Scarface (1932): Hawks and the Pre-Code Gangster

Watch Scarface (1932) once for the story. Watch it a second time counting the X’s. They are everywhere — in the girders of a ceiling, in the strapping of a window, in the crossed rafters above a garage, in the scar on the protagonist’s cheek, chalked on a wall, scored into a hotel plaque. Wherever the film is about to kill somebody, an X arrives first. Howard Hawks put it in a hundred years ago and it still works, because it turns the audience into an accomplice: you start spotting the mark before the characters do, and the film has made you complicit in the arithmetic of who dies next.

That is the level this picture is operating at, and it is why Scarface has outlasted almost everything else from its cycle.

The film that got buried

Scarface was produced by Howard Hughes through his Caddo company and released through United Artists in 1932, and its release was a war. The Hays Office objected to essentially all of it. Hughes and Hawks were made to add a subtitle, The Shame of the Nation; to insert a civic-outrage sequence in which respectable people demand that something be done about the gangster menace; and, in some territories, to attach an alternative ending in which Tony Camonte is arrested, tried and hanged, shot without Hawks and using a double, because a man’s face is harder to double than his back.

Then Hughes withdrew the film. He held the rights and, from the early 1940s, he simply kept it out of circulation for decades. An entire generation of critics and film-makers knew Scarface by reputation, from stills and from other people’s memories, and it did not properly return until the early eighties — arriving just in time to be overshadowed by Brian De Palma’s remake, which is a joke the film history books have never quite finished telling.

The practical consequence is that Scarface is the pre-Code gangster film that never got softened by familiarity. Little Caesar and The Public Enemy were in circulation continuously; their shocks were absorbed and defanged by half a century of imitation. This one came back out of the vault with its teeth intact.

What “pre-Code” actually means

The term misleads people, and it is worth being precise, because the precision is what makes Scarface’s production history legible. The Production Code was written in 1930. It existed. What did not exist until mid-1934 was the enforcement machinery — the office with the power to deny a film the certificate it needed to play in the major theatre chains. For four years the Code was a document that studios were expected to respect and were routinely able to ignore, and the negotiation happened film by film, in letters, with leverage on both sides.

Scarface is the extreme case of that negotiation, which is why it is the extreme case of the cycle. Hughes had money and no studio to protect, so he could afford a fight that Warner Bros. could not. He fought, he lost most of it, he released a compromised print, and then he removed the film from the world for forty years rather than let anyone tinker with it further — an act that reads as petulance and functioned, accidentally, as preservation.

The films made after mid-1934 could not do any of this. The gangster had to be punished from the first reel and shown to be punished; the sister could not be looked at that way; the machine gun could not be funny. What you are watching in Scarface is the last few months in which an American film could be this gleefully amoral about organised crime, made by people who could feel the door closing.

Muni, and the funniest gangster ever filmed

Paul Muni plays Tony Camonte as a delighted idiot with a genius for violence, and the performance is far broader than the modern taste for gangster gravitas permits. He giggles. He preens. He is fascinated by a machine gun the way a toddler is fascinated by a light switch, and Hawks stages his discovery of the weapon as pure comedy — a man finding out that the world can be rearranged by holding down a lever.

The comedy is the strategy. Hawks understood something that later gangster films mostly forgot, which is that a monster who is having a wonderful time is more frightening than a monster who broods. Camonte’s cheerfulness is what makes the body count obscene. He is never troubled, never conflicted, never given a scene of remorse to reassure the audience that the film disapproves. The film’s disapproval is structural, and it arrives in the last reel with interest.

Around Muni, Hawks assembled a cast that reads like a prophecy. George Raft is Guino Rinaldo, flipping the coin that made him a star and a caricature for the rest of his career — a piece of business so effective that Raft spent thirty years being asked to do it. Boris Karloff, a year after Frankenstein, is Gaffney, a rival with a bowling alley. Osgood Perkins is Johnny Lovo, the boss who thinks he has hired a weapon and has actually hired a successor. Karen Morley is Poppy, and Ann Dvorak is Cesca, Tony’s sister, about whom more below.

