Meanwhile, for those of you wondering what's become of me, I'm still watching movies in preparation for my essay "1906-1914: The Birth Of The Feature Film." One hundred seventeen (117) of them so far and counting. Okay, so most of them are ten minutes long, but still! The effort will be worth it, I promise.
Here's a taste, The Musketeers Of Pig Alley, the world's first gangster movie:
And don't forget, Turner Classic Movies will be broadcasting the newly-restored print of Fritz Lang's Metropolis this weekend, along with a documentary about the restoration and two more Lang movies, Spies and M.
Here's the schedule straight from the TCM website:
8:00pm Metropolis (1927) In this silent film, a city of the future is threatened with destruction when a wealthy corporate leader enlists a mad scientist to put down labor reformers. Cast: Brigitte Helm, Alfred Abel, Rudolf Klein-Rogge, Gustav Frolich Dir: Fritz Lang BW-149 mins
10:30pm Metropolis Refound (2010)
12:30am Spione (1928) Cast: Gerda Maurus, Willy Fritsch, Rudolf Klein-Rogge, Lupu Pick Dir: Fritz Lang
3:00am M (1931) The mob sets out to catch a child killer whose crimes are attracting too much police attention. Cast: Peter Lorre, Otto Wernicke, Gustaf Grundgens, Theo Lingen Dir: Fritz Lang BW-111 mins
[To read Part One of this essay, click here. For Part Two, here, and for Part Three, here.]
The Marx Brothers Go To Hollywood Even before the movie version of Animal Crackers was in theaters, the Marx Brothers began searching for writers for their next project, be it a new play, a radio show or another movie, finally settling on S.J. Perelman, Will B. Johnstone and Nat Perrin. Johnstone, you may recall, was the author of the Brothers' first Broadway play, I'll Say She Is! Perelman was a humorist who wrote for the New Yorker magazine. He had been a Marx Brothers fan since their vaudeville days and his first collection of stories, Dawn Ginsbergh's Revenge, published in 1928, carried on its dust jacket Groucho's famous endorsement: "From the moment I picked up your book until I laid it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it."
The third writer, Nat Perrin, was a law student who had bluffed his way into a writing job with the Brothers with a forged letter of introduction from playwright Moss Hart.
"You'll rue the day you ever took the assignment," producer Herman J. Mankiewicz told Perelman, warning him that the Brothers were notoriously difficult to work with. "This is an ordeal by fire. Make sure you wear asbestos pants."
The team kicked around a couple of ideas, one placing the Brothers on an ocean liner as stowaways, the with Groucho playing the president of a university. Both ideas allegedly came from Bert Granet, a lifelong pal of Groucho's, who went on to become a staff writer at RKO and later the producer of such television shows as The Untouchables and The Twilight Zone.
It was Groucho who suggested the team flesh out the stowaway idea.
The writers set to work on the screenplay while the Brothers were in London fulfilling an obligation to British stage impresario C.B. Cochran. On their return, the writers brought the finished draft to a hotel room where they met the four Marx Brothers, the Brothers' wives (the unmarried Harpo brought not one but two "girlfriends") and Zeppo's recently-acquired Afghan hounds. Perelman read the draft aloud to the Brothers who listened in silence.
"It stinks," said Groucho when Perelman was done.
For the second draft, Mankiewicz brought in writer Arthur J. Sheekman, who along with Perelman, wrote the bulk of the screenplay. The Brothers recent trip to England inspired several scenes, such as one based on a Punch-and-Judy show Harpo had seen in London—
—and another based on Groucho's own run-in with a customs agent in New York, which began when Groucho listed his occupation as "smuggler." (The subsequent investigation led to the discovery of unreported duty items, which in turn led to a stiff fine.)
The Brothers also resurrected the opening scenes from I'll Say She Is! where they pretend to be a famous stage personality, here Maurice Chevalier who had recently starred in two Ernst Lubitsch musicals, The Love Parade and The Smiling Lieutenant.
The final screenwriting credits read "by S.J. Perelman and Will B. Johnstone; additional dialogue by Arthur Sheekman," but, in fact, gags came from all sorts of sources—vaudeville veteran Solly Volinsky, cartoonist J. Carver Pusey, singer turned movie star Eddie Cantor, the Marx Brothers' uncle Al Shean, legendary screenwriter Ben Hecht, English playwright Roland Pertwee, producer Mankiewicz (when he wasn't napping in his office) and the Marx Brothers themselves. Nat Perrin's lone contribution—a barber shop scene that featured a disastrous shoeshine—was substantially rewritten and he did not received a screen credit (he later wrote Duck Soup and The Big Store).
Perelman later described the process as "five months of drudgery and Homeric quarrels, ambuscades, and intrigues that would have shamed the Borgias."
For his part, Groucho felt Perelman's work, on both Monkey Business and Horse Feathers, was too literary and despite his on-going friendship with the young writer, was quite critical of him, both privately and publicly. "The trouble is the barber in Peru [Indiana] won't get it." Years later, though, Groucho allowed that Perelman was "a great writer with a brilliant comic mind that didn't always mesh well with the lunacies of the Marx Brothers."
Production began on Monkey Business in the summer of 1931. With no Broadway commitment to keep the Brothers in New York, Paramount insisted that they film Monkey Business at the studio's Hollywood facilities, which were undeniably superior to the sound stage in Queens they had used for their first two films. This was the first of their movies filmed in Hollywood, and the first written directly for the screen
It was also the first film that did not boast the supporting work of Margaret Dumont. Feeling the part of a gangster's moll needed a sexier actress, the studio cast Thelma Todd, a veteran of dozens of Hal Roach comedy shorts featuring Laurel and Hardy and Charley Chase. She's around for two scenes with Groucho, one where she finds him hiding in her stateroom closet, the second where the flirt on the veranda at a party.
"Mrs. Briggs," he tells her, "I've known and respected your husband for years—and what's good enough for him is good enough for me!"
For the romantic lead, the studio finally got the rather obvious idea of cutting out the middle man and casting Zeppo. I can't say he's great as he chases the girl (Ruth Hall), but he's better than either Oscar Shaw or Hal Thompson who performed the same thankless chores in The Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers, respectively.
The expanded role didn't stop Zeppo from leaving the set in mid-production to vacation in San Francisco.
Although this was Norman Z. McLeod's first directorial effort, he quickly learned to leave the camera rolling, finding that the Brothers' ad libs were often funnier than the scripted material.
Even for a Marx Brothers' movie, the story is tissue thin. Four stowaways wreak havoc on an ocean liner, meet a couple of gangsters, go to work for them and wind up thwarting a kidnapping plot.
"How do you know there are four of them?"
"They were singing 'Sweet Adeline.'"
The shipboard setting is merely an excuse to move the Brothers from one comic situation to another, with each gag barely linked to the other. Not that this hurt the comedy any. By shedding the trappings of the Broadway musical, the Brothers' actions become even more deliciously transgressive, tormenting authority not for plot-driven reasons but simply because they can, an approach they built on to great effect in their next two movies, Horse Feathers and Duck Soup.
