Scarface: Gangster Style

These visual flourishes were, in part, a way of suggesting violence that could not be explicitly shown. Most famously, Hawks incorporated Xs into scenes where people are killed—a motif first established by Tony’s crisscross facial scar—offering the crew rewards of fifty and then one hundred dollars for thinking up ways to work them in. They are traced by shadows and streaks of light, painted on signs, formed by girders in a warehouse or the blades of a desk fan, marked on a bowling score sheet, and attached to a door in what must be the only apartment building in Chicago to identify rooms with Roman numerals. Aside from offering viewers an entertaining challenge in finding them, the Xs insouciantly advertise the film’s aestheticization of death. Who can mourn the loss of human life when they are busy admiring the artfulness of a bird’s-eye shot in which the shadow of an undertaker’s sign splashes a cross over a body sprawled on the pavement?

The established studios resented Hughes as an upstart and were loath to loan out their stars for his productions, one reason why most of the Scarface cast were relative newcomers. Paul Muni had returned to Broadway after making two unsuccessful films in 1929. A serious and cerebral actor who had honed his craft in the Yiddish theater, Muni initially felt he was wrong for the role of Tony Camonte, but once persuaded he dove in with his customary gusto, and during filming Hawks worked to tone down his flamboyance and the unintelligibly thick accent he had adopted. Italian American groups protested the heavy-browed, simian caricature he drew, but his performance is supercharged with animal spirits and refined by the imagination he brings to small details: the way Tony watches and imitates Poppy plucking her eyebrows, or how pleased he is with his analysis of the W. Somerset Maugham–derived play Rain (“This girl, Sadie, she’s been whatta you call . . . disillusioned”). Tony is scheming to take over the beer business on the South Side of Chicago, stir up a gang war with the North Side, and displace his boss, Lovo, but in the moment he is genuinely, single-mindedly interested in which man Sadie Thompson will wind up with, in Poppy’s grooming technique, in the interior decor of his new digs. This quality is dangerously disarming.

Poppy is at first repelled by Tony’s vulgarity, but once she comes to his apartment she succumbs to his naive, unquenchable enthusiasm. Fingering his garish dressing gown, she slyly mimics his trademark phrases: “Dat’sa pwutty hot. ’Spensive, eh?” (Observing and copying each other is a standard Hawksian mating ritual.) Her amusement gives us permission to be charmed by Tony, who can also be terrifying in his psychotic rages—especially those aimed at his sister, Cesca (Ann Dvorak). Though Hawks later claimed he had come up with the idea of basing the Camontes on the Borgias—complete with an incestuous sibling attachment—Scarface dialogue writer John Lee Mahin insisted that credit belonged to Hecht, who had a long-standing love for the infamous family. That may well be, but the prominence of women in the movie—compared with their usually peripheral roles in gangster films—is typical of Hawks, who would raise Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s hard-boiled newspaper comedy The Front Page (first adapted to film by Howard Hughes in 1931) to new heights by switching the gender of reporter Hildy Johnson from male to female in His Girl Friday (1940).

Poppy is probably the smartest person in the movie, and possibly the most amoral. She is also the story’s only survivor. Cesca is something else entirely. Tony’s unnatural obsession with his sister is established as soon as she is introduced, when he berates her for kissing a young man; she recognizes and recoils from his unbrotherly attentions, but she also realizes, and eventually accepts, that she is just like him—that, in some sense, she is him.

