As reworked by Hecht, with Hawks’s enthusiastic participation, the resemblance of
Scarface
to the career of Al Capone became
a great deal closer than the pronounced facial feature that, in the real gangster’s case, extended along his jaw and across his neck, the result of an unsuccessful attempt to slit his throat. The film’s magnificent opening scene, in which fat-cat mobster “Big Louie” Costillo is rubbed out in a phone booth after an all-night party, was based on the killing of Chicago racketeer “Big Jim” Colosimo by
Capone and Johnny Torrio in an effort to take over the Chicago underworld. The next to go is the unseen O’Hara, an obvious stand-in for Deanie O’Banion, “the last of the first-class killers,” whom Hecht and, especially, MacArthur had known well. His death prompted a retaliatory raid on Capone’s headquarters—reproduced in the film almost exactly in the attack on a restaurant that Scarface survives
by lying flat on the floor, just as Capone had done. The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, while not reenacted, is depicted in its bloody aftermath, and Hecht slipped in innumerable other details based on his knowledge of how things actually happened in Chicago.
As the story progresses, pure fiction increasingly dominates. Tony, sensing that his boss, Johnny Lovo, is weak, guns him down and takes
over the town and his girl. Protective and jealous of his sister Cesca in a way that seems unnatural, he shoots his best friend, Gino, when he discovers him in his sister’s apartment, not knowing they’ve married. This one “unprofessional” killing triggers his downfall, which climaxes when he and his sister are cornered in his private armored hideaway by an army of cops.
In 1931, the watchdog
Hays Office, headed by the puritanical former Republican Party national chairman Will H. Hays, enforced general rules of behavioral decency in movies: bad guys had to be punished, pre- or extramarital affairs could not be explicitly shown, religions and other respected institutions could not be insulted, and so forth. (The immeasurably more restrictive rules, such as married couples not being allowed
in the same bed and kisses limited to three seconds, were still more than two years away.)
Employed by the major studios, Hays made sure that their films toed the line, but he also did the bidding of the moguls, and he was particularly close to the most powerful boss of all, Louis B. Mayer, a friend and big supporter of President Herbert Hoover. No film could be released without a Production Seal
issued by the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, and Hays, along with his deputy, Colonel Jason Joy, and industrious foot soldier Lamar Trotti, was in charge of dispensing the seals. The Hays Office generally began its surveillance of films at the script stage, advising producers of suitability and indicating dialogue and other business that might fail to meet not only its own
standards but those of the myriad state and municipal censor boards that then existed around the country. In this capacity, the Hays Office saw itself not strictly as a censorship organization but as a helpful entity standing between filmmakers, who often tried to get away with as much as they could, and local censorship panels, which could be truly irrational, unpredictable, and inconsistent in
their judgments.
A script of
Scarface
was duly delivered to the Hays Office, and on June 1, 1931, came back the rather alarmed response. Not surprisingly, the first objection concerned the character of Tony Camonte’s mother. Hays was incensed at the negative depiction of the mother “as a grasping virago, distinctly an Italian criminal type mother” and insisted that the character be changed and
that she “present to the son a dialogue telling him what the Italian race has done for posterity and that he, Scarface, was bringing odium and shame upon his entire race.
“For the same general reason,” Hays continued, “the lawyer, Epstein, should not be so pronouncedly Jewish, if at all, as it will react at least racially against the picture.”
Also ordered out was a character named Benson, a
state’s attorney shown to be friendly with Camonte but prone to pompous public pronouncements, such as, “The gangs must go. Prohibition must be enforced.” Hays also advised that all action showing “judges issuing habeas corpus ought to be eliminated as tending to show a breakdown in the forces of law and a connivance with criminals.”
The original script had Gino Rinaldi and Scarface’s sister
Cesca shacking up together out of wedlock when her brother finds them, and it even made his mother the one who brings the relationship to Scarface’s attention. This is another significant plot point upon which Hays’s advice had direct effect: “Instead of having his ‘pal’ live with his sister and meet death at his hands, this should be changed as if he had been secretly married to
her. Dramatic
effect would be better and moral effect upon audience would be better.”
A major scene—also inspired by Capone—involved Scarface and Lovo’s former moll, Poppy, vacationing in Florida onboard Scarface’s yacht in the company of many social bigwigs and artistic types, including a woman writer of dirty books. The sequence was objected to on the basis that it glamorized the sweet desserts of the criminal
life, and was never shot.
