At Hays’s instructions, this artistic death sentence was carried out, but without the participation of either Howard Hawks or Paul Muni. Using a double for Muni in long shots and relying on close-ups of cuffed hands, manacled feet, and
the prisoner’s back most of the time, Richard Rosson patched together this turgid, utterly unrealistic ending that satisfied only one man, Will Hays.
Through the fall, Quarberg did what he could to generate favorable word of mouth about
Scarface
in Hollywood, showing the original version to the
Hollywood Reporter
publisher Billy Wilkerson, who wrote a front-page editorial raving about the film
and urging that it be approved and released at once. Quarberg also argued to Hughes that the best parry to Hays’s delaying tactics would be to open the film immediately in all territories that did not have local censorship panels and let critical acclaim and public enthusiasm take care of the rest. Hughes was reluctant, however, feeling that too much of the country would remain off-limits for him
to recoup what was now a $700,000 investment, a sentiment seconded by Joe Schenck and United Artists, who would be releasing it.
Still dragging his feet despite Hughes’s compliance in making the hanging ending, Hays, by November, was insisting upon a new title that would reflect an anti-gangster stance. United Artists proposed
The Menace
and
An American Menace
, while Hays himself came up with
Shame of the Nation
. Hughes was ready to go along with
The Scar on the Nation
, even though Quarberg told him it sounded like a gag, as long as the ads bore the prominent credit line “from the book SCARFACE by Armitage Trail.”
In further compliance with Hays’s dictates, Hughes agreed to finance the shooting of yet another sequence, one showing indignant civic leaders in the office of a Hearst-like
newspaper publisher, accusing him of glamorizing gangsters in print. In response, the publisher fulminates against guns
and lack of legal action against these public menaces. The most notorious addition to the picture, the sequence was polished up by Seton I. Miller from material prepared by Colonel Joy and Caddo’s E. R. Derr and directed by Richard Rosson at the beginning of December. The scene
is so badly directed and acted, that Hawks, who had nothing to do with it, calmly told Hughes, “It can’t hurt the picture. Everybody will know it wasn’t part of the picture.”
Hughes spent nearly all of January 1932 in New York City, cooperating with the Hays Office with an eye to getting the film approved quickly and into general release on March 26. Aside from using the hanging ending, essentially
eliminating the incest theme, and accepting the
Shame of the Nation
title, Hughes agreed to tack on a special prologue for New York, delivered by Police Commissioner Mulrooney, who had approved the film’s original version months before. This would replace the written broadside against gangsterdom and public apathy previously prepared at Hays’s behest. On January 21, Hughes cabled Quarberg the
following message:
Naturally all of us would like to be able to make and release our pictures just as we wish however unfortunately I don’t own my own releasing company and when United Artists tells me they won’t release the picture unless passed by Hays and when the Publix Loews Fox and Warner chains of theatres state they will not play the picture unless passed by Hays there is only one thing
I can do and that is to get the picture passed by Hays and that I have done with as little damage as possible. The Mulrooney foreword will be used only in New York State. For general distribution the picture will carry the foreword which was on it when shipped to New York the last time which, it might interest you to know, was written by Mr. Hays personally. Furthermore, most of the last changes
were suggestions Mr. Hays was kind enough to give me. I showed him the picture and he thinks it vastly improved.
Hughes may have thought that kowtowing to Hays on all these points would automatically give him both the Production Seal and New York censor approval, but he was dead wrong. To his shock, when Hays, after a four-month delay, finally got around to showing the most watered-down version
of
Scarface
to the Board of Review, it was rejected in its entirety. “So much for the alleged ‘cooperation,’” hooted Quarberg, “which you see has all been … just a plain scheme to delay the release of
Scarface
as long
as possible, if not indefinitely.” In a confidential letter to Hughes, he wrote, “As you undoubtedly realize by now, the men who are actually running the picture business, including
Will Hays and the Big-Shot Jews, particularly the MGM moguls, are secretly hoping you have made your last picture. They are jealous of your successful pictures, and have resented your independence, and your entrance into the industry from the start. On top of all this, they are inwardly incensed, and further aggravated, because you purchased the film rights to
Queer People
.” He suggested that
his boss release
Scarface
instantly wherever possible, including California, and quit the Hays Association “with a grand public gesture.”
