Howard Hawks’ ferocious, never-bettered gangster saga has the best of pre-Code thrills — sex and violence at the service of basic All-American ambition. Paul Muni’s Tony Camonte is a near-Neanderthal egoist crazy about Karen Morley but also his own sister, slinky Ann Dvorak. George Raft has his most famous role and Boris Karloff delights as a nervous bootlegging mobster. The big issue with this release?  It’s in 4K Ultra HD, which at first glance strikes us as format overkill.

Scarface (1932)
4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray
The Criterion Collection 1239
1932 / B&W / 1:35 / 95 min. / Scarface, Shame of a Nation / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date November 12, 2024 / 39.95
Starring: Paul Muni, Ann Dvorak, Karen Morley, Osgood Perkins, C. Henry Gordon, George Raft, Vince Barnett, Boris Karloff, Purnell Pratt, Tully Marshall, Inez Palange, Edwin Maxwell, John Lee Mahin.
Cinematography: Lee Garmes, L.W. O’Connell
Film Editor: Edward Curtiss
Art Director: Harry Oliver
Screen story by Ben Hecht, dialogue by Seton I. Miller, John Lee Mahin, W.R. Burnett from the book by Armitage Trail
Produced by Howard Hughes
Directed by Howard Hawks

We reviewed a rather good Blu-ray of Howard Hawks’  Scarface just three years ago, and were happy when Criterion announced a domestic disc last Fall. But a 4K Ultra HD release?  The film elements that have survived look just good enough to yield a reasonable Blu-ray image. Reader interest has been high enough to do another review once-over, and to compare Criterion’s new encoding to the April, 2021 [Imprint] release.

Brian De Palma’s excess-driven 1983 remake can’t hold a candle to this 1932 original, which so antagonized the censors that were able to get a restrictive Production Code passed two years later. Along with its contemporary gangster classics Little Caesar and The Public Enemy, Scarface was accused of glorifying criminality. Ben Hecht’s’ screenplay used a nickname for the notorious Al Capone, who had just been convicted of income tax evasion. The gang war depicted in the show depicts the St. Valentines’ Day Massacre, then a relatively recent event. With similar name changes, we meet stand-ins for notable hoods like Bugs Moran and Dion O’Bannion. Hecht once reported that after Scarface, some hoods visited him on behalf of the Chicago mob, just to chat. He and his playwriting partner Charles MacArthur ( The Front Page) had been newspapermen, sometimes writing crime stories. When a reporter in Scarface asks for an interview with a big hood, Hecht gave him MacArthur’s name.

The famed pre-Code gangster stars Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney are of course indelible originals with distinctive styles. The noted stage actor Paul Muni would soon be better known for playing  ‘great men‘ of history. Paul Muni’s ‘scarfaced’ gangster isn’t as easy to pin down — he’s a loathsome sociopath, a vulgar immigrant with zero self-control and even less self-awareness. But he’s always a menace, even when his gun moll laughs up her sleeve at his lack of manners and fashion sense.

Italian-American hit man Tony Camonte (Paul Muni) murders the top mob boss Big Louis Costillo (Henry J. Vejar) so that Johnny Lovo (Osgood Perkins) can take over the South Side. Tony’s strong-arm tactics quickly bring the bootleggers into line, but he is soon disobeying orders, moving into the North Side domain of Gaffney (Boris Karloff) and igniting a shooting war. Tony also makes moves on Lovo’s moll, Poppy (Karen Morley). His protective attitude toward his sister Cesca (Ann Dvorak) verges on incestuous possessiveness. It leads directly to his downfall, when Cesca falls in love with Tony’s closest associate, gunman Guino Rinaldo (George Raft).

A big slice of America has always hated immigrants on the basis of race, religion and ethnicity. Italian anti-defamation leagues must have been in an uproar over Paul Muni’s Tony Camonte, a woefully ignorant goon who sees Chicago as the Land of Opportunity for banditry on any level. Camonte isn’t part of a Mafia, he’s just a thug who ought to be deported.

