Raft required an entirely different sort of guidance. Hawks hired him for his look and personality and knew that his clothes, eyes, and mannerisms would be primarily responsible for his effectiveness on-screen. Raft looked great in good clothes, and Hawks often inserted him into scenes where he actually had nothing to do, just to add to the mood and to give Gino Rinaldi weight and authority. As for Raft’s celebrated bit of flipping a coin, which Hawks believed “probably helped make him a star,” credit for it is once again disputed between the director and writer. Raft always maintained that Hawks thought it up, and said that “I spent most of my time on the set practicing flipping the nickel.” Glad to accept responsibility, Hawks said that he got the idea from an old mob story about a killer who, as a sign of disrespect, left a measly nickel in the fist of his victim. John Lee Mahin, on the other hand, swore that Hecht wrote the bit of business into the script, which he suspected Raft never even read.
Whoever invented it, Hawks recognized that giving Raft something to do would go a long way to cover his awkwardness and inexperience. “Having George flip the coin made him a character,” Hawks said. “The coin represented a hidden attitude—a kind of defiance, a held-back hostility, a coolness—which hadn’t been found in pictures up to that time; and it made George stand out.” Raft, who acknowledged that cheap hoodlums across the country began imitating him as soon as the film came out, admitted that flipping the coin helped him with the stress of repeated takes. “I had to flip the nickel so that my hand was steady and firm, and I even managed to do it while staring at someone.”
Raft even managed to do it during his death scene. When Muni played the scene of Scarface coming to his sister’s apartment and gunning down his best friend, Raft, who was tossing a coin on Hawks’s instructions, fell back and accidentally hit his head on the door. “When I slid down the door,” Raft recalled, “I was slightly unconscious and landed in a small pool of my own blood. My eyes sort of rolled up in my head, like people’s do when they are dying. The coin I had been tossing fell out of my hand. I heard Hawks say, ‘Print.’ Everyone there said this was the greatest movie death scene they ever saw. Hawks filmed the coin rolling along the floor until it lost its motion, and fell flat. Hawks told me later, ‘The roll of the coin and then its falling still told the story of Gino’s death.’” None of this ended up in the finished film, however; Raft simply slumps down in the doorframe upon being shot, shaking his head in stunned disbelief, his hand now empty of the coin it had been flipping.
Raft loved Hawks, saying he was “wonderful, wonderful” and that “he never bawled anybody out, in contrast to other directors, who’d always scream. He never talked above a whisper, and got the best out of everybody by being quiet.” Hawks later remarked, “Raft is one of the few actors who is grateful for the start I gave him. For ten years after we made Scarface, Raft would write me every year saying he’d do any story, anytime, anywhere—for half his normal price.”
Working seven-day weeks when the industry norm was six, Hawks pushed ahead with shooting, with Mahin revising dialogue daily. When Hughes, whom Hawks had audaciously banned from the set, saw dailies of the first car wreck caused by machine guns, he loved it so much he ordered Hawks to film several more of them, which depicted Scarface’s Reign of Terror. Inspired by newspapers’ habit of marking crime photographs with an X in the spot where bodies were found, Hawks wanted to use a running gag of a visual X in every scene involving a murder. He offered crew members first fifty dollars, then one hundred for any clever suggestion that made it into the film, and there are several good ones: the cross of an undertaker’s sign above a crime scene on a sidewalk; the roof supports in the garage setting of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre; the Roman numeral X on the apartment where Tony comes to kill Rinaldi; and, most memorably, the X mark for strike on Gaffney’s bowling line score. As usual, Hawks injected sly humor whenever possible, such as in the scene where Vince Barnett’s secretary survives a raid on his boss’s headquarters while on the telephone, but he also made the violence as realistic as possible, even down to using real bullets to tear up the place in the same sequence. The director filmed the destruction once without actors, then had the actors play before rear projection of the violence to heighten the realism. The use of live ammunition did have tragic consequences, however, on the night of July 16. Gaylord Lloyd, the brother of the celebrated comic star Harold Lloyd, was visiting during the filming of one of the big action set pieces. Against instructions, he changed position to get a better view and was hit in the eye by a ricocheting bullet. Despite prolonged efforts by doctors, he lost the eye permanently.