In fact, the forty-five minutes the Brothers spend on the boat is some of the best work of their careers. But then they finally make it through customs and something unfortunate happens—the plot kicks in. The final two reels revolve around rival gangsters, a swanky dinner party and the aforementioned kidnapping, and presumably writers Perelman and Sheekman wanted to spoof the gangster movies that were then all the rage, but very little comedy arises from this set-up and ultimately the storyline feels grafted on.
Too, there's something a little off about the gangsters finding the Marx Brothers funny—the Brothers are best when they are a threat to authority, subverting the established order, and it's a little sad to see them reduced to the role of court jesters—but until then, it's a great movie and even this last act has its moments. (Harpo disguised as the bustle of a woman's dress is particularly inspired).
Monkey Business premiered on September 19, 1931, to favorable reviews, with Mourdant Hall of the New York Times favorably comparing the film to Chaplin's The Gold Rush. The movie turned a profit at the box office, but despite the praise of the critics, it failed to crack the list of the year's top ten grossing films.
This pattern of decreasing box office revenue would be repeated with the Brothers' next two pictures.
Trivia: In the scene where the Brothers finally escape the near-sighted ship's officer and wave to him from the dock, the onlooker sitting on a crate in the background is none other than Sam "Frenchy" Marx, father of the Marx Brothers. He earned $12.50 for two days' work.
[To read Part One of this essay, click here. To read Part Two of this essay, click here.]
III. Trouble In Paradise: Champagne and Moonlight After the success of his naughty operettas, The Love Parade, Monte Carlo, The Smiling Lieutenant and One Hour With You (and the failure of a somber anti-war film, Broken Lullaby), Ernst Lubitsch turned his attention to what most critics now point to when they speak of Lubitsch's best work, Trouble In Paradise.
Trouble In Paradise is the story of a pair of sophisticated lovers, Gaston and Lily, who romance and thieve their way across Europe, only to find their happiness threatened by a beautiful young widow who also happens to be the target of their latest scam. Lubitsch based the story on the first act of Laszlo Aladar's failed stageplay, The Honest Finder—a crook finds a rich woman's handbag—and originally thought to do a spoof of the gentleman-thief stories, such as Raffles, The Saint and The Falcon, which were popular at the time. Then Lubitsch and long-time collaborator Samson Raphaelson hit upon the idea of making the thieves a man and a woman, which added both a romance angle and then when they take aim at the widow, a romantic complication.
The gentleman thief is Gaston Monescu, "the man who walked into the Bank of Constantinople and walked out with the Bank of Constantinople." The studio had suggested a young Cary Grant for the role, but as Lubitsch's biographer Scott Eyman noted, in 1932 Grant was still more the Cockney roughneck Archie Leach of his birth than the style icon of later years; and Lubitsch preferred an actor who possessed the sort of cultured aplomb that one can only acquire through experience.
Instead, he chose another English actor, Herbert Marshall, a twenty year veteran of the London stage who was as suave and sophisticated in real life as the gentleman thief he portrayed on screen here, but who, having lost a leg in World War I and then so mastered the use of a prosthetic limb the resulting limp was barely apparent, also possessed the mettle to convincingly depict a master criminal.
When the movie opens, we see the thief's escape, his silhouette leaping over the balcony of a ritzy Venetian hotel while his victim lays unconscious on the floor, an example of the indirect and innovative way Lubitsch preferred to stage action—rather than show us the crime itself, Lubitsch leaves us to fill in the blanks and instead moves us directly into the relationship that will define the rest of the movie.
We get our first good look at Gaston a short distance from the scene of his crime as he instructs a waiter on the preparation of a romantic dinner:
"It must be the most marvelous supper. We may not eat it, but it must be marvelous." "Yes, Baron." "And waiter?" "Yes, Baron?" "You see that moon?" "Yes, Baron." "I want to see that moon in the champagne." "Yes, Baron." (makes note on pad) "'Moon in champagne.'" "I want to see—um—" "Yes, Baron." "And as for you, waiter—" "Yes, Baron?" "I don't want to see you at all."
Gaston is pretending to be a baron so he can scam a countess, who ironically turns out to be Lily pretending to be a countess so she can scam a baron. As Lily, Lubitsch cast Miriam Hopkins, who had worked with the director a year earlier in the musical comedy, The Smiling Lieutenant (she would work with him again in 1933's Design For Living). As I have written before (here), "Hopkins was one of the sauciest actresses of the pre-Code age, excelling in light comedies and lurid melodramas alike," yet because her best films often proved too scandalous to be re-issued once censors began taking scissors to Hollywood's past, "even film fanatics can admit to having rarely seen her work."
It doesn't take long for Gaston and Lily to realize the truth about each other, but rather than being angry or disappointed, the two are titillated, and dinner turns into a virtual striptease of items they've stolen from each other—a wallet, a brooch, a pocket watch—climaxing with the revelation of the most audacious theft of all:
"I hope you don't mind if I keep your garter." "Darling!"
The film quickly jumps ahead a year—no wasted motion for Lubitsch. Gaston and Lily have been living together and thieving together through the capitals of Europe and all is well until they run across a wealthy young widow. Madame Colet is rich, generous and bored with the stiffs who court her—veteran farceurs, Charlie Ruggles and Edward Everett Horton (the latter the very man Gaston robbed in Venice). When Gaston appears at her door as part of a scheme to separate her from her fortune, she sees in him the sort of handsome, Continental man she's been longing for.
"Madame Colet, if I were your father—which fortunately I am not—and you made any attempt to handle your own business affairs, I would give you a good spanking. In a business way, of course." "What would you do if you were my secretary?" "The same thing." "You're hired."
The widow, who may well know she's being taken but is still eager for the ride, is played with sympathy and sex appeal by Kay Francis. Her polished, dark beauty contrasts nicely with Hopkins's earthy blonde charms and no doubt was a factor in her casting, as was her performance earlier that year in Jewel Robbery, in which she plays a willing victim to William Powell's elegant jewel thief. Although her career would later take a nose-dive after a bitter contract dispute at Warner Brothers, in 1932, she was at the peak of her popularity.
Just the plot I've described so far would provide the makings of a good comedy (or spun in a different direction, suspense thriller), but Lubitsch ups the ante by creating genuine chemistry between Gaston and the widow. Suddenly Trouble In Paradise is no longer a simple story about the theft of money, but the theft of Gaston's affections as well, which realistically can't end well for somebody. The inevitable heartbreak adds what Andrew Sarris called "a counterpoint of poignant sadness during a film's gayest moments," and is what, I think, lifts this sparkling comedy to the level of pure genius.
And that's without even addressing the numerous examples of Lubitsch's mastery of the technical end of his craft, which not only keeps the story moving but gives this confection its airy, art Deco style. "I think I have done nothing better or as good," he wrote of the film shortly before his death.
"The plot is grown-up, funny and sad," Roger Ebert wrote in 2002, and for his review of the film for his Great Movies series, he added, "in a drawing room comedy of froth and inconsequence, you find that you believe in the characters and care about them."