Furious with Hays after having been strung along by him for so long with no results, Hughes left New York on February 11 amid rumors that he was quitting the picture business; it didn’t help matters that for long periods over the next two months Hughes would
be incommunicado aboard his yacht. At this point, Quarberg felt that his best bet would be to drum up so much press and public outrage against Hays and the suppression of the picture that the pressure would force it out. He started by trying to arrange for Senators La Follette and Brookhart, two personal friends, to introduce a resolution in the United States Senate calling for nationwide investigation
of motion picture censorship. On February 29, he screened the original version of
Scarface
at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood for two hundred members of the press, who gave the film the “greatest ovation ever accorded any motion picture at any preview. Broke into spontaneous applause at finish. All singing praises of picture.
Scarface
talk of Hollywood.” Three days later, the
Los Angeles
Times
published a column of unrestrained support for the film, calling it “the best, most incisive gangster film ever done” and stating, “Had
Scarface
been produced at the height of the gangster epidemic it would have been an enormous sensation.” Calling the film a “masterpiece,” Billy Wilkerson of the
Hollywood Reporter
charged Will Hays with “hysterical gestures” in regard to
Scarface
. Quarberg
arranged to show the picture in New York to Robert E. Sherwood, a writer whose film column was syndicated in hundreds of papers nationally. Sherwood was also a screenwriter, and no one at the time seemed to notice that he had recently written a film for Howard Hughes,
Cock of the Air
. United Artists confirmed Quarberg’s suspicions that it was working at cross-purposes with Hughes when, directly
contrary to Quarberg’s instructions, it showed Sherwood the Hays version with the hanging ending rather than the original, thus inadvertently giving Sherwood the chance not only to praise the picture but to “give the Hays office the verbal lacing of their lives.” Revving up his campaign
even further, Quarberg suggested that Hughes file suit in New York, “applying for a restraining order to prevent
the state censor board from interfering with the showing of
Scarface
.”
Finally convinced that Quarberg was right about Hays fronting a covert industry-wide campaign against
Scarface
and himself, Hughes decided to take his earlier advice and launch the picture in a market where there were no censorship concerns. United Artists booked the film into the Loews State Theatre in New Orleans, where
it had its world premiere on March 31, 1932. Seizing the opportunity he had long sought, Quarberg surrounded the opening with all attendant hoopla, including having the print delivered by an armored truck driven down the entire length of Canal Street to the theater, flanked by two police motorcycles with sirens blaring. Not surprisingly,
Scarface
became the hit of the season, doubling the grosses
of the year’s biggest opening up to then.
Emboldened, Hughes and United Artists planned a general release for April 22 in the same “original version”—that is, with the “yellow” ending in which a fleeing Scarface is shot by police—presented in New Orleans. Sensing the tide turning after the Los Angeles screening, the Hays Office had begun dissembling and releasing disinformation, most of which
was designed to make it look as though it had been responsible for a version of
Scarface
that was presentable to the public, rather than the cause of its long delay. Three days before the New Orleans opening, the Hays Office stated that “the picture has been completely remade by [Lewis] Milestone, and that it is the new Milestone version which is to be released,” adding that, “it was the Howard
Hawks version, now discarded, which had been rejected by the N.Y. censors.” At one time, Hughes had considered letting Milestone take a crack at recutting
Scarface
for the benefit of the New York board, but this was never done. After the successful Los Angeles press screening, the Hays Office had also tried to claim that the cut shown there “was their revised version of the picture,” all of which
begins to explain the confusion about the different versions of
Scarface
that have come down through the years.
