[To read Part One, click here. To read Part Two, click here.]
III. Tabloid Cinema At Its Best Scarface premiered in New Orleans, Louisiana, on March 31, 1932, two years after Howard Hughes had acquired the film rights to the story. Denied a proper release thanks to the interference of the Hays Office, the National Board of Review and other state and local censorship boards, the movie played where it could.
Even in its compromised form, though, Scarface was the toughest, most violent picture of its era, boasting twenty-eight deaths (with more off screen), drive-by shootings, bombings, numerous car crashes, and for those lucky enough to see the original ending, a shootout worthy of a more modern movie. It's also credited with being the first picture to show a gangster using a machine gun and it gave us George Raft and his oft-parodied coin-flipping gangster routine.
Scarface is the story of Tony Camonte (Paul Muni), a vicious, small-time thug determined to take what he wants, and what he wants (in the words of Key Largo's Johnny Rocco) is "more." As the movie begins, Tony is working as hired muscle for Johnny Lovo (Osgood Perkins), a Chicago gangster who is tired of waiting in line behind Big Louie Costillo who has grown fat, happy and complacent after years of running Chicago's South Side. After removing Big Louie and taking over his operation, Lovo mistakenly believes he can handle Tony, aiming him like a tommy gun when he needs him, putting him away again when he's served his purpose.
But Tony is a sociopath unable to control his impulses or reign in his appetites. "Some day I'm gonna run the whole works," he boasts. "In this business there's only one law you gotta follow to keep out of trouble: Do it first, do it yourself, and keep on doing it." His ferocity gets Lovo embroiled in a gang war he's not ready for and eventually Tony also tires of waiting in line behind a mob boss he feels has grown fat, happy and complacent, wresting control from Lovo in a bloody confrontation.
Meanwhile, Tony's sister Cesca (Ann Dvorak) falls in love with Tony's best friend and partner in crime, Guino Rinaldo (George Raft), a development as dangerous for the would-be lovers as a gang war is for everybody else—Tony is in love with his sister and will allow no one, not even his best friend, to get close to her.
Predictably, Tony's lack of self-control leads to his downfall. "Someday you're gonna stumble and fall down in the gutter," a police detective tells him, "right where the horses have been standing, right where you belong." And you just know he's right. (If Ben Hecht didn't write that line, I'll eat the movie.) While typically Hawks's dramas focus on a man aware of his limitations as he runs smack up against a nearly-impossible task, Tony Camonte might be the least self-aware man Hawks ever spent time studying and his lack of self-awareness proves to be his Achilles heel.
The result is one of Howard Hawks's best movies, to my mind the first indispensable movie of his long career. The storytelling is taut, the action intense and well-staged. The camerawork is some of the most involved of his career, for example, using an uninterrupted tracking shot to open the movie in a style reminiscent of the silent opening of Rio Bravo.
Without calling attention to itself in the way, say, the opening of Orson Welles's Touch of Evil does, the shot establishes the ethnicity of the main characters, their buffoonish pretensions and tragic fall, Tony Camonte's treachery and the reluctance of a witness to get involved, all while creating an air of suspense that literally pulls the audience into the story.
Hawks was also beginning to experiment with faster-paced dialogue—twenty percent faster than anything he'd done before, he later said. Although it would be another two years before he began to experiment with overlapping dialogue and rapid-fire delivery in the screwball comedy Twentieth Century, a style that would characterized so many of his later films, the speed and fluidity of Scarface is a welcome relief from the static and stagy efforts of so many of his contemporaries.
Which is not to say that Scarface is a perfect movie. The constant moral- izing of police- men, reporters and politicians is clumsily written, repetitive and tiresome (blame the Hays Office, assistant director Richard Rosson and writer John Lee Mahin). The film's attempts at humor from Tony's illiterate secretary Angelo (Vince Barnett) are too broad for a movie this serious. Further, some have criticized Muni's performance in the title role—writer Ben Hecht who had himself recommended Muni for the part later complained, "He was a make-believe tough guy. You think he's a menace, but he doesn't do anything." (I myself have nominated Muni for a best actor award, so obviously I disagree; but it's a matter of taste.)
And those looking for Hawks's signature elements—male comradery, stoicism in the face of danger, and smart, independent women—will not find them here. What we today think of as a Howard Hawks movie was still a few years up the road.