Why the craft still lands

The screenplay is Ben Hecht’s, with Seton Miller, John Lee Mahin and W. R. Burnett contributing, and it is fast in a way that is genuinely startling in a film this old. Scenes end two lines before you expect them to. Exposition arrives inside insults. There is a running gag about a secretary who cannot work a telephone, and Hawks lets it play across the entire picture until the joke has become a character and the character has become a casualty.

The opening is the technical showpiece: a long, gliding take through the aftermath of a party — cleaners, streamers, a man singing to himself — that follows a shadow to a telephone booth and ends in a murder rendered in silhouette on a wall. Hawks and Lee Garmes are showing you the whole film in one movement. The killing is offhand. The camera does not stop for it. Violence in this world is a piece of housekeeping.

The Gaffney sequence is the other one people carry away. Karloff throws a bowling ball; the camera stays on the ball and follows it down the lane; the pins go over, one wobbling and falling last, and the film has told you a man was shot without showing you the shot. It is one of the great pieces of displacement in cinema, and it is funnier and colder than anything the sound of gunfire could have achieved.

The case against

The civic-outrage material is dead footage. It was extorted from the production and it plays exactly as extorted material plays: a newspaper editor lecturing a room about the moral duty of the press, arriving from nowhere, going nowhere. Modern prints generally include it, and it stops the film dead every time.

Poppy is thin. Karen Morley is given a decorative function and a couple of good looks and very little else, and the film’s interest in her ends the moment Tony acquires her. And the picture’s morality is fundamentally incoherent — it wants to condemn Camonte and it plainly adores him, which is precisely what the censors noticed and precisely why the film is still alive.

The real ancestor, and everything after

The trio is the story. Little Caesar (1931) came first and gave the cycle its arc; The Public Enemy (1931) gave it its star and its violence; Scarface gave it its style and got locked in a cupboard for it. Everything downstream is arguing with one of those three.

The most direct descendant is White Heat (1949), which took Camonte’s central perversity — the gangster whose real relationship is with a family member rather than with a woman — made it a mother instead of a sister, and built an entire psychology out of it. Sideways, Black Caesar (1973) reran the rise-and-fall shape with the racial politics that the 1932 film could not have named. And Miller’s Crossing is the film that finally worked out how to have the wit of Hecht’s dialogue without the moralising the Hays Office bolted onto it.

It is easy to see now, in restorations that are far better than anyone expected to get. Ninety-three minutes. Almost nothing in it has softened.

Spoilers below

The Cesca material is what got the film buried, and it is still the reason to watch it. Tony’s interest in his sister is coded with about as much subtlety as a brick: he polices her clothes, her dancing, her company, and he does it with a possessiveness that has nothing to do with a brother’s protectiveness and that Muni plays with visible want. Ann Dvorak, who is superb, plays Cesca as someone who has worked out exactly what is going on and has decided to use it. The scene in which she deliberately provokes him is one of the most transgressive things in American cinema of any era, and it was made in 1932 by people who knew perfectly well what they were doing.

Which sets up the killing of Guino. Tony finds his sister with his best friend and shoots him on the spot, without a word, and the film’s cruellest joke lands a beat later: they were married. Nobody had told him. Guino was killed for the crime of being loved back.

The ending is the whole cycle’s high point. Cesca comes to Tony’s fortress apartment to kill him for it, and cannot, and stays — the two of them holed up with the steel shutters down and the police outside — and she dies in the siege. What follows is the film’s real verdict: Camonte, stripped of the only person he actually cared for, discovers that his own courage was a function of company. He comes out of the building gibbering, pleading, begging the police not to shoot, and Hawks gives him the least dignified death in the genre. He is gunned down under a neon sign advertising tours of the world — The World Is Yours — and the camera holds on the sign while the body cools underneath it.

The alternative hanging ending exists and is on some discs and is worth watching once, to see what the Hays Office thought it was buying. It bought a courtroom. Hawks had already given them a man dying in a gutter under an advertisement, which is the more punishing image by a distance, and they could not read it.