Ann Dvorak was still in her late teens when she came to a party at Hawks’s house, and he was dazzled by the slim dancer and former child actor. He later recalled an incident during the evening in which George Raft, who had been cast as Tony’s right-hand man, Guino Rinaldo, initially rebuffed Dvorak’s invitation to dance; to change his mind, she performed an enticing slow shimmy in front of him. Hawks restaged this bit of business in the film, when Cesca undulates to the bluesy “Some of These Days” in an attempt to lure Guino onto the dance floor in a nightclub. (Alas, she is unsuccessful, and we don’t get to see Raft cut a rug in this film; a former professional dancer, he performs a sinuous soft-shoe in Rowland Brown’s 1931 gangster gem Quick Millions and beats Cagney in a foxtrot contest in 1932’s Taxi!) When she appears in the Paradise nightclub in a plunging, skintight, nearly sheer black evening gown, Cesca is lit up like an electric sign, high on her own beauty. She fixes her feverishly bright eyes on Guino’s face as she sways in front of him, turning to show her naked white back. She looks stripped to the bone, recklessly exposed. When Tony sees her dancing with ­another man, he drags her home in a jealous fury, tearing her dress and slapping her. But he can no more control her than he can control himself; they are both fueled by the same blaze of raw nerves and flammable energy. Poppy and Guino, by contrast, are both sleekly impassive and guarded, but finally unable to resist the Camontes’ insatiable appetites.

Dvorak appeared in a total of eight films released in 1932, including Hawks’s next, The Crowd Roars, making her one of the relatively few actresses he cast more than once. Her career fizzled almost immediately afterward when she defied Warner Bros. by taking off on a European honeymoon despite her contractual obligations. In any case, the Production Code crackdown of 1934 would have dampened the lustrous avidity she brought to her self-immolating characters. Near the end of Scarface, Cesca serenades Guino with a peppy rendition of “Wreck of the Old 97,” about the fatal crash of a speeding train. Her brother has his own equally fitting theme, repeatedly whistling the sextet “Chi mi frena in tal momento?” from Gaetano Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, whose lyrics ask: “Who restrains me in such a moment?”

Even during the relatively lax pre-Code era, Scarface did not avoid wrangles with censors, and Hughes and Hawks were forced to make various changes to secure its release. (Hughes was so stung by attacks on the film that he pulled it from circulation after its initial run, and it was not widely seen again until after his death in 1976, when it had a delayed influence on a new generation of gangster films, including Brian De Palma’s 1983 remake starring Al Pacino.) A prologue and new scenes were added demanding action to stamp out organized crime. A corrupt state’s attorney was removed; Tony’s mother went from unconditional supporter to hand-wringing voice of conscience; Cesca and Guino’s union was blessed by clergy. The censors were especially concerned about the final showdown with the law, which they felt glorified Tony by letting him charge the police fearlessly and go down in a hail of bullets. Even a compromise that showed Tony “turning yellow” and pleading for his life before being shot down was insufficient; an alternate ending was tacked on in which he is arrested, tried, and hanged.

These revisions were superficial patches on the film’s cheerfully cynical portrait of a society drunk on violence, money, and bootleg booze. Cops hate the laws that restrain them from beating suspects and throwing them in jail without charge. Mobsters talk about running their illegal trade, one created by the puritanical prohibition of alcohol, “like a business.” In many ways, Scarface perfectly illustrates the argument Robert Warshow made in his 1948 essay “The Gangster as Tragic Hero,” which described gangster films as vehicles for excavating the dark underside of the American success myth. (Think of Tony’s Gatsbyesque piles of shirts.) “The gangster is doomed because he is under the obligation to succeed,” Warshow wrote, since “every attempt to succeed is an act of aggression, leaving one alone and guilty and defenseless among enemies.”

For most of the film, however, Tony Camonte is not a tragic hero but a comic antihero. And in the end he is brought down not by his determination to reach the top, which he does with blood-soaked ease, but by his possessive love for Cesca. Killing Guino opens him wide—to the police, but also to a vulnerability we’ve never seen before. For the first and only time, he falls mute, paralyzed and bewildered, peering helplessly at Cesca as she steps out of the shadows with a gun pointed at him. As sirens betray the approach of the police, her frozen face slowly comes back to life, welling with love, and she rushes into her brother’s arms. That he will die in the gutter is inevitable; it is also unimportant, since with Cesca’s death his spirit is extinguished. But for a brief moment before that, as brother and sister joyously fight off the cops together, the world is his.