The result was a hit with audiences and the film landed in the list of the year's top ten money makers despite mixed reviews from the critics. Despite its success, relatively rare for Lubitsch, the film was withdrawn from circulation once the studios began enforcing the Production Code in 1934 and was not seen again until 1968. Coupled with the fact that it was never released on videotape and didn't land on DVD until 2003, Trouble In Paradise probably ranks high on a list of least-seen essential classics.
In 1991, the Library of Congress selected Trouble In Paradise for preservation in the National Film Registry.
I was 1200 words into my essay on the best supporting actress of 1932-33 when I changed my mind. It happens. I know you think I have this all mapped out in advance, but I really don't—I only think I do.
So what that means is my post won't be ready today as originally planned.
In the meantime, how about passing the time with William Powell in a detective movie? This street-legal copy of The Kennel Murder Case comes courtesy of the Internet Movie Database and features Powell in his recurring role as Philo Vance, a high society dandy who solves murder mysteries in his spare time. This is pre-Thin Man, so no booze or wisecracks, but if you know Powell's work in The Thin Man series, this gives you a chance to see where he polished his chops.
Typically, actors in those days toiled for years before they got a shot at stardom, but when they got their break, they knew what to do with it. Powell was no exception. This was his fifty-sixth movie and you can see that he knows how to command the screen. All he needed at this point was Myrna Loy and a wire-haired terrier to make the leap to stardom.
No slapdash B-picture, this. Directed by Michael Curtiz, who would later win an Oscar for directing Casablanca, it co-stars Mary Astor and one of my favorite character actors, Eugene Pallette.
If you're a devotee, as I am, of both Turner Classic Movies and the Katie-Bar-The-Door Awards, you'll be glad to know that a pair of Katie nominees, King Kong and Jewel Robbery are airing on America's classiest cable channel tomorrow, Saturday, May 8. King Kong is up for three Katies, including best picture and director; Kay Francis is up for best actress in Jewel Robbery.
At 6 a.m. EDT is Jewel Robbery, starring William Powell as a suave jewel thief who forces his victims to smoke marijuana during the robbery, leaving them happy, giggling and quite unable to identify him to the police. One of his victims (Kay Francis) is so taken with the thief, she insists on a repeat performance.
After the film's release, thousands of people wrote the studio asking where they could get hold of some of this marijuana stuff for themselves.
The other film, King Kong, I dare say you've heard of. Released in 1933, this is the ultimate in fun-stupid summer-blockbuster entertainment. It's spawned many remakes and sequels, but the original is the one people keep coming back to, and with good reason. If somehow you've never seen this classic action-sci-fi-horror flick, set your recorder or block out some time.
It's on at Noon, EDT time.
From TCM's website:
6:00am [Romance] Jewel Robbery (1932) A jewel thief falls for a tycoon's wife in Vienna. Cast: William Powell, Kay Francis, Helen Vinson, Hardie Albright Dir: William Dieterle BW-68 mins
12:00pm [Horror/Science-Fiction] King Kong (1933) A film crew discovers the "eighth wonder of the world," a giant prehistoric ape, and brings him back to New York, where he wreaks havoc. Cast: Fay Wray, Robert Armstrong, Bruce Cabot, Frank Reicher Dir: Merian C. Cooper BW-105 mins
René Clair (À Nous La Liberté) Edmund Goulding (Grand Hotel) (here on the set with Wallace Beery and Joan Crawford) Howard Hawks (Scarface) (on the set of 1959's Rio Bravo with Angie Dickinson) Rouben Mamoulian (Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde) James Whale (Frankenstein)
[To read Part One, click here. To read Part Two, click here.]
III. Tabloid Cinema At Its Best Scarface premiered in New Orleans, Louisiana, on March 31, 1932, two years after Howard Hughes had acquired the film rights to the story. Denied a proper release thanks to the interference of the Hays Office, the National Board of Review and other state and local censorship boards, the movie played where it could.
Even in its compromised form, though, Scarface was the toughest, most violent picture of its era, boasting twenty-eight deaths (with more off screen), drive-by shootings, bombings, numerous car crashes, and for those lucky enough to see the original ending, a shootout worthy of a more modern movie. It's also credited with being the first picture to show a gangster using a machine gun and it gave us George Raft and his oft-parodied coin-flipping gangster routine.
Scarface is the story of Tony Camonte (Paul Muni), a vicious, small-time thug determined to take what he wants, and what he wants (in the words of Key Largo's Johnny Rocco) is "more." As the movie begins, Tony is working as hired muscle for Johnny Lovo (Osgood Perkins), a Chicago gangster who is tired of waiting in line behind Big Louie Costillo who has grown fat, happy and complacent after years of running Chicago's South Side. After removing Big Louie and taking over his operation, Lovo mistakenly believes he can handle Tony, aiming him like a tommy gun when he needs him, putting him away again when he's served his purpose.
But Tony is a sociopath unable to control his impulses or reign in his appetites. "Some day I'm gonna run the whole works," he boasts. "In this business there's only one law you gotta follow to keep out of trouble: Do it first, do it yourself, and keep on doing it." His ferocity gets Lovo embroiled in a gang war he's not ready for and eventually Tony also tires of waiting in line behind a mob boss he feels has grown fat, happy and complacent, wresting control from Lovo in a bloody confrontation.
Meanwhile, Tony's sister Cesca (Ann Dvorak) falls in love with Tony's best friend and partner in crime, Guino Rinaldo (George Raft), a development as dangerous for the would-be lovers as a gang war is for everybody else—Tony is in love with his sister and will allow no one, not even his best friend, to get close to her.
Predictably, Tony's lack of self-control leads to his downfall. "Someday you're gonna stumble and fall down in the gutter," a police detective tells him, "right where the horses have been standing, right where you belong." And you just know he's right. (If Ben Hecht didn't write that line, I'll eat the movie.) While typically Hawks's dramas focus on a man aware of his limitations as he runs smack up against a nearly-impossible task, Tony Camonte might be the least self-aware man Hawks ever spent time studying and his lack of self-awareness proves to be his Achilles heel.
The result is one of Howard Hawks's best movies, to my mind the first indispensable movie of his long career. The storytelling is taut, the action intense and well-staged. The camerawork is some of the most involved of his career, for example, using an uninterrupted tracking shot to open the movie in a style reminiscent of the silent opening of Rio Bravo.
Without calling attention to itself in the way, say, the opening of Orson Welles's Touch of Evil does, the shot establishes the ethnicity of the main characters, their buffoonish pretensions and tragic fall, Tony Camonte's treachery and the reluctance of a witness to get involved, all while creating an air of suspense that literally pulls the audience into the story.
Hawks was also beginning to experiment with faster-paced dialogue—twenty percent faster than anything he'd done before, he later said. Although it would be another two years before he began to experiment with overlapping dialogue and rapid-fire delivery in the screwball comedy Twentieth Century, a style that would characterized so many of his later films, the speed and fluidity of Scarface is a welcome relief from the static and stagy efforts of so many of his contemporaries.
