Welcome back to Worth a Rewatch — new reviews and reevaluations of old films featured at Iowa’s nonprofit cinemas. Think of it as a small historical adventure, an investigation of an artifact and perhaps, the way that artifact’s meaning has changed over time. Today we look at Howard Hawks’ 1932 gangster magnum opus Scarface, which the Bijou Film Board will be screening at FilmScene on Saturday, March 28.
Scarface started with a lawsuit. Howard Hughes, the industrial magnate, had just finished his flying picture, Hell’s Angels, when he heard that Howard Hawks was making his own film about WWI fighter pilots, Dawn Patrol. Hughes had spent three years on Hell’s Angels. In the advent of talking pictures, he had to re-shoot most of the movie with sound, and it seems it was not the money he needed, but a good enough picture to justify all the time he spent.
Hughes arrived unannounced to Hawks’ house. Standing in his front door, he insisted that Hawks cut a scene where a pilot is shot in the chest and coughs up blood, because it was — Hughes asserted — very much like a scene from his own movie. Hawks told him, essentially, to stuff it. This was their first meeting.
Standing face to face, on opposite sides of an argument, they didn’t notice how much their ambitions aligned. Hughes was an outsider in Hollywood. He had bought his way in, and his choices as a producer were driven as much by a need to succeed as a desire to snub the studio system. Hawks was an unwilling insider. Although he was achieving wide acclaim, he felt restrained. He wanted liberty from studio tampering, from people who decided what pictures he could make.
After the lawsuit was thrown out, and after both films proved to be successful — it’s possible each film served as cross-promotion for the other — Hawks and Hughes warmed. At the same moment Hawks signed a three-picture deal with First National Pictures, Hawks and Hughes decided they wanted to make a gangster film together.
There was, at that time, an outcry from Christian leaders about the moral decay of American culture at the hands of moving pictures. They called for government intervention, and as a defense against this, Hollywood embraced William Hays, a Christian emissary. He developed and enforced a code of ethics that meant to make movies polemical, if not entirely innocent. The enforcement of the Hays code was erratic, however, often based on nothing but instinct and, at times, hysteria.
Hawks and Hughes planned to make the most violent, gritty gangster movie ever, based off the real crimes of Al Capone, who was at that very moment on trial in Chicago for racketeering. This was, to Hays, the epitome of everything wrong with Hollywood. And even before the first day of shooting, the Hays Office warned them, “under no circumstances is this film to be made.” Looming in the near distance were more lawsuits.
Hughes ignored this warning. The cast was a collection of unknowns, stage actors and, in George Raft’s case, actual gangsters. Working seven-day weeks, the 28-day shooting schedule still stretched into 60. The final product was, quantifiably, the most violent gangster picture ever made. One critic who saw the original film counted over 40 murders. This blew away Little Caesar, released the year before, which had only three.
When submitted to the Hays office for review, it is not surprising that the film was rejected in toto. In every reel there were things that Hays found unacceptable, but his major problem was the ending. It featured Scarface duking it out with the police, shooting wildly into crowds of people, tearing down the stairs, into the street, and falling to a barrage of bullets. Besides the violence, Hays didn’t like that Scarface died, in a way, heroically, insisting he should die like a coward, perhaps with one bullet or at the hands of a swift judicial system.
Hughes and Hawks had no interest in adhering to Hays, but without Hays’ approval, it became clear that there was no chance of the film being shown in whole swaths of the country, including New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio. It is through Hays that we get the infamous forward to Scarface, where the onus of gun crime is put on the audience: “What are you going to do about it?” He wrote that. From Hays, we also get a series of scenes in which civic leaders inexplicably appear to make speeches about “the gangster problem,” some of them touting weird, xenophobic solutions, like “packing them all up and sending them back to Italy.”
Hughes spent over $25,000 dollars on re-shoots, but when resubmitted, Scarface was rejected, again. After a year of working with the censors, it became apparent that Hays’ plan was to forestall a release indefinitely.
Hughes, in response, chose to release the film anyway and battle it out with local censor boards.
As often seems to happen (remember when the Catholic church condemned Billy Joel’s “Only the Good Die Young”?), all the censorship clangor only made people more interested. When Scarface was finally released in New York, at the Rialto Theater, it ran for 72 hours straight. The Rialto alone grossed $161,000 dollars (adjusted, that’s close to $4 million in today’s dollars).
For both sides, it looked like a victory. Hughes more than made his money back. In most states, Scarface was shown with limited amendments. And Hays proved that to push a movie past his office took time, money and lawyers that only a billionaire like Hughes could afford. It was celebrated as both a movie pried from the grasp of censorship and a swan song of the gangster film era.