But the most troublesome aspect of
Scarface
, from the first reading of the script to even after its release, was its ending. In the original draft, Tony Camonte, retreating to his metal-shuttered refuge with his beloved sister, shoots it out with the police while showering them with contemptuous verbal abuse. After exchanging charged expressions of filial love and eternal
devotion, Cesca is shot and Tony is driven out by tear gas and an engulfing fire. Like a mad animal, Scarface charges down the stairs to receive a relentless torrent of police bullets, which somehow fails to stop him. Still on his feet, he lurches toward the cop Guarino (upon whose badge he had lit a match early in the story), aims his gun at his face, and fires at point-blank range. But the
pistol just clicks; the chamber is empty. Guarino then seizes his opportunity and shoots Scarface, who crumbles to the pavement but still keeps pulling the trigger of his gun as he falls, expressing murderous defiance and insolence to the end.
Hays would have none of this. “In the closing episode of this story,” he objected, “Scarface is endowed with humane kindly qualities especially as applied
to the welfare of his sister. He is also given super-human power in escaping a barrage of bullets. This should all be readjusted, otherwise it … would readily lend itself to the charge of so-called ‘glorification’ of the criminal.”
Three days later, Colonel Joy followed up with an official letter expressing great concern that Scarface would appear too heroic, suggesting, for the first time, that
the character become “a cringing coward” at the end and that the character of the police detective Guarino be built up to be the brave one sent into the blazing inferno to capture the gangster singlehandedly.
With Mahin the lead writer now, revisions were quickly initiated in an attempt to placate the Hays Office. By mid-June, Hawks and Hughes’s executive E. B. Derr were involved in nearly daily
meetings with Colonel Joy “in a last endeavor to salvage as much as possible of the story.” In the midst of the negotiations and rewrites, Joy reported to Hays that though “the
treatment of the story is becoming more satisfactory, there still remains the most harsh and frank gangster picture we ever had. We told [Hawks] that we did not expect it to pass any of the censor boards, and that it would
probably have the effect of closing the door for any further possibilities in that direction.”
Finally, with the picture ready to roll and Hughes and Hawks both fed up with being told what they could and could not do, they received a stern warning from Colonel Joy: “Under no circumstances is this film to be made. The American public and all conscientious State Boards of Censorship find mobster
and hoodlums repugnant. Gangsterism must not be mentioned in the cinema. If you should be foolhardy enough to make
Scarface
, this office will make certain it is never released.”
Enraged at the hypocrisy of an organization that had approved dozens of gangster films for release and sure that this was just another sign that the industry leaders wanted to chase him out of town, Hughes sent Hawks
a note: “Screw the Hays Office. Start the picture and make it as realistic, as exciting, as grisly as possible.”
The shooting of
Scarface
began on June 23, 1931. Most of the studio work was done at the Metropolitan Studios, at Formosa and Santa Monica Boulevard, which later became the Samuel Goldwyn Studios, while some additional filming was done at the Harold Lloyd Studios, at a small, ram-shackle
studio in Westwood, and at the Mayan Theater in downtown Los Angeles. Emboldened by Hughes’s command, Hawks played the toughness of the characters and the violence of the action to the hilt. He was also inspired to new heights artistically. For a director who had rejected fancy camera movements and stylistic frills after what he considered the failed experimentation of
Paid to Love
, Hawks’s opening
shot was like a glorious throwback to the silent cinema and a bouquet tossed to the influence of Expressionism. For three minutes, the camera drifts weightlessly amid the remnants of what has obviously been a bacchanalian gangster party. Beginning with a streetlamp going out, the camera moves down to show milk being delivered outside what had been a First Ward stag party. A cleaning man clears
some confetti off the potted palms and finds a brassiere on the floor, while the host, “Big Louie” Costillo, is well satisfied with himself, admitting to his two drunken buddies that his former partner Johnny Lovo is bound to cause trouble but boasting that he, Louie, is “on top of the world.” After Louie heads over to make a phone call, the camera continues right to pick up a shadow moving in
from the right, quietly whistling a theme from Donizetti’s opera
Lucia di Lammermoor
. The figure moves resolutely onward
toward the phone booth. Standing in silhouette, the figure draws a gun, says, “Hello, Louie,” and fires, shattering the elegant relaxation of the scene, launching a gang war, and getting
Scarface
off to a shocking start.