Which is not to say that Scarface is a perfect movie. The constant moral- izing of police- men, reporters and politicians is clumsily written, repetitive and tiresome (blame the Hays Office, assistant director Richard Rosson and writer John Lee Mahin). The film's attempts at humor from Tony's illiterate secretary Angelo (Vince Barnett) are too broad for a movie this serious. Further, some have criticized Muni's performance in the title role—writer Ben Hecht who had himself recommended Muni for the part later complained, "He was a make-believe tough guy. You think he's a menace, but he doesn't do anything." (I myself have nominated Muni for a best actor award, so obviously I disagree; but it's a matter of taste.)
And those looking for Hawks's signature elements—male comradery, stoicism in the face of danger, and smart, independent women—will not find them here. What we today think of as a Howard Hawks movie was still a few years up the road.
Still, for all its flaws, Scarface is the best gangster movie of the early sound era and arguably the best gangster movie made before The Godfather in 1972.
It may also be the least glamorous look at crime before Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas. Without The Public Enemy's back story to explain away violent behavior (criminals are made, that film suggests, rather than born), without James Cagney's gleeful energy, Edward G. Robinson's genuine menace, or Clark Gable's roguish sexuality, the portrait of criminals presented in Scarface is of dull-witted buffoons and incestuous sociopaths. The violence may have been thrilling, but I can't imagine anyone walking out of the theater thinking, "Gee, I wish I were Tony Camonte."
Despite favorable reviews and strong box office in those theaters where it played, Scarface received no awards and no nominations. Hughes ultimately withdrew the picture from circulation and except for bootleg copies, it wasn't seen again until 1980.
Of the major participants, Hawks went on to become one of the most acclaimed directors in Hollywood history, giving us such gems as Rio Bravo, Red River, His Girl Friday, Bringing Up Baby, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep and many more. Howard Hughes, as fans of Martin Scorsese already know, was primarily interested in aviation, but he did produce twenty-six movies, including The Outlaw which in 1943 introduced Jane Russell's bosom to a grateful movie-going public. Paul Muni went on to become one of Hollywood's biggest names, earning six Oscar nominations, winning for The Story of Louis Pasteur. Ann Dvorak on the other hand, got into a contract dispute with Warner Brothers and despite a brief flurry of good movies in the early '30s, wound up making B-pictures until her retirement in 1952. (You can read more about her at Operator 99's blog "Allure.") George Raft had a long career playing gangsters and tough guys but he also had an uncanny ability to turn down good parts, rejecting the lead roles in High Sierra, The Maltese Falcon and Double Indemnity.
As for the authors of the screenplay, Ben Hecht was nominated for six Oscars during his career, winning two, for Underworld and The Scoundrel, though his best known work now is probably the screenplay for the Alfred Hitchcock classic, Notorious.
W.R. Burnett continued to work as a screenwriter and novelist, earning an Oscar nomination for 1942's Wake Island. Along with fellow novelist James Clavell, he also co-wrote the screenplay for The Great Escape in 1963.
Seton I. Miller went on to write sixty-nine movies, including the original screenplay for The Adventures of Robin Hood, and shared the Oscar for Here Comes Mr. Jordan with Sidney Buchman.
John Lee Mahin most often worked with director Victor Fleming (he of Gone With The Wind), contributing to ten of Fleming's movies. Mahin helped found the Screen Writers Guild, but opposed his co-founders' leftist politics and joined the Screen Playwrights instead. He was later an outspoken critic of Communism during the McCarthy Era but denied involvement in the blacklists of the period, saying, "If [screenwriters] were a threat to the American way of life, the American way of life isn't worth a shit, you know?" He was twice nominated for an Oscar, for Captains Courageous and Heaven Knows, Mister Allison.
Armitage Trail (a.k.a. Maurice Coons), whose novel inspired the movie, never saw the finished production. He died of a heart attack in October 1930 shortly after his arrival in Hollywood. He was only twenty-eight. His brother, Hannibal Coons, wrote for television, including twenty-five episodes of The Addams Family.
Scarface itself is now regarded as an indispensable part of the Hollywood film canon. Hawks called it his favorite movie and Jean Luc-Godard once named it the best American movie ever made. In his 1974 book Talking Pictures, Richard Corliss called Scarface "a kind of cinematic version of tabloid prose at its best" and "the alpha and omega of Hollywood's first gangster craze."
In 1994, the Library of Congress included Scarface in the National Film Registry, and in 2006, the American Film Institute selected it the sixth best gangster movie ever made. The AFI also included Paul Muni's Tony Camonte on its list of the fifty greatest villains of movie history.
And what did the movie's inspiration, Al Capone, think of Scarface? He liked it so much, he obtained a copy for his own personal collection.
Note: In Part One of this essay, I wrote, with regard to what role each of the credited writers played in preparing the final screenplay for Scarface, "Whether [Seton I.] Miller and [John Lee] Mahin worked together as a team or one after the other, I can't say (given the degree to which Miller later resented collaborating with other writers, the latter seems likely)." Since then, I found a photo of the "cutting continuity" (which Joseph's Glossary of Film Terms defines as "a list containing information about camera setups, dialogue, and other aspects of each shot of the final cut of the film") which lists Ben Hecht as the screenplay's author with "continuities" by Miller.
Assuming this is a copy of the cutting continuity for Hawks's version of the film (the document is dated 1931) before Richard Rosson shot additional footage, then I would have to conclude that Mahin was brought in to write the alternate ending for Scarface. Maybe other dialogue as well. I can't swear to this though since I haven't actually read the cutting continuity. It can be purchased for a mere $3500, which is about $3490 more than my budget allows for this sort of thing. If someone has read it, or otherwise can say where Miller and Mahin come into the story, let me know.
II. From Screenplay To Screen: Battling The Censors "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
For those unfamiliar with the words, that's the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States and it's been allowing sinners and saints, artists and hacks, and statesmen and blowhards alike, to speak their piece without fear of reprisal or prior restraint for over two hundred years.
Well, theoretically.
Despite the absolutist language of the amendment, courts have always recognized limitations on the freedom of speech (and speech is what I'm specifically writing about here), including but not limited to prohibitions against slander and libel, child pornography, incitement to riot, creating the danger of imminent harm (that is, yelling "fire" in a crowded theater), and publishing troop movements during times of war (and no doubt others I haven't thought about since law school); as well as reasonable "time, place and manner" restrictions on when, where and how speech is conducted (which is why protesters camp out across the street from the White House and not in the Oval Office). (Others would not doubt remind me of the Alien and Sedition Act of 1798, the so-called "Espionage" Act of 1917, the McCarthyism of the 1950s, and a lot of other episodes that would curl your hair.)
Still, it must be astonishing to a generation accustomed to watching pornography on their telephones to discover that for the first half of the 20th Century, the First Amendment did not apply to movies at all.
Huh? What?
