding whirlwind. As the incestuous duo shoots it out with the cops, slightly outnumbered eighty-to-one, the lighting is fabulous. Dvorak’s clamoring reaches an unequaled frenzy (“I’m just like you, Tony, aren’t I, I’m not afraid) and there is an authentic sense of the primeval, life coming to smash the puny puffed-up egos.
In the same essay, Howard Hawks published in 1969:
Scarface, as vehement, vitriolic, and passionate a work as has been made about Prohibition, is a deadly, grim gangster movie far better than White Heat or Bonnie and Clyde, a damp black neighbor to the black art of Walker Evans’ subway shots or the Highway 90 photographic shot at dawn by Robert Frank... (it has) tough-lipped mentality (and) hallucinatory energy (and is) Hawks’ best film...
And:
In each action film, (Hawks) is powerfully interested in the fraternal groups that he sets up, sticking to them with an undemonstrative camera that is always eye-level and acute on intimate business, and using stories that have straight-ahead motion and develop within a short time span...Scarface has sulphurous lighting and feverish style...
Reading Farber, one knows what he doesn’t like. But his praise is generally non-theoretical, casuistic, a listing of images that he admires characterized poetically. Farber’s criticism seems best at isolated characteristics in films that he deplores. It would be difficult to use Farber’s writing on film to develop of list of qualities that must (or should) exist in a good movie.
Similarly, it is easier to define what Scarface is not, then, to precisely identify what it is. Scarface is not a study of causes of crime. There is no effort to identify an etiology of violent organized crime. (The film’s editorial interpolation, midway through the mayhem, in which various stuffed-shirts say that the audience must demand (1) gun control, and (2) deportation of dangerous villains is laughably inadequate). The film doesn’t revel is psycho-pathology – the gangsters seem mostly cheerful, albeit aggressive, blokes. The picture is violent, but not sadistic. The film does not endorse any particular ethnic component as integral to violent crime – gangsterism is not the result of being an oppressed or disenfranchised ethnic minority. Although the film has some sexual byplay, the movie doesn’t really have a romantic component – there only doomed lovers are the incestuous sister and brother and their interactions seem, more or less, incidental and tangential to the main tendencies of the narration. No specious effort is made to connect capitalism or business to gangsterism. There is no sense that the characters are acting out of some kind of trauma – for instance, war-induced desensitization. Hawks’ doesn’t view his gangsters as addicts or as anything less than self-sufficient, self-reliant agents. (This is a marked contrast to Brian DePalma’s great 1983 remake starring Al Pacino.) Hawks doesn’t even lay the criminality of the film’s characters at the feet of Prohibition – the traffic in beer seems almost wholesome.
Perhaps, this indeterminacy as to theme is the key to a good picture – at least as far as Farber’s analysis. The movie doesn’t muck about in big ideas or themes. It is what it shows and does. To the extent that we can define a theme that can be considered extrinsic to the film’s imagery and narrative, the movie has failed – at least, I think this would be Farber’s contention. If we can say clearly what a movie is about, the film is not successful.
Legacy
Arguably the greatest gangster film ever made, Scarface has undoubtedly been the most influential. All later crime films involving mobsters derive from this picture.
Brian DePalma remade the movie in 1983, also a film masterpiece. In DePalma’s Scarface, the hero is Tony Montana, a Cuban gangster and a Mariel boatlift refugee. Like Hawks’ Tony Comonte, Tony Montana is in love with his sister and, although more ornately baroque, the main narrative arc in the 1983 film closely tracks the earlier picture.
And, in light, of the sad news of the death of James Gandolfini, another Tony (Soprano) on the long-running HBO series, we must ask what parts of his enormous and majestic performance are derived from Scarface. Consider the scene in which Scarface’s Tony guns down his best friend played by George Raft. George Raft’s unutterably sad eyes, his look of dog-like betrayal as he slithers down the wall to die, his mute accusation lodged against his master – these things are intrinsically encoded in Tony Soprano’s haunted eyes, his morose desperation and melancholy, the darkness and gloom of the wet city streets at night.
Quiz questions:
Who was Dan O’Banion?
Who was Big Jim Colosimo?
What is the name of the song that Ann Dvorak sings to George Raft?
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