Still, for all its flaws, Scarface is the best gangster movie of the early sound era and arguably the best gangster movie made before The Godfather in 1972.
It may also be the least glamorous look at crime before Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas. Without The Public Enemy's back story to explain away violent behavior (criminals are made, that film suggests, rather than born), without James Cagney's gleeful energy, Edward G. Robinson's genuine menace, or Clark Gable's roguish sexuality, the portrait of criminals presented in Scarface is of dull-witted buffoons and incestuous sociopaths. The violence may have been thrilling, but I can't imagine anyone walking out of the theater thinking, "Gee, I wish I were Tony Camonte."
Despite favorable reviews and strong box office in those theaters where it played, Scarface received no awards and no nominations. Hughes ultimately withdrew the picture from circulation and except for bootleg copies, it wasn't seen again until 1980.
Of the major participants, Hawks went on to become one of the most acclaimed directors in Hollywood history, giving us such gems as Rio Bravo, Red River, His Girl Friday, Bringing Up Baby, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep and many more. Howard Hughes, as fans of Martin Scorsese already know, was primarily interested in aviation, but he did produce twenty-six movies, including The Outlaw which in 1943 introduced Jane Russell's bosom to a grateful movie-going public. Paul Muni went on to become one of Hollywood's biggest names, earning six Oscar nominations, winning for The Story of Louis Pasteur. Ann Dvorak on the other hand, got into a contract dispute with Warner Brothers and despite a brief flurry of good movies in the early '30s, wound up making B-pictures until her retirement in 1952. (You can read more about her at Operator 99's blog "Allure.") George Raft had a long career playing gangsters and tough guys but he also had an uncanny ability to turn down good parts, rejecting the lead roles in High Sierra, The Maltese Falcon and Double Indemnity.
As for the authors of the screenplay, Ben Hecht was nominated for six Oscars during his career, winning two, for Underworld and The Scoundrel, though his best known work now is probably the screenplay for the Alfred Hitchcock classic, Notorious.
W.R. Burnett continued to work as a screenwriter and novelist, earning an Oscar nomination for 1942's Wake Island. Along with fellow novelist James Clavell, he also co-wrote the screenplay for The Great Escape in 1963.
Seton I. Miller went on to write sixty-nine movies, including the original screenplay for The Adventures of Robin Hood, and shared the Oscar for Here Comes Mr. Jordan with Sidney Buchman.
John Lee Mahin most often worked with director Victor Fleming (he of Gone With The Wind), contributing to ten of Fleming's movies. Mahin helped found the Screen Writers Guild, but opposed his co-founders' leftist politics and joined the Screen Playwrights instead. He was later an outspoken critic of Communism during the McCarthy Era but denied involvement in the blacklists of the period, saying, "If [screenwriters] were a threat to the American way of life, the American way of life isn't worth a shit, you know?" He was twice nominated for an Oscar, for Captains Courageous and Heaven Knows, Mister Allison.
Armitage Trail (a.k.a. Maurice Coons), whose novel inspired the movie, never saw the finished production. He died of a heart attack in October 1930 shortly after his arrival in Hollywood. He was only twenty-eight. His brother, Hannibal Coons, wrote for television, including twenty-five episodes of The Addams Family.
Scarface itself is now regarded as an indispensable part of the Hollywood film canon. Hawks called it his favorite movie and Jean Luc-Godard once named it the best American movie ever made. In his 1974 book Talking Pictures, Richard Corliss called Scarface "a kind of cinematic version of tabloid prose at its best" and "the alpha and omega of Hollywood's first gangster craze."
In 1994, the Library of Congress included Scarface in the National Film Registry, and in 2006, the American Film Institute selected it the sixth best gangster movie ever made. The AFI also included Paul Muni's Tony Camonte on its list of the fifty greatest villains of movie history.
And what did the movie's inspiration, Al Capone, think of Scarface? He liked it so much, he obtained a copy for his own personal collection.
Note: In Part One of this essay, I wrote, with regard to what role each of the credited writers played in preparing the final screenplay for Scarface, "Whether [Seton I.] Miller and [John Lee] Mahin worked together as a team or one after the other, I can't say (given the degree to which Miller later resented collaborating with other writers, the latter seems likely)." Since then, I found a photo of the "cutting continuity" (which Joseph's Glossary of Film Terms defines as "a list containing information about camera setups, dialogue, and other aspects of each shot of the final cut of the film") which lists Ben Hecht as the screenplay's author with "continuities" by Miller.