In 1915 the United States Supreme Court ruled in Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio that the protections of the First Amendment did not extend to motion pictures. "[T]he exhibition of moving pictures is a business, pure and simple, originated and conducted for profit ... not to be regarded, nor intended to be regarded ... as part of the press of the country, or as organs of public opinion." Given that movies could be "used for evil," the Court reasoned, censorship was not beyond the power of the state.
Until the Supreme Court overturned Mutual Film in 1952 (Joseph Burstyn, Inc v. Wilson), Hollywood studios were subject to the whim of any government body with a mind to protect the public from itself.
The government of New York City was the first to begin censoring movies, forming the New York Board of Motion Picture Censorship in 1909. The city required all movies to receive its stamp of approval before being exhibiting in its jurisdiction. Because of the city's outsized commercial importance, the major studios agreed to submit their films for the board's review, which meant in effect that New York City was determining what the rest of the nation could see. To reflect that fact, the Board changed its name, first to the National Board of Censorship and then to the National Board of Review.
After the Supreme Court's decision in Mutual Film, seven other states created their own censorship boards. By the time Scarface went into production, one out of three moviegoers lived in states or cities that regulated the content of movies.
In the early 1920s, a series of scandals—for example, the Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle trial -- further eroded Hollywood's standing in the eyes of the public. To stave off the threat of even more state and local oversight, the studios asked former U.S. Postmaster General, Will Hays, to draft a set of guidelines of what would and would not be acceptable content in movies. In 1930, he produced a more formal document of prohibited topics called "A Code To Govern The Making Of Talking, Synchronized And Silent Motion Pictures," known informally as the Hays Code. (For a more detailed primer on the history of movie censorship, check out the article "Movie Censorship—A Brief History" at "The Picture Show Man.")
It was in this climate that Hughes, Hawks and Hecht sought to make the ultimate gangster picture, one which as Hecht put it, would "double the casualty rate of any picture to date." Hecht's treatment had come complete with casting recommendations—for the lead, Paul Muni, a young New York actor who had made a couple of critically-acclaimed flops in Hollywood before retreating to the Broadway stage; and for the part of Johnny Lovo, Tony's boss, Osgood Perkins who had played the lead in Hecht's Broadway play The Front Page. Hawks cast George Raft for the key role of Tony's sidekick, Guino Rinaldo. Before turning to acting, Raft had been a boxer in New York's Hell's Kitchen and had well-known mob connections, both lending authenticity to the part. In the role of Tony's sister and Rinaldo's love interest, Hawks cast bit player Ann Dvorak after seeing her dance at one of Raft's parties.
Principal photography began in June 1931 and continued until October. The film's release was delayed until March 31, 1932, while Hughes wrangled with both the Hays Office and New York's National Board of Review over the film's content.
Tim Dirks, at his indispensable website "Filmsite," details the various cuts, edits and alternate scenes deemed necessary to get the film out the door.
For example, Tony Camonte's mother explicitly disapproves of her son, calling him "bad" and "no good." Hawks dialed down the violence as much as possible, showing no blood despite a body count of nearly thirty and leaving many of the deaths to occur off screen. (He instead used a recurring visual motif, the letter "X," to signal to the audience that a death had occurred, paying his crew $100 a piece for ways to fit the X into the production, the most inventive being the murder of Boris Karloff in a bowling alley—he rolls a strike, marked with an "X" on his scorecard, just as he's gunned down.)
Hawks also de-emphasized the incestuous relationship that had inspired Hecht's screenplay in the first place.
"We made the brother-sister relationship clearly incestuous," he explained later, "but the censors mistook our intention and objected to it because they thought the relationship between them was too beautiful to be attributed to a gangster. We had a scene in which Muni told his sister that he loved her, and we couldn't play it in full light. We wound up play it in silhouette against a curtain with the light coming from outside. It was a little bit too intense to show faces—you wouldn't dare take a chance."
Despite the changes, the Hays Office refused to give Scarface its stamp of approval—unusual at a time when the Code was unenforceable and honored in the breach if at all—forcing Hughes to bring in assistant director Richard Rosson after filming was complete to shoot an alternate ending, one where a cringing, cowardly Tony Camonte is brought before a judge and sentence to death. By that time, Muni was no longer available and a stand-in (whose face is never shown) was used in his stead.
In addition, Rosson added several moralistic speeches with lines such as "Don't blame the police. They can't stop machine guns from being run back and forth across the state lines. They can't enforce laws that don't exist." A disclaimer was tacked on to the beginning of the film as well as a subtitle, "The Shame Of The Nation," both designed to shift the blame for bootlegger violence from police and political corruption to public indifference.
And still the Hays Office did not approve the film. Hughes finally got tired of waiting and shipped the movie out to any theater that would take it. Some states, New Jersey for example, saw the original cut; New York saw a cut with the bowdlerized ending. Scarface did well wherever it played but didn't play in enough places to make back its costs and eventually Hughes withdrew the film from circulation. Except for bootlegged 16-millimeter prints, the public didn't see it again for nearly fifty years when Universal Pictures bought Scarface in preparation for Brian DePalma's 1983 remake. (The original cut of Scarface wasn't seen in New York until 1980.)
Of the seemingly endless series of movies Hollywood produced during Prohibition to cash in on the public's obsession with gangsters, three stand out today—Little Caesar, The Public Enemy and Scarface. The first two made stars of Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney, respectively, but the best, and at the time most controversial, was Scarface.
The story of a ruthless thug's rise and fall was a familiar one to audiences when the film first appeared in theaters in 1932. But those lucky enough to see the uncut version of Scarface saw a more violent and more complex treatment of the subject than anything that had come before it. Both bucking censorship and helping to usher it in, the production of Scarface is the stuff of legend; the finished movie is a classic.
I. From Novel To Screenplay: "A Real Tough Shoot-‘em Up" The movie Scarface was based on a novel of the same name by a young writer of pulp fiction, Maurice Coons, whose friendship with the Sicilian gangs that ran the slums of Chicago gave his material an air of authenticity. Writing under the pseudonym Armitage Trail, Coons fashioned a tale of a small-time thug, Tony Camonte, who claws his way up the mob ladder only to fall once he reaches the top. It was a thinly-disguised portrait of Al Capone, the same sort of story that writers all over the country were churning out in novels such as W.R. Burnett's Little Caesar and for pulp magazines like Black Mask. As Hollywood sought to exploit the gang wars of the Prohibition Era for its own profit, studios snapped up many of these stories and began to adapt them into motion pictures.
Howard Hughes, the eccentric millionaire business man, aviator and movie producer, was eager to jump on the gangster bandwagon with a picture of his own that would "knock the audience out of its seats." Although he had successfully produced a number of movies, including The Racket, The Front Page and the Oscar-winning comedy Two Arabian Knights, Hughes's one experience as a director, helming 1930's Hell's Angels to financial disaster, convinced him that despite his money and his enthusiasm, he needed a real director to get his project off the ground.
Enter Howard Hawks.
