Howard Hawks | FRAGMENTEN UIT HET SCHEMERLAND

Directed by:
Howard Hawks, Richard Rosson

Written by:
Armitage Trail, Ben Hecht, Seton I. Miller

Cast:
Paul Muni (Tony), Ann Dvorak (Cesca), Karen Morley (Poppy), Osgood Perkins (Lovo), C. Henry Gordon (Guarino), George Raft (Rinaldo), Vince Barnett (Angelo), Boris Karloff (Gaffney), Purnell Pratt (Publisher), Tully Marshall (Managing Editor)

The original Scarface opens with a challenge — literally. The very first words on screen declare: “This picture is an indictment of gang rule in America. What are YOU going to do about it?” I can’t think of another film that confronts its audience so directly. It sets the tone for what’s to come: bold, brash, and unafraid to stir things up.

The story kicks off when Louis Costillo, the last of the old-school gang leaders, is gunned down. With him out of the way, Chicago is up for grabs. Enter Tony Camonte — a ruthless, trigger-happy Italian thug with big ambitions. He works for Johnny Lovo, a mob boss running the city’s bootlegging operations, but Tony clearly has bigger plans.

Tony’s greatest strength is his fearlessness. His greatest weakness? He’s reckless to the point of stupidity. At one point, he openly tells an underling — someone he barely knows — that he plans to kill Lovo and take over. Still, Tony lives by his own brutal code: “Do it first. Do it yourself. And keep doing it.” And for a while, that philosophy takes him far.

It’s no secret that Tony Camonte is a thinly veiled version of Al Capone — the real-life ‘Scarface’. The film even recreates the infamous St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, among other bloody moments from Capone’s reign. Paul Muni, who plays Tony, throws himself into the role with raw intensity. At times, maybe too much intensity. His exaggerated Italian accent borders on parody today — but to be fair, that larger-than-life acting style was very much in fashion back then.

Watching Scarface for the first time, I was struck by how much it echoes Brian De Palma’s 1983 version — the one I grew up with. Tony’s obsessive, almost incestuous protectiveness over his sister, the iconic ‘The World is Yours’ sign, and of course, his violent downfall in a hail of bullets — it’s all here. The DNA of De Palma’s Scarface runs straight back to Howard Hawks’ original.

But what really stood out to me on my recent rewatch was just how groundbreaking the action scenes are. The machine gun shootouts — stark, brutal, and filmed in gritty black and white — feel years ahead of their time. There’s a raw energy to them that still hits hard, even nearly a century later. This Scarface might not have the swagger of Al Pacino’s Tony Montana, but it’s every bit as bold, violent, and unforgettable.

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Quote:
TONY CAMONTE: “Hey, Cesca, you and me, huh? We’ll show them. We’ll lick them all, the North Side, the South Side! We’ll lick the whole world!”

Trivia:
Like many of the early gangster movies, real machine gun fire is used to create the bullet damage in walls, including scenes with main characters ducking gunfire.

Bullets Over Hollywood (2005, USA)

Director: Elaina Archer
Written by: John McCarty (book), Elaina Archer, Tom Marksbury
Features: Paul Sorvino (narrator), Leonard Maltin, Michael Madsen, Edward McDonald, ao.

Running Time: 70 mins.

This Hugh Hefner produced documentary shows the fascination of moviegoers with the mob. ‘Once in the racket, always in the racket’, Al Capone said who became the archetype of the gangster and role-model for some legendary movie characters like Caesar ‘Rico’ Bandello (Little Caesar) and Tony Camonte/Montana (Scarface) This also applies to Hollywood when it comes to making gangster films. Every time you think the realms of the genre have been fully explored, some new masterpiece comes along. After the time that Cagney, Robinson and Bogart dominated the screen, a new generation of filmmakers emerged in the seventies with Coppola, Scorsese and De Palma. Then at the brink of the new millennium, the Hollywood gangster legend continued on the small screen with The Sopranos.

Bullets Over Hollywood opens with the very first gangster film: The Musketeers Of Pig Alley, made in 1912. It then goes on to chronologically move through gangster film history right up until The Sopranos. The documentary combines film fragments, interviews and real gangster footage while Paul Sorvino (GoodFellas) provides the narrative. It is an interesting viewing for enthusiasts of the genre, but misses real insight in the works that it covers. Some interesting facts are revealed such as the story that Howard Hawks was forced by Hollywood to add ‘the shame of the nation’ to his gangsterfilm Scarface, because they didn’t want to glorify gangsters. Also interesting is some behind-the-scene footage of gangster classics, but these fragments are unfortunately a little brief. Altogether this is worth a look. If only to hear Leonard Maltin rave about The Godfather and to re-experience some of the finest sequences in the history of this fascinating American phenomenon.

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