All through preproduction, Hawks’s right-hand man was
Richard Rosson, the brother of Arthur, who was to have directed
Underworld
, and Harold, Hawks’s cinematographer on
Trent’s Last Case
. As the film’s official “codirector,” Rosson not only helped with script matters and conceptualizing sequences, but would also shoot most of the action scenes (or second-unit sequences, as they would come to be called), notably the car crashes, machine gunning, and
many insert shots. Behind the camera, Hawks had Lee Garmes, “a great cameraman” who used half the light of an ordinary cinematographer. “We had more light in the houselights than we did on the set. We had just got some faster film too.” The other cinematographer was Hawks’s reliable collaborator from his silent pictures, L. William O’Connell, who shot with Rosson as well as with Hawks on numerous
scenes. “Garmes was the self-styled artist of Hollywood,” O’Connell explained. “He was a very daring cameraman, and he was the big shot of all the camera departments. He made himself important. He initiated contrast photography.… I did all the stunts. I wasn’t just a stooge to Lee Garmes on
Scarface
. We were scheduled out for different types of scenes.”
Garmes’s work is unusually sculpted and
hard-edged for the time, increasing the film’s tough, brutal quality. Hecht was so impressed with him that he made him cinematographer and codirector of his later independent New York pictures. He felt that Garmes was “one of the unsung heroes of Hollywood, who possibly knows more about direction than any five directors.” For his part, O’Connell’s proudest contribution was devising the memorable
shot in which, after Boris Karloff’s Gaffney is gunned down in a bowling alley, the final bowling pin spins and spins before falling down, giving the dead man a strike; O’Connell said that he rigged the pin with a wire to control its movements, but that the shot still took many takes to get right. He was impressed that “Hawks was full of symbolism.”
Carrying on a tradition of the silent cinema,
Hawks had live music played on the set to put his actors in the proper mood. However, his directorial ingenuity and tact were put to the test by the diametrically opposed problems presented by Muni and Raft, the technique-laden theatrical veteran and the rank amateur. When he started, Muni laid on both the Italian accent and the editorializing about his character far too thick. Hawks had him cut
down his accent by half, then by half again because, “we just want the
suggestion
that you’re Italian. It’s more in the inflection than in the
accent. Besides, we want to understand you.” Some viewers even pick up that Muni’s accent becomes less distinct as the picture progresses, as Tony Camonte grows more “American” and moves further away from his roots. Hawks also told Muni that he was initially
attacking his character too heavily and suggested that he lighten up his characterization by adding a playful veneer over Camonte’s innate viciousness. By way of example, he cited the famous story in which Capone hosted a banquet for a rival mobster, sang his praises, told some jokes, toasted him, then grew more serious and sarcastic until he pulled out a baseball bat and clubbed the man to
death. This scene was not included in
Scarface
but appeared nearly thirty years later in both
Party Girl
and
Some Like It Hot
, in which it was enacted by none other than George Raft himself. In 1987, Robert De Niro performed another version of it in
The Untouchables
. Muni threw himself into the role with the absorption and attention to detail for which he would become famous, arriving at the studio
at 5:30 A.M. to go over his scenes, practicing in front of a full-length mirror in his dressing room, and reciting his lines into a dictaphone so he could play them back and find the proper gestures to accompany them.
Raft required an entirely different sort of guidance. Hawks hired him for his look and personality and knew that his clothes, eyes, and mannerisms would be primarily responsible
for his effectiveness on-screen. Raft looked great in good clothes, and Hawks often inserted him into scenes where he actually had nothing to do, just to add to the mood and to give Gino Rinaldi weight and authority. As for Raft’s celebrated bit of flipping a coin, which Hawks believed “probably helped make him a star,” credit for it is once again disputed between the director and writer. Raft always
maintained that Hawks thought it up, and said that “I spent most of my time on the set practicing flipping the nickel.” Glad to accept responsibility, Hawks said that he got the idea from an old mob story about a killer who, as a sign of disrespect, left a measly nickel in the fist of his victim. John Lee Mahin, on the other hand, swore that Hecht wrote the bit of business into the script, which
he suspected Raft never even read.