Born in Indiana to a wealthy merchant, and raised in Southern California, Howard Hawks had studied mechanical engineering at Cornell and served in the United States Army Air Service before returning to California to work as a prop man for the Mary Pickford Company. That in the wide-open days of the silent era he went from prop man to director in just three years was not all that unusual. By the time Hughes acquired the film rights to Scarface, Hawks had already directed ten movies and was a veteran of the gangster genre, helming The Criminal Code to critical acclaim and commercial success the year before. Always independent minded, Hawks walked out on a contract with Jack Warner to take the job with Hughes, resulting in a lawsuit that Hawks ultimately lost.
W.R. Burnett took first crack at the screenplay. A native of Springfield, Ohio, Burnett had failed in his first attempt at fiction, writing a hundred unpublished short stories and five unpublished novels before throwing in the towel and taking a job as a night clerk at a hotel in Chicago. It was there that he became acquainted with Chicago's underbelly; his experiences and observations inspired his 1929 novel, Little Caesar, a smash hit that served as the basis for Edward G. Robinson's classic gangster film.
But evidently, Burnett's screenplay for Scarface failed to satisfy Hughes's vision of "a real tough shoot-'em up," and while enough of his work survived to earn Burnett a screen credit, Hughes and Hawks would look elsewhere for the final screenplay of their gangster thriller.
They next turned to Ben Hecht, arguably the greatest screenwriter of all time, certainly belonging near the top of a very short list. Before moving to Hollywood, he had worked as a journalist in Chicago and Berlin, written novels and co-authored the hit play The Front Page with Charles MacArthur (Howard Hughes produced the film adaptation in 1931). In 1926, Hecht moved to Hollywood after receiving a telegram from Herman J. Mankiewicz (who with Orson Welles won best original screenplay for Citizen Kane). The telegram read, "Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots. Don't let this get around." Mankiewicz was right. Hecht eventually became the highest paid writer in Hollywood, earning as much as $100,000 a month, and won an Oscar in its first year of existence for the gangster picture Underworld.
Film historian Richard Corliss later called Hecht "the Hollywood screenwriter."
During their conversations about the project, which initially didn't interest Hecht, Hawks commented that Capone reminded him of the Borgias, whose unsavory stew of incest, murder and intrigue ruled Italy during the Renaissance Era. That was enough of a hook for Hecht who—to the consternation of his agent who had negotiated a salary of a $1000 a day instead of a flat $20,000—wrote a 60-page treatment of the story in eleven days.
As Hecht envisioned the story, Tony Camonte's ascension through the ranks to the position of crime boss is accomplished not through brains and cunning but through sheer aggression so irrational, unrestrained and often at odds with Tony's own best interests that it takes more calculating men by surprise, overwhelming them before they see the threat. One of Hecht's keenest insights, that criminals aren't so much masterminds as ruthless, undisciplined children, came from his conversations with gangsters while working as a journalist in Chicago, and Hecht portrays Tony as a child who, as Naomi Wise put in an essay for Take One magazine, "refuses to recognize the existence of the wills of other humans." As a result, despite the violence depicted in Scarface, the movie plays more as a comic satire about preening buffoons and apes in hats than the reverent portrait of larger-than-life anti-heroes too many gangster movies devolve into.
In adapting Scarface, Hecht cut out the novel's backstory and cop brother, and added a sister for whom Tony has incestuous desires apparent to everyone but himself, a desire that ultimately proves to be his Achilles heel. He also used Scarface as a vehicle for criticizing his fellow journalists whom he felt had helped glorify gangsters. Hecht based the character Johnny Lovo, Tony's boss, on Johnny Torrio, and North-side boss Big Louie Costillo on Big Jim Colosimo. He also drew on several incidents well-known to movie audiences, such as the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, the murder of Legs Diamond in a hospital bed and Deannie O'Bannion's assassination in a flower shop.
After receiving Hecht's treatment, Hawks turned the story over to a pair of young writers, Seton I. Miller and John Lee Mahin, who are credited with their movie's "continuity and dialogue." Miller was a young writer who had worked with Hawks before, co-writing the early Louise Brooks effort A Girl In Every Port, and providing the dialogue for The Dawn Patrol and The Criminal Code (the latter scoring him an Oscar nomination). Like Miller, Mahin was twenty-eight; unlike Miller, Scarface was Mahin's first screenplay. He had been working in New York as a journalist (and was fired by William Randolph Hearst for writing a negative review of Hearst's mistress, Marion Davies) until heading for Hollywood at the invitation of fellow journalist Ben Hecht.
Handing a screenplay from writer to writer was not an unusual procedure in those days—Hollywood studios approached screenwriting as an assembly line process for decades, with one team of writers developing the story, another team working on the dialogue and yet another providing re-writes, with very little collaboration between the separate groups. In this case, Hecht fleshed out the novel's storyline, invented many new ideas, defined the characters, wrote dialogue, then Miller and Mahin worked out the "continuity"—the progression of the scenes—and wrote additional dialogue.
Whether Miller and Mahin worked together as a team or one after the other, I can't say (given the degree to which Miller later resented collaborating with other writers, the latter seems likely). It is also unclear which, if either of them, did the rewrites attempting to satisfy the censorship boys in the Hays Office. Hawks himself did some work on the script although as was often the case, did not take a credit.
In any event, the process of producing a screenplay for Scarface turned out to be relatively painless. Getting the movie from the page to the screen proved to be anything but.
Meanwhile, for those of you wondering what's become of me, I'm still watching movies in preparation for my essay "1906-1914: The Birth Of The Feature Film." One hundred seventeen (117) of them so far and counting. Okay, so most of them are ten minutes long, but still! The effort will be worth it, I promise.
And don't forget, Turner Classic Movies will be broadcasting the newly-restored print of Fritz Lang's Metropolis this weekend, along with a documentary about the restoration and two more Lang movies, Spies and M.
Even before the movie version of Animal Crackers was in theaters, the Marx Brothers began searching for writers for their next project, be it a new play, a radio show or another movie, finally settling on S.J. Perelman, Will B. Johnstone and Nat Perrin. Johnstone, you may recall, was the author of the Brothers' first Broadway play, I'll Say She Is! Perelman was a humorist who wrote for the New Yorker magazine. He had been a Marx Brothers fan since their vaudeville days and his first collection of stories, Dawn Ginsbergh's Revenge, published in 1928, carried on its dust jacket Groucho's famous endorsement: "From the moment I picked up your book until I laid it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it."
The writers set to work on the screenplay while the Brothers were in London fulfilling an obligation to British stage impresario C.B. Cochran. On their return, the writers brought the finished draft to a hotel room where they met the four Marx Brothers, the Brothers' wives (the unmarried Harpo brought not one but two "girlfriends") and Zeppo's recently-acquired Afghan hounds. Perelman read the draft aloud to the Brothers who listened in silence.