Assuming this is a copy of the cutting continuity for Hawks's version of the film (the document is dated 1931) before Richard Rosson shot additional footage, then I would have to conclude that Mahin was brought in to write the alternate ending for Scarface. Maybe other dialogue as well. I can't swear to this though since I haven't actually read the cutting continuity. It can be purchased for a mere $3500, which is about $3490 more than my budget allows for this sort of thing. If someone has read it, or otherwise can say where Miller and Mahin come into the story, let me know.
Back sometime around Easter, I guess it was, when I was first ac- quainting myself with the films of the Silent Era, I happen to catch both the 1925 silent film Ben-Hur: A Tale Of The Christ and the 1959 remake starring Charlton Heston, which happened to be on cable around the same time. Being versions of the same book, you would expect the movies to have similarities—the former has a heavier emphasis on the political underpinnings of the first Jewish-Roman war, the later focuses more on Judah Ben-Hur's various relationships, but they both feature the same characters, plot progression and action scenes—but I wasn't quite prepared to discover that both feature nearly identical versions of the most famous scene in the movie, the chariot race. Similar to the point that if William Wyler didn't consciously set out to copy Fred Niblo's version, I'd be amazed.
And yet to my mind, there's no comparison between the two scenes: the 1959 version is head and shoulders better than the earlier version.
What was the diff- erence? It's not the latter's use of color film stock, nor its use of 70 mm wide- screen. I've seen enough movies in my life to know that with rare exceptions (Lawrence of Arabia, for example), I prefer black-and-white film and the intimacy of the 1:1.33 frame ratio to the distraction of color and the often-cluttered canvas of widescreen. And it's certainly not the actors. Charlton Heston was an underrated performer who made a lot of good movies, but he wasn't clearly any better than Ramon Novarro, one of the best actors of the Silent Era. So what was the difference?
It was the sound.
The thundering hooves, the cracking whips, the frenzied roar of the crowd, rising and falling with the emphasis of the scene, like instruments played by the tightest live band you've ever seen, all working together to draw you in, make your adrenaline flow, building to its apex as Judah and his rival duel head-to-head, dropping off almost to silence as Messala struggles crushed and broken on the arena sand. The individual shots in the two movies are virtually the same, the blur of chariots and hooves, the flash of whips, the cheering of the crowd; it's the use of sound (the work of Oscar-winner Franklin Milton) that makes the latter version the greatest action sequence ever filmed. The silent version has many of the same camera angles and sets it's good, but the emotions watching it don't build in the same visceral way, and when it's over, you know you've seen only the second best chariot race in movie history.
Sound editing is a little understood or appreciated art—least of all by me. You may recall that it was the notion of having to pick an alternate Oscar winner for sound editing this year that prompted this blog in the first place. But in the course of cycling through well over a hundred silent movies, and developing a true affection for them, I think I now, too, have a better idea of the role sound plays in a movie and maybe, too, how that sound arrives on the screen, not as something passively picked up by pointing a microphone at the actors and recording whatever the mic happens to hear but by constructing—as carefully and consciously as anyone else working on the movie—a symphony of sounds that plays on your intellect and emotions as surely as the work of the actor or the director.
Thomas Edison experimented with uniting film and sound as early as 1894, inventing what he called the Kinetoscope, which combined a phonograph record, a loop of film and a drive belt that moved the two together, all housed in a viewing cabinet (basically a penny peep show but with movies of mundane scenes such as a man sneezing or a couple dancing). The technology was fraught with problems—brittle film, inexperienced operators—and Edison abandoned sound movies by 1915.
Research shifted to putting sound on film itself . Lee De Forest proved to be the primary innovator in the field and by 1922 he had developed both a technique for imprinting sound waves on film in the form of variable shades of gray lines, and what he called the Audion tube, which amplified the sound so that more than a few people could hear it.
De Forest premiered various sound shorts in April 1923 and later filmed Franklin Roosevelt placing Al Smith's name in nomination at the 1924 Democratic convention. De Forest though had a falling out with some of his colleagues who took the work to Hollywood where the studios perfected variations on this sound system, including Fox's Movietone, Warner Brothers' Vitaphone and RCA Phonophone.
Musical scores and sound effects began appearing in movies by 1925, but it was the premiere of The Jazz Singer on October 6, 1927 at Warner Brothers' theater in New York City that turned sound from a novelty into a necessity.