He’s also a borderline psycho, a thug with good reflexes but an infantile mind, who only sees what he wants to take. Camonte is positively ecstatic to get his hands on a submachine gun: “Get out of my way Johnny, I’m gonna spit!”  At times Muni makes Tony seem primitive, almost ape-like. His untethered appetites and crude manners reminded critic Robin Wood of Fredric March’s very simian interpretation of  Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, released just the previous year.

Playing pretty boy to Muni’s ‘oily’ thug is the dancer-turned actor George Raft. His Guino Rinaldo is a loyal colleague given the famous bit of business of flipping a coin — legendary gangster lore that Billy Wilder later  reprised for nostalgic effect. The fantasy of brotherly loyalty in organized crime is a common theme in classic gangster films. Scarface finds tragedy in a mixup between Tony and Guino.

Maladjusted in her own way, Karen Morley’s gold digger Poppy is always looking for the Strong Man. She responds to Tony’s grotesquely blunt come-ons, amused that he misreads her insults as praise. Poppy becomes Tony’s girl when he takes over the mob. She clearly digs Tony’s crazy side, sharing in his excitement over his new machine gun. It’s a gangland spin on ‘baby makes three.’

Although Scarface has no explicit sex scenes, Poppy is obviously shacked up with Lovo and then Tony. She’s even more of a trophy dish than was Jean Harlow in The Public Enemy. Some say that the platinum blond Tony greets on the way to his table is Jean Harlow, making a cameo bit appearance.

Even more of an erotic charge is delivered by Ann Dvorak as Tony’s sister Cesca, an 18 year-old ‘wild kid’ eager to go crazy. Dvorak had worked as an assistant dance director before meeting Howard Hughes; the racy bit of dance-pantomime she puts on for Guino Rinaldo is a highlight of pre-Code sex appeal. The steadfast Guino is actually a good influence on Cesca.

Scarface excels on other levels as well. Tony Camonte’s mugging is often very funny, as when he all but becomes aroused by the steel shutters newly installed in his apartment. Tony’s hoodlum ‘secretary’ Angelo (Vince Barnett) provides direct comedy relief as a clown who can’t read or write and is incapable of answering a telephone. If Tony’s manic enthusiasm makes him seem infantile, Angelo is an outright baby. He is used several times to take the edge off a violent scene. In an Italian restaurant, Angelo keeps trying to talk on a telephone, even as the dinery is being shot up by Gaffney’s hoods. It’s the famous ‘drive by’ machine gun parade depicted in most every film about Al Capone.

Howard Hawks’ film is far more violent than either Little Caesar or The Public Enemy. Although some killings occur off camera, numerous machine gunnings, bombings, and other mayhem is right up front for the camera. Montages show hoods blasting at each other from vintage cars and then crashing into light posts and store fronts. Tony’s gangland demise is more violent as well. Cagney and Robinson exit with an element of pathos, but Tony goes out in a blaze of glory, fueled by a his twisted relationship with Cesca and a definingly damning mistake. He’s so crazed that he neglects the basics, like closing those steel shutters. Nobody over-reaches like an American gangster with the flaw of Hubris. The only exit is madness.

Scoring high in eroticism, humor and its violence, Scarface is also designed for maximum expressiveness. Hawks never allows the film frame settle into standard coverage. Tony is constantly on the move, and the camera must rush to track with him through bars, night clubs, and offices. The film’s striking transition montages quickly became a cliché. A machine gun is superimposed over calendar pages flying away — ‘another bullet, another day gone by.’  The imagery was so strong that the new Production Code made submachine guns a Hollywood taboo.

“X” marks the spot.

The most explicit bit of expressionist filmmaking is a graphic ‘X’ motif, that marks most of the film’s killings with a literal X, somewhere in the film frame. A big X hovers behind the main titles, and repeats whenever somebody is murdered. We see the Xs on a bowling scorecard, as guns are fired off-screen. In a down angle on a victim on the sidwewalk, a street sign provides the X. The art directors even come up with seven X’s for the infamous mass murder at the Clark Street Garage. The X’s have a weird effect, as if God were branding black marks on America’s moral scorecard.

