Scarface

Many purists would jump at this as being the definitive "Sacrface," but so much had changed in the fifty-one years between the two movies that it is nearly impossible. Whereas the Al Pacino cult classic spanned close to three hours and included almost every imaginable cause of death, this version is a mere hour and a half, give or take a few minutes, and unlike the remake, takes place entirely in Chicago.

Made as an anti-gangster film, with a message buried under the many bodies that pile up, this is a surprisingly brutal movie for its time, and got a reputation as such. This was just before the so-called "Golden Age" of cinema, and in a time like that, chances are a movie this unapologetic wouldn't get made. But it is a masterful gangster film.

Paul Muni is Tony Camonte, a pseudo-Capone psycho who believes in doing the dirty work himself, is a sleazebag. He talks in a lisp that holds him apart from the gangsters of Cagney and Bogart as a man who, even then, seems ethnic. To boot, his "secretary" is an immigrant who is only semi-literate and can't hear people well on the phone. Boris Karloff shows up as an Irish gangster, Gaffney, who falls under Camonte's gun. Aside from an entire segment where Camonte goes seemingly from point A to point B with the same tommy gun and kills off the competition, this is a brilliant milestone in the gangster genre, and probably the best of the era. Even now, it proves what people could accomplish by mere suggestion, sparing much of the language that is in movies (and, indeed, used in real life) today.

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.

Inevitably, Scarface will be compared with the near-contemporary gangster films, Little Caesar and Public Enemy, and Paul Muni with their stars Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney. What does it tell us about that era: that all three careers took off with portrayals of gang leaders? The three performances significantly differ. Robinson rises to the top by the use of a crafty intelligence as well as violence; Cagney by a type of shrewdness and personal charisma. Paul Muni's Tony Comonte is neither intelligent nor personable; his manners are crude; and at times he is almost childlike in his behavior: for instance, when he is enjoying a play and is interrupted after the second act, summoned to do another killing,and leaves a henchman behind, who can tell him later how it came out, then is delighted to hear that the "guy with the collar" didn't get the girl; rather, the rougher suitor. He can be described as cunning and animistic: a young wolf who eliminates any rival who stands in his way; finally the leader of the pack One can be moved by Robinson's last words, "Is this the end of Little Caesar?" or by Cagney's body falling through the open door of his family home, he having been killed off-screen. Comonte's death is that of a trapped or cornered animal, wordless in a beautifully staged sequence,as brutal as his life, depicted for the audience in every detail. Of the three portrayals, Muni's comes across to me as the most chilling, in its enactment of instinctive evil. How ironic that He would later win his greatest fame for his performances as Emile Zola and Louis Pasteur.

Action-wise, this movie was 60 years ahead of its time, at least in terms of the amount of action in it. I think it's safe to say most classic films, including the crime movies, are much slower in pace than today's fare. Not this one.

Since they didn't show much blood in these old films, it isn't gory but it is action- packed with few lulls. Paul Muni, as "Tony Camonte," the head gangster, is compelling and fun to watch. He's tough-as-nails until the end. The women n here - Ann Dvoark and Karen Morely - are interesting, too, as is one of Muni's sidekicks, a big dumb guy who was funny. Don't be fooled by the billing of George Raft and Boris Karloff. They got it because they turned out to be big names later. In this film, they have very small roles.

This is Muni's show, though, all the way and few actors could ham it up in his day like him. It's a wild ride for the full 93 minutes.

p.s. To anyone misreading my opening remarks: more action doesn't always mean more interesting. Some times it does; some times it doesn't.

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.