Howard Hawks made this classic gangster film in 1932. The date's important. The talkies had established themselves by then; censorship of the screen had not. Thus the story, a thinly disguised biopic of Al Capone, enjoys the glamour of the sight and sound of evil which public opinion, marshalled by the powerful Roman Catholic Legion Of Decency, would shortly demand to see curbed by the morality code that Hollywood bowed its head to, albeit hypo-critically, in 1934. So, despite a subsequent subtitle 'The Shame Of The Nation' and a hastily added prologue denouncing public enemies like Tony Camonte, the covert message of the film is, enjoy.
It's extraordinarily fresh despite its age, for the gangster attributes that later became iconic in American crime movies hadn't been worn out by repetition. The Tommy-gun, for instance, which riddles the streets - and ultimately the film's anti-hero, played by Paul Muni - became the weapon of choice in the Thirties. Even the wave of G-men dramas which followed the early gangster movies, thus transferring glamour from the criminal to the law-enforcement officers, were enhanced by this chunky weapon - so different, as Colin McArthur has pointed out in his monograph, Underworld USA, from the slim Winchesters or the aristocratic Colts in use by Western heroes. And the tailoring of these new street barons of crime, deriving their profits from illicit liquor during Prohibition ? the gang wars were largely fought to decide whom the tippling city bought its drinks from - reflects the new classy apparel of the old blue-collar strivers fresh off the immigrant boats. Many years later, Frank Sinatra, a mutation of the same stock, would sock a guy who set his sweaty fingers briefly on Frank's custom-tailored threads; you feel the same shudder of alarm when Camonte swaggers around the town, its nightspots and bars, in his tailored three-pieces and top coats. 'Who'd dare lay a finger on me?' say the suits.
Muni's performance is distinguished by another trait that censorship would speedily declare verboten: incest. His relationship with his sister (played by Ann Dvorak) is an extreme and perverse way of keeping it 'in the family' lest power slip out of the love-struck criminal's hands into some woman's clutches.
Scarface has two other characteristics that persist in today's cinema, indeed flourish in the Scorsese underworld: the gangster is Italian and he is Roman Catholic, practising or lapsed. There were to be biopics of Jewish mobsters - Meyer Lansky, for instance - but, somehow, the clannishness of 'Our Crowd' never contributed to the same sense of a specific church and geographical latitude giving birth to a malevolent mutation of the American streets. Ultimately, the gangster has to die in those same streets that he came from, and briefly ruled by fear. Scarface helps entrench this convention, too. 'Do it first, do it yourself, and keep on doing it,' is Tony Camonte's advice to his best pal. Good sense: until someone else sticks it to you first.
Scarface (1932 Version)
Cert: PG