To ensure that his preferred version of the film be shown in all situations possible, Hughes put out the word that all prints with the “hanging” ending were to be rounded up and sequestered. The producer also finally resurfaced in the United States, turning up with Billie Dove at the opening of
Scarface
in his hometown of Houston on April 22. Hawks
and Ann Dvorak, who had recently finished
The Crowd Roars
, also came in at Hughes’s request, and
Scarface
broke the opening-day house record at the
Metropolitan Theater. Initial box-office results from other cities were strong as well, the tough Ohio censor board had just passed the picture without cuts, and it seemed that Quarberg’s persistence would pay off.
Ironically, it was just at this
moment of apparent victory that the tension that had long been felt between the Hughes organization and United Artists erupted into open fissures. In early April, without authorization from Hughes, Joe Schenck “had a print of
Scarface
cut and edited in New York to conform to all the latest censorship demands” in an attempt to get the picture out before Hughes filed legal action. A Hays-inspired
attack on
Scarface
in the trade journal
Film Daily
provoked Hughes to withdraw all advertising from the publication, a move he forced a reluctant United Artists to make as well, and Schenck, who was still beholden to Hays even if Hughes wasn’t, became so embarrassed by Quarberg’s merciless attacks on “Elder Hays” that he demanded that Hughes restrain and, finally, fire the “meddlesome incompetent
fool.” Hughes refused.
Hughes’s response was to send telegrams to the eleven New York dailies, attacking the “politically controlled censor boards” and announcing immediate legal action to get the film shown in New York, Chicago, and elsewhere. In a last-ditch attempt to prevent such a move, Schenck submitted to the New York censors a “special print” including the Mulrooney antigun foreword and
the hanging ending. In mid-May,
Scarface
was cleared for exhibition in New York State.
Quarberg immediately put out a gloating press release declaring a “knockout victory over New York Board censors,” who placed their “stamp of approval on the original version of the picture.” In fact, the film had been approved “with eliminations,” but Hughes instructed United Artists not to publicize the fact
that the New York version “is not original and unchanged version as of course picture will draw more customers if public told they will not see any censored version but will see the real thing and thus capitalize on the publicity we have already had on the controversy over censorship.” Personally, Quarberg was disappointed in Hughes for accepting the cuts in order to release the film quickly, rather
than fighting it out, in court if necessary, for the original version. But financially, Hughes’s tactics paid off.
Scarface
finally opened in New York City on May 19, 1932. With local boy George Raft in town to boost interest further, the film played at the Rialto Theater for seventy-two hours straight at the start of its run and, as
Variety
put it, “opened like a machine gun in action,” grossing
a tremendous $57,200 in its first week. As the trade paper described the patronage, “Picture is drawing a preponderance of male trade. Women represent only
around 10% while the men represent everything from First to 10th Avenues. Femmes appear mostly to be of the carriage trade.” The film went on to gross $161,600 in seven weeks at the Rialto alone before heading out into neighborhood runs.
Variety
waited to review the hanging version at the film’s New York release. “Presumably the last of the gangster films, on a promise, it is going to make people sorry that there won’t be any more,” it predicted. Confirming that Hughes and Hawks had fulfilled their original intentions, the review stated that
Scarface
“bumps off more guys and mixes more blood with rum than most of the past gangster
offerings combined. The blows are always softened by judicial preachments and sad endings for the sinners. But the punch is in the violence, the killings, the motives and the success of the cast in giving the director what he wants.” Word got out among the cognoscenti that, United Artists’ claims notwithstanding, the version on display in New York was not the one to see, so discerning New York
critics and viewers wanting to see the unexpurgated version merely crossed the Hudson River into New Jersey.
There were still some battles to be fought. It took the Pennsylvania Censor Board another two months to reverse its original decision and pass
Scarface
, and some cities, such as Dallas, insisted on the hanging ending. In Chicago, where Hughes’s previous gangster saga,
The Racket
, had never
been permitted to play, the showing of
Scarface
was similarly blocked indefinitely. Ultimately, the censorship battle over
Scarface
held up the film’s release for just five to six months, not the two years often claimed by Hawks and many film historians.