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Fast-paced 'Scarface' pushed `30s violence limits, stirred censors
by Bruce Dancis
McClatchy Newspapers (MCT) (article from PopMatters.com here )
The notoriety of the original Scarface, directed by Howard Hawks and starring Paul Muni as Chicago crime boss Tony Camonte (a thinly veiled Al Capone), began even before it was filmed in 1931 and gained steam when producer Howard Hughes tried to release it. The film was far more scandalous in its day than Brian De Palma’s 1983 remake, starring Al Pacino, which itself caused an uproar.
Hughes wanted to make a film about the notorious Borgia family of Italy but to set it amid the world of Chicago gangsters; he also wanted to top the most famous contemporary gangster films, The Public Enemy and Little Caesar, in its action and lurid violence. He hired Hawks to direct, and after several other writers failed to come up with an adequate script, Hawks brought in former Chicago reporter Ben Hecht to take over the writing.
Working outside the Hollywood studio system, they couldn’t sign any established stars for their film. So Hawks and Hecht found Muni, a star of New York’s Yiddish theater, to play Camonte; George Raft, a former dancer with mobster friends, to play Camonte’s best friend and sidekick Guino Rinaldo; and chorus girl Ann Dvorak to take the role of Cesca, Tony’s younger sister.
Hawks, the director of such famous movies as Bringing Up Baby, Sgt. York, Red River and The Big Sleep, always called Scarface one of his favorites. It remains a beautifully shot, fast-paced story—if a bit over the top in some of the performances—of the rise and fall of a criminal boss.
Even before filming began, Hollywood’s censorious Hays Office tried to tamper with the script, which it viewed as glamorizing criminals and containing too much violence. Although Hughes agreed to make many of the changes demanded by the censors, he ended up telling Hawks (according to Hawks’ biographer, Todd McCarthy): “Screw the Hays Office. Start the picture and make it as realistic, as exciting, as grisly as possible.”
But after the movie was finished, the Hays Office and various state movie censorship boards did succeed in persuading Hughes to make some major changes, without Hawks’ approval: adding a prologue saying that the movie was made to educate the public about such despicable characters; changing the title to Scarface: The Shame of the Nation; adding a scene in which newspaper editors decry the criminals; and filming a new ending that has Camonte convicted of murder and hanged—rather than the original ending in which he dies in a hail of bullets.
The film was finally released sporadically around the country in 1932 and did remarkably well at the box office. Although it was re-released at various times over the years, in 1947, Hughes ordered the film withdrawn from circulation. It was seen only in rare bootleg copies until 1980, when Universal purchased it along with other Hughes films. Only then did it receive a New York premiere in its original form. (Ironically, when it was finally re-released, Scarface received a PG rating—an indication of how Hollywood’s standards about violence have changed over the years.)
Unfortunately, Robert Osborne’s introduction to the film on DVD doesn’t go into these later issues, though he does mention some of the film’s early censorship battles. The only other bonus feature on the DVD is the inclusion of the tacked-on alternate ending.
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NEW MEDIA: DVDS: A CLASSIC RELEASE
Scarface, the way Howard Hawks intended
WARREN CLEMENTS Link to article
U.S. director Howard Hawks excelled in any genre he turned his hand to, be it western (Rio Bravo), war movie (The Dawn Patrol), comedy (Bringing Up Baby), drama (The Big Sleep) or sci fi-horror (he oversaw the important scenes in The Thing From Another World). Now there are two more DVDs from the canon.
Scarface, previously available only with a limited-edition box of the 1983 remake with Al Pacino, originally arrived in theatres in 1932 after a wrenching battle with U.S. censors. Producer Howard Hughes bent over backward to appease the Hays office, and even had a new ending shot (not by Hawks) in which gangster Tony Camonte, a character based on real-life mobster Al Capone, blubbers in court as a judge sentences him to hang and proclaims, "There's no place in this country for your type." (This ending is included as a DVD extra.) That version was shown in New York and a few other states with harsh censor boards, and on its release, critic James Shelley Hamilton astutely noted the "extraneous moralizing speeches, unexceptionable in their morals but quite out of place in the drama."
In more accommodating states, Hughes released a version with the original ending, in which Camonte is shot by police. Then, being an idiosyncratic sort, Hawks pulled Scarface from circulation for decades.
When he was casting and could find no Hollywood A-listers to play Camonte, Hawks persuaded Paul Muni, who was acting in Yiddish theatre in New York, to assume the role of an ambitious killing machine who (at Hawks's direction) walked with the slouch of an ape. "We put boards about this tall," Hawks later said, "and we got little people to work with him, [and he] had a sweater underneath to make him look big." Hawks also gave George Raft his breakthrough role as Rinaldo, Muni's enforcer, after seeing him at a boxing match. "He was a pretty lousy actor," the director said, so, to distract the audience's attention, "we gave him a half-dollar to flip" - a bit of business Raft repeated 27 years later as a gangster in Some Like It Hot.
This Scarface is full of interesting touches. Camonte whistles a snatch from the opera Lucia di Lammermoor when he's about to kill someone, and Hawks plants a giant X in many scenes. "The papers that published the photos of a murder indicated 'X marks the spot where the body is found,' " he told the French journal Cahiers du Cinéma in 1956. "So we designed 15 or 20 scenes around the X, finding all sorts of ways to use the X when a murder occurred." The most memorable appears just before rival mob boss Gaffney (Boris Karloff) is shot while bowling; someone puts an X on the scorecard to record a strike. Martin Scorsese paid homage by using the X motif in his gangster film The Departed.
Having directed three of the best comedies of the era - Twentieth Century, Bringing Up Baby and His Girl Friday - Hawks turned to a story by future director Billy Wilder. Wilder, in turn, made it a condition of selling the outline (and co-writing the screenplay) that he be allowed to watch Hawks direct on the set.
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