Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood

by Todd McCarthy

  Raft was responsible for bringing Ann Dvorak into the picture. Raft brought the slender, eighteen-year-old chorus girl to an elegant party at Hawks’s home. Hawks recalled that “Ann asked [Raft] to dance with her but he said he’d rather not. She was a little high and right in front of him starts to do this sexy undulating dance, sort of trying to lure him on to dance with her. She was a knockout. She wore a black silk gown almost cut down to her hips. I’m sure that’s all she had on. After a while George couldn’t resist her suggestive dance and in no time they were doing a sensational number which stopped the party.”

  The evening proved fateful on a number of fronts. The next day, Hawks called Dvorak in to see him, and after working out a deal with Eddie Mannix to release her from her contract at MGM, where she was languishing on the vine, he cast her in the key role of Cesca, the sister Scarface loves who becomes involved with Raft’s Gino. So big an impression had Dvorak’s dance made on Hawks that he had her repeat it in the film, in the key nightclub scene in which Cesca tempts Gino onto the dance floor, marking the beginning of their passionate but doomed romance. For Hawks, “the scene played like a million dollars because it was something that really happened between George and Ann.”

  It was also the beginning of something happening between Howard and Ann. Lean and sharp-featured, very much to Hawks’s taste, Dvorak soon became the director’s after-hours companion in a liaison that lasted through Scarface and into their next picture together, The Crowd Roars. Hawks liked Dvorak’s sprightly, direct, unbashful manner, and she was one of the few actresses he ever used in two films.

  The other sexual crosscurrent on the Scarface company was an uncomfortable one involving Raft and Hughes. Raft had known Billie Dove in the late 1920s, when she was going out with New York Mayor Jimmy Walker. They met again during the Scarface shoot, and Raft, who claimed ignorance of Dove’s involvement with his boss, decided to push the relationship to a new level. Suspicious of what was going on, Hughes traced the couple to the Ambassador Hotel. A hoodlum pal of Raft’s noticed Hughes in the lobby and called the actor upstairs, who was right in the middle of things with Billie Dove at that moment. “She was pretty upset when I told her what was happening, since the last guy in the world either of us wanted to cross was Howard Hughes. So, as gracefully as I could, I said my good-byes to Billie, slipped down the service elevator, and beat it home.”

  Karen Morley won the role of Johnny Lovo’s blond moll whose choice in men shifts with the winds of power. Boris Karloff, the big-house killer in The Criminal Code, pressed Hawks for a role and got the similarly sinister part of Scarface’s crosstown rival, Gaffney. To play Scarface’s goofy personal secretary, Hawks resourcefully selected Vince Barnett, who had played a few bits before but who, along with his father, also worked as a professional ribber, or cutup, at parties and official functions. Expert at posing as a waiter and spilling things on people, or getting up and insulting bigwigs in front of their peers, Barnett, with his bald pate, out-turned ears, and childlike expression, had become too familiar a face to get away with this stuff anymore. So Hawks, by giving him his first important role, launched his career as a successful character actor. In all, the cast was a bargain, with only stage veterans Muni and Perkins earning anything resembling real money and everyone grateful for the break.

  By the time Ben Hecht was finished with his contributions to the script of Scarface, the story was much harsher, more cynical about human motivations and behavior, more jaundiced about political realities, and more forthright than the finished film would be. Scarface would still emerge as the most potent film about organized crime Hollywood would produce for decades, and even the diluted version went well beyond the contemporary norm in violence. The story of what happened to the content of Scarface between June 1, 1931, a month before shooting started, and its openings—in different versions in various parts of the country—the following April and May illustrates the vagaries of censorship laws in the U.S. at the time and specifically demonstrates how pressures could be brought to bear on producers during what is now considered the racy pre-Code era in Hollywood. The tale plays out as a pitched battle among the wills of some fiercely independent filmmakers, the financial priorities of businessmen, the righteous dander of the press, and the intrigues of politicians and officials with personal agendas of their own, which in some cases involved the neutralizing of Howard Hughes as a force in Hollywood.

  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 sa
me 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 play
ed 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.