If there was any other technological breakthrough that had a bigger impact on the history of movies (other than the ability to project a film image onto a screen itself), I can't think of it off hand. Critics and directors were divided over the value of the new technology, but the public embraced it wholeheartedly and whether or not studios quite knew how best to use sound—most at first simply shoehorned a couple of musical numbers into otherwise silent movies—sound was clearly the future.
Compare the public's acceptance of—indeed, insistence upon—sound in movies with the public's indifference to 3-D. Hollywood first introduced what we think of as 3-D in 1952 (various processes have been around since 1922) in the now-forgotten movie, Bwana Devil. 3-D's inventor, M.L. Gunzberg, heralded the technology as the next big thing, and studios still produce a 3-D movie out every now and then, touting every refinement as the breakthrough that will win the hearts of the movie-going public. But after more than fifty years of tinkering with it, the movie audiences still find it a novelty, more annoying than necessary.
By contrast, people were irrevocably hooked on sound about halfway through Al Jolson's first song. The fact is, sound so fundamentally alters the movie-watching experience that, as I've said before, it's an entirely different medium.
Which is not to say the transition to sound went smoothly.
Early sound recording equipment was cumbersome and prevented directors from moving the camera fluidly and actors from moving naturally outside the narrow range of the microphone. By 1929, the invention of the boom mic, which allowed actors a broader range of movement, and "blimps"—protective covers that masked a camera's noise—helped alleviate the problem somewhat. But it hadn't taken long to learn bad habits and coupled with the loss of the Silent Era's best directors (Murnau died, Keaton locked himself into a bad deal at MGM, Chaplin retreated into his own little world), the look of movies suddenly became static and stagy. It took Orson Welles in 1941 to come along rediscovered what a previous generation of directors had taken for granted.
Other losses were more fundamental to the nature of the new medium which added a layer of realism that could never exist in a silent movie. As Imogen Sara Smith in her essay "Sinner's Holiday: An Ode To The Pre-Code" points out, "With the change to talkies, the silent era's swashbuckling heroes, Great Lovers, ringleted sweethearts and carefree flappers suddenly seemed antiquated. Sound punctured fantasy and brought movies down to earth and up to date: never again would they soar to the heights of romance they had reached in silence."
To that list, I would add the horror genre as one that sound changed forever. In the Silent Era, horror depended not, as Roger Ebert put it, on the shock of the hand reaching in suddenly from off-screen but on the emotion of dread, the dread of "all of the things we worry about at 3 in the morning—cancer, war, disease, madness," with no banter to relieve the tension, no ridiculous dialogue to ruin the mood. Horror movies in the Silent Era had the quality of a nightmare, for in our nightmares as in silent movies, no one can hear you scream.
Finally, the advent of sound not only changed movies, it changed the movie business as well.
I think most of us who know anything about the history of movies, or at least have seen Singin' in the Rain, know that many a silent career foundered with the introduction of sound. Olga Baclanova had a heavy accent that relegated her to small "exotic" roles when she found work at all. John Gilbert, who had a fine English stage actor's voice, could have made the leap to sound if Louis B. Mayer had taken care with the transition rather than saddling him with inferior scripts. And Paramount producer B.P. Schulberg treated Clara Bow so cavalierly, giving her a total of two weeks to prepare for her first sound picture, that she eventually cracked up and left Hollywood altogether.
What I didn't realize until I began researching the transition to sound was that the studios often had a vested interest in seeing their silent stars fail.
Silent film legend turned film historian, Louise Brooks has written that bankers, having financed the construction of sound-equipped movie theaters to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, muscled their way onto the boards of studios to ensure a return on their investment. Hollywood quickly changed from a wide-open town willing to try anything to a tightly-run old boys' network characterized by reactionary politics and a focus on the bottom line.
By destroying the careers of some of the more expensive talent, saddling them with lousy movies and publicizing the resulting failures, they were able to cut costs and send a message to the next wave of talent just breaking into pictures. Thus, for example, Louis B. Mayer at MGM quietly trashed Lillian Gish in the press and then dumped her $400,000 a year salary as soon as one of her movies failed to make money at the box office. Meanwhile, Greta Garbo, at less than a tenth of the salary and with a work visa under the studio's control, became the new studio cash cow.