The final screenwriting credits read "by S.J. Perelman and Will B. Johnstone; additional dialogue by Arthur Sheekman," but, in fact, gags came from all sorts of sources—vaudeville veteran Solly Volinsky, cartoonist J. Carver Pusey, singer turned movie star Eddie Cantor, the Marx Brothers' uncle Al Shean, legendary screenwriter Ben Hecht, English playwright Roland Pertwee, producer Mankiewicz (when he wasn't napping in his office) and the Marx Brothers themselves. Nat Perrin's lone contribution—a barber shop scene that featured a disastrous shoeshine—was substantially rewritten and he did not received a screen credit (he later wrote Duck Soup and The Big Store).
Production began on Monkey Business in the summer of 1931. With no Broadway commitment to keep the Brothers in New York, Paramount insisted that they film Monkey Business at the studio's Hollywood facilities, which were undeniably superior to the sound stage in Queens they had used for their first two films. This was the first of their movies filmed in Hollywood, and the first written directly for the screen
It was also the first film that did not boast the supporting work of Margaret Dumont. Feeling the part of a gangster's moll needed a sexier actress, the studio cast Thelma Todd, a veteran of dozens of Hal Roach comedy shorts featuring Laurel and Hardy and Charley Chase. She's around for two scenes with Groucho, one where she finds him hiding in her stateroom closet, the second where the flirt on the veranda at a party.
Even for a Marx Brothers' movie, the story is tissue thin. Four stowaways wreak havoc on an ocean liner, meet a couple of gangsters, go to work for them and wind up thwarting a kidnapping plot.
Too, there's something a little off about the gangsters finding the Marx Brothers funny—the Brothers are best when they are a threat to authority, subverting the established order, and it's a little sad to see them reduced to the role of court jesters—but until then, it's a great movie and even this last act has its moments. (Harpo disguised as the bustle of a woman's dress is particularly inspired).
Monkey Business premiered on September 19, 1931, to favorable reviews, with Mourdant Hall of the New York Times favorably comparing the film to Chaplin's The Gold Rush. The movie turned a profit at the box office, but despite the praise of the critics, it failed to crack the list of the year's top ten grossing films.
After the success of his naughty operettas, The Love Parade, Monte Carlo, The Smiling Lieutenant and One Hour With You (and the failure of a somber anti-war film, Broken Lullaby), Ernst Lubitsch turned his attention to what most critics now point to when they speak of Lubitsch's best work, Trouble In Paradise.
Instead, he chose another English actor, Herbert Marshall, a twenty year veteran of the London stage who was as suave and sophisticated in real life as the gentleman thief he portrayed on screen here, but who, having lost a leg in World War I and then so mastered the use of a prosthetic limb the resulting limp was barely apparent, also possessed the mettle to convincingly depict a master criminal.
"It must be the most marvelous supper. We may not eat it, but it must be marvelous."
It doesn't take long for Gaston and Lily to realize the truth about each other, but rather than being angry or disappointed, the two are titillated, and dinner turns into a virtual striptease of items they've stolen from each other—a wallet, a brooch, a pocket watch—climaxing with the revelation of the most audacious theft of all:
"Madame Colet, if I were your father—which fortunately I am not—and you made any attempt to handle your own business affairs, I would give you a good spanking. In a business way, of course."
The widow, who may well know she's being taken but is still eager for the ride, is played with sympathy and sex appeal by Kay Francis. Her polished, dark beauty contrasts nicely with Hopkins's earthy blonde charms and no doubt was a factor in her casting, as was her performance earlier that year in Jewel Robbery, in which she plays a willing victim to William Powell's elegant jewel thief. Although her career would later take a nose-dive after a bitter contract dispute at Warner Brothers, in 1932, she was at the peak of her popularity.
"The plot is grown-up, funny and sad," Roger Ebert wrote in 2002, and for his review of the film for his Great Movies series, he added, "in a drawing room comedy of froth and inconsequence, you find that you believe in the characters and care about them."
I was 1200 words into my essay on the best supporting actress of 1932-33 when I changed my mind. It happens. I know you think I have this all mapped out in advance, but I really don't—I only think I do.
Typically, actors in those days toiled for years before they got a shot at stardom, but when they got their break, they knew what to do with it. Powell was no exception. This was his fifty-sixth movie and you can see that he knows how to command the screen. All he needed at this point was Myrna Loy and a wire-haired terrier to make the leap to stardom.
At 6 a.m. EDT is Jewel Robbery, starring William Powell as a suave jewel thief who forces his victims to smoke marijuana during the robbery, leaving them happy, giggling and quite unable to identify him to the police. One of his victims (Kay Francis) is so taken with the thief, she insists on a repeat performance.
The other film, King Kong, I dare say you've heard of. Released in 1933, this is the ultimate in fun-stupid summer-blockbuster entertainment. It's spawned many remakes and sequels, but the original is the one people keep coming back to, and with good reason. If somehow you've never seen this classic action-sci-fi-horror flick, set your recorder or block out some time.
III. Tabloid Cinema At Its Best
But Tony is a sociopath unable to control his impulses or reign in his appetites. "Some day I'm gonna run the whole works," he boasts. "In this business there's only one law you gotta follow to keep out of trouble: Do it first, do it yourself, and keep on doing it." His ferocity gets Lovo embroiled in a gang war he's not ready for and eventually Tony also tires of waiting in line behind a mob boss he feels has grown fat, happy and complacent, wresting control from Lovo in a bloody confrontation.
Meanwhile, Tony's sister Cesca (Ann Dvorak) falls in love with Tony's best friend and partner in crime, Guino Rinaldo (George Raft), a development as dangerous for the would-be lovers as a gang war is for everybody else—Tony is in love with his sister and will allow no one, not even his best friend, to get close to her.
Which is not to say that Scarface is a perfect movie. The constant moral- izing of police- men, reporters and politicians is clumsily written, repetitive and tiresome (blame the Hays Office, assistant director Richard Rosson and writer John Lee Mahin). The film's attempts at humor from Tony's illiterate secretary Angelo (Vince Barnett) are too broad for a movie this serious. Further, some have criticized Muni's performance in the title role—writer Ben Hecht who had himself recommended Muni for the part later complained, "He was a make-believe tough guy. You think he's a menace, but he doesn't do anything." (I myself have nominated Muni for a best actor award, so obviously I disagree; but it's a matter of taste.)
It may also be the least glamorous look at crime before Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas. Without The Public Enemy's back story to explain away violent behavior (criminals are made, that film suggests, rather than born), without James Cagney's gleeful energy, Edward G. Robinson's genuine menace, or Clark Gable's roguish sexuality, the portrait of criminals presented in Scarface is of dull-witted buffoons and incestuous sociopaths. The violence may have been thrilling, but I can't imagine anyone walking out of the theater thinking, "Gee, I wish I were Tony Camonte."
As for the authors of the screenplay, Ben Hecht was nominated for six Oscars during his career, winning two, for Underworld and The Scoundrel, though his best known work now is probably the screenplay for the Alfred Hitchcock classic, Notorious.
