Scarface

A friend of mine was so incensed when he told me that the Al Pacino film Scarface was contemplating to be remade. 'Why do they want to spoil the classics?'

I told him that the the 1983 version that he loves so much was a remake!

Howard Hawks 1932 original is a pre Hays code version based on mobsters in Chicago at the time. Tony 'Scarface' Camonte (Paul Muni) is a bodyguard for a bootlegger Big Louis Costillo who he kills. The ambitious Tony wants a piece of the action, a step up the ladder and joins up with another mobster, Johnny Lovo who arranged the hit and got Tony out of police custody.

This is the beginning of the gang wars in Chicago as Lovo expands his operation, Tony who is more aggressive in taking out his rivals is aided by his coin flipping sidekick Guino Rinaldo (George Raft.)

Tony is attracted by Lovo's dame Poppy (Karen Morley) and plans to one day bump off Lovo. After all Tony thinks the world is his and there for the taking. However he also has an almost incestous obsession with his sister, the floozy Cesca who herself is attracted to Guino.

This is a violent gangster film, with some grisly dark humour. There is a tabloid feel to this picture. It starts of with some moralising that the government is doing nothing to stop the gang warfare, there is talk at one point of deporting these thugs, they are not even American citizens.

I was rather taken aback with how strong the violent action scenes would be for the audience of the time. Tony loves firing that machine gun. The film rattles along at quite a pace and yet also feels strangely offbeat.

It is noticeable how much of the fundamental story is later used by Brian De Palma for his updated version.

I just watched "Scarface" for the 3rd or 4th time, and was surprised to find out that I no longer find it utterly perfect. Vince Barnett's vaudevillian comic bits are too long, and the constant underscoring of the film's anti-violence "message" is awkward. But I still think the film has a lot of great things in it, and I would definitely recommend it. As everyone else mentioned, Paul Muni is excellent as dopey gangster Tony Camonte, and this time I was knocked out by Karen Morley's performance as a no-nonsense moll; I hope I can find some other films of hers. I'm not sure the movie works as the anti-violence film it claims to be: Although Tony Camonte has a lot of faults, the non-gangster characters are mostly undeveloped and dull, if not downright problematic, like the police inspector who apparently likes to beat up arrestees. Edwin Maxwell's tough-talking Chief of Detectives has the right idea about the "lice" who shoot innocent bystanders during their crime sprees, but his character is a bit too one-note to compete with Paul Muni and George Raft. In fact, I think George Raft's character is subtly made into the hero of the film, despite all the illegal things he does. Interestingly, the film is probably just as violent as many modern pictures--there are an awful lot of gunshot victims--but because it's in black and white, and each killing goes by quickly, audiences of today might find it rather tame. But Hawks makes excellent use of sound to try and convey the horror of some of the crimes: a woman screams chillingly, a dog barks in the distance. Did this film help rouse the public against Prohibition-era gangsters, or did it just continue the public's romance with them?

This film is based on real events that happened in the criminal career of Al Capone, although Capone's criminal career had already ended with his conviction on charges of tax evasion six months before this film was released in April 1932. You know you're watching a Howard Hughes production when, during the first scene, a bar employee is sweeping up after a party held by one of Chicago's big gangsters and finds a bra among the confetti. The film shares some aspects with its gangster film predecessors - Tony Camonte is motivated by a desire for power just as Edward G. Robinson's Rico was in "Little Caesar", and also like Rico takes over the gang from a boss he perceives as weak. However, Camonte doesn't seem to have the pent-up rage of Public Enemy's Tom Powers. When Tony performs acts of violence it is usually related to gangland business. The actual deaths are strictly business, but the execution of the killings themselves are something Tony takes pride in - a sort of work of art on his part.

Like Tom Powers, Tony Camonte is given a family background, but unlike Tom Powers, Camonte's family is a completely dysfunctional one. What is unique in this gangster picture is Tony's trio of love interests. He wants his boss' girl, Poppy, as a status symbol. He also seems to have a love affair going with the machine gun, acting like he has discovered America the first time he shoots one. Finally, Tony is in love with his own sister Cesca. Tony's only true fits of rage occur when he sees her with another man, and it is this loss of emotional control over this one issue that is ultimately his downfall. George Raft, an ex-gangster of sorts himself, is terrific as the smart and level-headed Guino Rinaldo, Tony's right-hand man. Finally there is Vince Barnett as Tony's extremely inadequate secretary in a bit of comic relief turned tragic at the end of the film.

Howard Hawks directs this harsh and frank and sometimes humorous look at a small time gangster's(Paul Muni) taste of success before his mob world crumbles around him. This is one of the best gangster movies of the 1930's. Very well written and full of terrific characters. Fast paced and free flowing story line.

My favorite scene is when the Muni character first gets his hands on a machine gun. This arrogant, violence driven mobster becomes child like with a brand new toy. Others in this fine crime drama are Osgood Perkins, George Raft, Ann Dvorak, Boris Karloff and C. Henry Gordon. Also notable are Karen Morley and Edwin Maxwell as the Chief of Detectives.

Ambition, greed and pride come before a fall. The mob way or no way is a tough way to live. Excellent flick.

As other have accurately pointed out, this is an unusual film for Hawks. For one thing, there really is no hero. Muni looks rather anthropoid in this movie. He seems to live in a dump and is content to let his mother and sister live in a similar dump. He throws his mother around too, the swine. There is little of the male solidarity we've come to expect from Hawks. Everyone in the film seems manipulative.

There are a couple of other uncharacteristic features here. Some fancy editing takes place as a chattering tommy gun seems to blow away the pages of a calendar. And the later Hawks would have considered the symbolic use of all those Xs to be pretentious. (Hawks claimed he got the idea from a photo in a tabloid newspaper of a murder scene after the body had been removed, but an X was entered into the pic to denote the body's position.) Of course many of his characters had little quirks, rubbing their noses with a finger or whatever, but they were behavioral touches rather than artifactual. After this film he seems to have given up on built-in symbolic oddities and gone with George Raft's coin flipping instead.

But, the main plot aside, Tony Camonte's attitude towards his sister, a characteristically non-obedient babe with melanic eye rings like a panda's, is straightforwardly covert. I've never been sure he knew exactly what he was doing with forbidden impulses like incest or homosexuality. I mean, the guy was from Goshen, Indiana! He didn't know from Freud. As he once put it in an interview, "They attribute all these things to me. . . . It's completely unconscious." Ann Dvorak, as the sister, does a mean kootchy kootchy for Raft in the nightclub vestibule, by the way.

This is definitely worth catching, although it doesn't seem to be shown much on TV. It belongs with Little Caesar and Public Enemy as one of the films to establish an entire genre.