On the other hand, while Mayer's vision was cruel, at least you could say he had one. The aforementioned B.P. Schulberg helped bankrupt Paramount in no small part because he viewed movies as disposable commodities and actors as interchangeable widgets. The ticket-buying public wasn't as gullible as he assumed. The producers who succeeded were those who could balance the ruthless demands of the new bottom line with the exacting needs of art.
In any event, silent movies were out, sound was in. Many of the greats from the old era—Keaton, Lloyd, Gilbert, Bow, Gish—never recovered and I for one will miss writing about their movies. But without sound, there would have been no Groucho Marx, no Preston Sturges, no Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. On the horizon were a new crop of actors, James Cagney, Jean Harlow, Clark Gable, Bette Davis, and after they arrived, the movies as we know them would never be the same.
Note: I had planned to spend the rest of the week coasting with photos of stars from the Early Sound Era and then announcing the Katie Award nominees for 1929-30 sometime this coming weekend. But out of respect for the larger-than-life talent (and grousing) of faithful reader Douglas Fairbanks, I'm going to write essays about some of the Katie winners from 1919-1927—starting with Fairbanks and then moving on to focus on those performers and directors I haven't covered before, say, Gloria Swanson, Anna May Wong, Sergei Eisenstein and the movie Metropolis. We'll see. I do have a life, you know.
Okay, okay, I admit it—I don't have a life. But I do have responsibilities ...
III. Tabloid Cinema At Its Best
But Tony is a sociopath unable to control his impulses or reign in his appetites. "Some day I'm gonna run the whole works," he boasts. "In this business there's only one law you gotta follow to keep out of trouble: Do it first, do it yourself, and keep on doing it." His ferocity gets Lovo embroiled in a gang war he's not ready for and eventually Tony also tires of waiting in line behind a mob boss he feels has grown fat, happy and complacent, wresting control from Lovo in a bloody confrontation.
Meanwhile, Tony's sister Cesca (Ann Dvorak) falls in love with Tony's best friend and partner in crime, Guino Rinaldo (George Raft), a development as dangerous for the would-be lovers as a gang war is for everybody else—Tony is in love with his sister and will allow no one, not even his best friend, to get close to her.
Which is not to say that Scarface is a perfect movie. The constant moral- izing of police- men, reporters and politicians is clumsily written, repetitive and tiresome (blame the Hays Office, assistant director Richard Rosson and writer John Lee Mahin). The film's attempts at humor from Tony's illiterate secretary Angelo (Vince Barnett) are too broad for a movie this serious. Further, some have criticized Muni's performance in the title role—writer Ben Hecht who had himself recommended Muni for the part later complained, "He was a make-believe tough guy. You think he's a menace, but he doesn't do anything." (I myself have nominated Muni for a best actor award, so obviously I disagree; but it's a matter of taste.)
It may also be the least glamorous look at crime before Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas. Without The Public Enemy's back story to explain away violent behavior (criminals are made, that film suggests, rather than born), without James Cagney's gleeful energy, Edward G. Robinson's genuine menace, or Clark Gable's roguish sexuality, the portrait of criminals presented in Scarface is of dull-witted buffoons and incestuous sociopaths. The violence may have been thrilling, but I can't imagine anyone walking out of the theater thinking, "Gee, I wish I were Tony Camonte."
As for the authors of the screenplay, Ben Hecht was nominated for six Oscars during his career, winning two, for Underworld and The Scoundrel, though his best known work now is probably the screenplay for the Alfred Hitchcock classic, Notorious.
Scarface itself is now regarded as an indispensable part of the Hollywood film canon. Hawks called it his favorite movie and Jean Luc-Godard once named it the best American movie ever made. In his 1974 book Talking Pictures, Richard Corliss called Scarface "a kind of cinematic version of tabloid prose at its best" and "the alpha and omega of Hollywood's first gangster craze."
Note: In Part One of this essay, I wrote, with regard to what role each of the credited writers played in preparing the final screenplay for Scarface, "Whether [Seton I.] Miller and [John Lee] Mahin worked together as a team or one after the other, I can't say (given the degree to which Miller later resented collaborating with other writers, the latter seems likely)." Since then, I found a photo of the "cutting continuity" (which Joseph's Glossary of Film Terms defines as "a list containing information about camera setups, dialogue, and other aspects of each shot of the final cut of the film") which lists Ben Hecht as the screenplay's author with "continuities" by Miller.