A lot has been written about Howard Hughes’ battle with the Production Code Office over Scarface. As an independent he refused to censor his picture, resulting in many bans. Hughes was too powerful to suppress, so negotiations dragged out. A text opening was added, and maybe a pro- Law & Order speech, and eventually an entire different ending was filmed, showing Tony Camonte’s execution by hanging. Audiences in New York City were shown the censored ending, but fans could see the film uncut by taking a short train ride to New Jersey. The movie was banned outright when Code enforcement came, but Hughes retained the original version.

The Criterion Collection’s 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray of Scarface was a must-see from the beginning. Until a few years ago most all film copies were terrible. The video versions that circulated weren’t much better. We were told that the original negative was long gone, and assumed that only some miracle vault discovery could revive the movie in original condition.

Universal made an effort to restore Scarface a few years back, using an element identified as a duplicate negative, without saying how many generations is was from the lost original neg. It appears to have undergone some expert clean-up, digital finessing and a major audio going-over.

The Australian disc from 2021 was quite an upgrade; it was very similar to a Blu-ray added as an extra on a 2019 4K disc release of the
1983 remake. In both cases no restoration information was given, just text stating ‘a high definition presentation from Universal Pictures.’

The new 4K does not appear to be from any newly-discovered miracle source. Criterion’s text cites a new 4K digital restoration, which likely indicates more digital enhancements, if not a new scan. For the record, the feature clocks in at 93 min 41 seconds, although Criterion’s box reads 95. The picture looks very good for a vintage movie taken from a dupe neg. The 4K encoding does show a different, finer grain patterning on some scenes, but is it film grain?  Cameraman Lee Garmes shoots many scenes with filters, often blurring the edges of the frame.

The bottom line is that the 4K Scarface looks very good. But owners of the previous Blu-rays should not expect to see a dramatic improvement. We did a fairly close comparison between the Criterion 4K and the [Imprint] Blu-ray. The 4K often looks a little brighter, but the image varies throughout. On some scenes we thought the elevated exposure over-brightened some faces, but neither encoding looked consistently superior.

I’ve recently attended an online chat with a respected home video exec, an industry engineer and a colorist. When asked point-blank, the video experts wouldn’t commit to an opinon about old B&W films and Ultra HD encodings — whether the information in a HD Blu-ray encoding is more than sufficient. Scarface shouldn’t be used as an argument against 4K for old movies. For all we know, the Very Good image on both releases is a radical video rescue, and we don’t want to discourage any of that.

Criterion doesn’t overload the disc with extras. The alternate censored ending is one menu item. It’s actually the full final 13 minutes of the show even though the change seems to affect only the last 3 minutes or so, just long enough for a judge’s speech and a gallows scene.

Lea Jacobs gives a pretty good 17-minute talk about the audio work in Scarface, both the technical layering of sound and the way Hawks directed the dialogue reads to avoid the static quality of early talkies. Even better is a 37-minute talk by Megan Abbott and actor-director Bill Hader. What we think might be a superficial chat develops into a good discussion.

Imogen Sara Smith’s excellent essay on the foldout insert provides the authoritative critical study. Scarface is such a rich movie, it could have used a full commentary from a critic of Ms. Smith’s caliber.

We like Mark Chirello’s graphics for the cover art, menus, etc. They incorporate the title typeface style used on some original posters.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Scarface
4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Excellent
Video: Very Good ++
Sound: Excellent
Supplements:
An alternate ending, from the censored version of the film
A conversation with author Megan Abbott and actor Bill Hader
A visual essay by Lea Jacobs on director Howard Hawks’s innovative use of sound and editing
An insert folder with an essay by Imogen Sara Smith.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One Blu-ray in Keep case
Reviewed: December 8, 2024
(7242scar)

Visit CineSavant’s Main Column Page
Glenn Erickson answers most reader mail: cinesavant@gmail.com

Text © Copyright 2024 Glenn Erickson