Scarface itself is now regarded as an indispensable part of the Hollywood film canon. Hawks called it his favorite movie and Jean Luc-Godard once named it the best American movie ever made. In his 1974 book Talking Pictures, Richard Corliss called Scarface "a kind of cinematic version of tabloid prose at its best" and "the alpha and omega of Hollywood's first gangster craze."
Note: In Part One of this essay, I wrote, with regard to what role each of the credited writers played in preparing the final screenplay for Scarface, "Whether [Seton I.] Miller and [John Lee] Mahin worked together as a team or one after the other, I can't say (given the degree to which Miller later resented collaborating with other writers, the latter seems likely)." Since then, I found a photo of the "cutting continuity" (which Joseph's Glossary of Film Terms defines as "a list containing information about camera setups, dialogue, and other aspects of each shot of the final cut of the film") which lists Ben Hecht as the screenplay's author with "continuities" by Miller.
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
Despite the absolutist language of the amendment, courts have always recognized limitations on the freedom of speech (and speech is what I'm specifically writing about here), including but not limited to prohibitions against slander and libel, child pornography, incitement to riot, creating the danger of imminent harm (that is, yelling "fire" in a crowded theater), and publishing troop movements during times of war (and no doubt others I haven't thought about since law school); as well as reasonable "time, place and manner" restrictions on when, where and how speech is conducted (which is why protesters camp out across the street from the White House and not in the Oval Office). (Others would not doubt remind me of the Alien and Sedition Act of 1798, the so-called "Espionage" Act of 1917, the McCarthyism of the 1950s, and a lot of other episodes that would curl your hair.)
The government of New York City was the first to begin censoring movies, forming the New York Board of Motion Picture Censorship in 1909. The city required all movies to receive its stamp of approval before being exhibiting in its jurisdiction. Because of the city's outsized commercial importance, the major studios agreed to submit their films for the board's review, which meant in effect that New York City was determining what the rest of the nation could see. To reflect that fact, the Board changed its name, first to the National Board of Censorship and then to the National Board of Review.
In the early 1920s, a series of scandals—for example, the Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle trial -- further eroded Hollywood's standing in the eyes of the public. To stave off the threat of even more state and local oversight, the studios asked former U.S. Postmaster General, Will Hays, to draft a set of guidelines of what would and would not be acceptable content in movies. In 1930, he produced a more formal document of prohibited topics called "A Code To Govern The Making Of Talking, Synchronized And Silent Motion Pictures," known informally as the Hays Code. (For a more detailed primer on the history of movie censorship, check out the article "Movie Censorship—A Brief History" at "The Picture Show Man.")
For example, Tony Camonte's mother explicitly disapproves of her son, calling him "bad" and "no good." Hawks dialed down the violence as much as possible, showing no blood despite a body count of nearly thirty and leaving many of the deaths to occur off screen. (He instead used a recurring visual motif, the letter "X," to signal to the audience that a death had occurred, paying his crew $100 a piece for ways to fit the X into the production, the most inventive being the murder of Boris Karloff in a bowling alley—he rolls a strike, marked with an "X" on his scorecard, just as he's gunned down.)
Despite the changes, the Hays Office refused to give Scarface its stamp of approval—unusual at a time when the Code was unenforceable and honored in the breach if at all—forcing Hughes to bring in assistant director Richard Rosson after filming was complete to shoot an alternate ending, one where a cringing, cowardly Tony Camonte is brought before a judge and sentence to death. By that time, Muni was no longer available and a stand-in (whose face is never shown) was used in his stead.
And still the Hays Office did not approve the film. Hughes finally got tired of waiting and shipped the movie out to any theater that would take it. Some states, New Jersey for example, saw the original cut; New York saw a cut with the bowdlerized ending. Scarface did well wherever it played but didn't play in enough places to make back its costs and eventually Hughes withdrew the film from circulation. Except for bootlegged 16-millimeter prints, the public didn't see it again for nearly fifty years when Universal Pictures bought Scarface in preparation for Brian DePalma's 1983 remake. (The original cut of Scarface wasn't seen in New York until 1980.)
Of the seemingly endless series of movies Hollywood produced during Prohibition to cash in on the public's obsession with gangsters, three stand out today—Little Caesar, The Public Enemy and Scarface. The first two made stars of Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney, respectively, but the best, and at the time most controversial, was Scarface.
Howard Hughes, the eccentric millionaire business man, aviator and movie producer, was eager to jump on the gangster bandwagon with a picture of his own that would "knock the audience out of its seats." Although he had successfully produced a number of movies, including The Racket, The Front Page and the Oscar-winning comedy Two Arabian Knights, Hughes's one experience as a director, helming 1930's Hell's Angels to financial disaster, convinced him that despite his money and his enthusiasm, he needed a real director to get his project off the ground.
Born in Indiana to a wealthy merchant, and raised in Southern California, Howard Hawks had studied mechanical engineering at Cornell and served in the United States Army Air Service before returning to California to work as a prop man for the Mary Pickford Company. That in the wide-open days of the silent era he went from prop man to director in just three years was not all that unusual. By the time Hughes acquired the film rights to Scarface, Hawks had already directed ten movies and was a veteran of the gangster genre, helming The Criminal Code to critical acclaim and commercial success the year before. Always independent minded, Hawks walked out on a contract with Jack Warner to take the job with Hughes, resulting in a lawsuit that Hawks ultimately lost.
They next turned to Ben Hecht, arguably the greatest screenwriter of all time, certainly belonging near the top of a very short list. Before moving to Hollywood, he had worked as a journalist in Chicago and Berlin, written novels and co-authored the hit play The Front Page with Charles MacArthur (Howard Hughes produced the film adaptation in 1931). In 1926, Hecht moved to Hollywood after receiving a telegram from Herman J. Mankiewicz (who with Orson Welles won best original screenplay for Citizen Kane). The telegram read, "Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots. Don't let this get around." Mankiewicz was right. Hecht eventually became the highest paid writer in Hollywood, earning as much as $100,000 a month, and won an Oscar in its first year of existence for the gangster picture Underworld.
As Hecht envisioned the story, Tony Camonte's ascension through the ranks to the position of crime boss is accomplished not through brains and cunning but through sheer aggression so irrational, unrestrained and often at odds with Tony's own best interests that it takes more calculating men by surprise, overwhelming them before they see the threat. One of Hecht's keenest insights, that criminals aren't so much masterminds as ruthless, undisciplined children, came from his conversations with gangsters while working as a journalist in Chicago, and Hecht portrays Tony as a child who, as Naomi Wise put in an essay for Take One magazine, "refuses to recognize the existence of the wills of other humans." As a result, despite the violence depicted in Scarface, the movie plays more as a comic satire about preening buffoons and apes in hats than the reverent portrait of larger-than-life anti-heroes too many gangster movies devolve into.
Whether Miller and Mahin worked together as a team or one after the other, I can't say (given the degree to which Miller later resented collaborating with other writers, the latter seems likely). It is also unclear which, if either of them, did the rewrites attempting to satisfy the censorship boys in the Hays Office. Hawks himself did some work on the script although as was often the case, did not take a credit.