Hughes and Hawks had taken the attitude that they were going to shoot the picture they wanted to make, but they still had to play ball with the Hays Office if they hoped to show Scarface to the general public. On July 8, a test scene was submitted to Hays as an indication of “the atmosphere” of the picture. Three days later, however, Colonel Joy indicated to his boss that “inasmuch as they have everything in the story, including the inferences of incest, the picture is beginning to look worse and worse to us, from a censorship point of view.”
On July 22, Colonel Joy looked at rushes representing about a third of the picture and had lunch with Hawks and E. B. Derr, during which they “went over the shooting script with a fine tooth comb.” Joy told Hays that “they agreed to eliminate or change the countless things which render the script a violation of the Code.” However, the filmmakers still hadn’t agreed to three things requested by Hays: making a suitable “foreword” that condemned gangsterdom, writing “a strong speech by a suitable character,” and making the title character “yellow at the end.”
Joy looked at more footage on July 29 and again on August 20, but he felt that “radical” revisions would still be necessary; as things stood, he believed, only fifty percent of theaters in the United States would play the picture.
During July, Los Angeles experienced one of its worst heat waves on record, which could conceivably have contributed to Hughes’s frayed nerves and severe strain over the progress of production. Although thrilled with the results Hawks was getting, by midmonth he began putting heavy pressure on his director to pick up the pace; his original estimate of twenty-eight shooting days had already been reached and Hawks wasn’t even half done. For Hawks, there was also tremendous pressure at home, as Athole suffered one of her periodic attacks and had to be hospitalized. Under the circumstances, her husband scarcely had time to visit, much less care for her. On the job, Hawks tried to reassure his producer that he needed the extra time to make the film they both wanted, and Hughes had no choice but to wait until Hawks finished the picture to his own satisfaction. He finally did so at the end of August after a sixty-day shoot, and Hughes announced a November 28 release date through United Artists.
On September 8, Colonel Joy informed Will Hays about the film’s progress: “With Mr. Trotti we sat in with the executives of Caddo while the first rough-cut version of Scarface was screened, after which we argued for an hour for a complete revision of the ending of the story. If this suggestion is accepted, it will involve another five days’ shooting and will greatly weaken the value of the picture, but it will relieve the picture of any nonconformance to the Code.”
Endless conferences, discussions, and negotiations dragged on through September, with Trotti suggesting that “the ending be changed to show Scarface going yellow and being taken by police. An entirely new thread will be run through the picture shifting its meaning as follows: The gangster is a great man as long as he has a gun; once without a gun, he is a yellow rat. The final message of the picture will be—not to let criminals get possession of guns. Mr. Hawks was enthusiastic about the suggestion and will attempt to develop it and then sell the idea to Mr. Hughes.”
At the time, New York Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt, then a hopeful for the 1932 Democratic presidential nomination, was undertaking major legislation against the private ownership of machine guns; there was much hue and cry abou
t the issue of violence, and agitation to repeal Prohibition was reaching a peak. In mid-September, Joy and Trotti spent many hours with Hawks and Derr going over the antigun scenes as well as the new ending, which would take four days and $25,000 to shoot and “would be essential” if the picture were to be passed. “Mr. Hawks has a splendid conception of the whole plan and a dramatic finish which ought to make the picture acceptable.”
This “dramatic finish” was the climax seen on most prints of the picture, the one commonly accepted as the “official” ending, but one that was made only in an attempt to placate the Hays Office. Hawks, of course, regretted being forced into the compromise, and it seems probable that he recalled the never-seen original ending of Scarface when he (and an un-credited Ben Hecht) devised the violent conclusion to The Thing 20 years later, in which the monster is shot to smithereens and still won’t go down. Unable to use Hecht’s original ending, Hawks came up with a way to meet the censors’ insistence that Scarface turn “yellow” and be shown to be nothing without a gun. He began with the scene in Scarface’s armored lair by changing the tenor of Tony and Cesca’s final moments together. When his sister is shot, Tony becomes hysterical, cries “I’m no good by myself,” and insists that she mustn’t die, making her realize that he’s actually afraid. This was designed to prepare the audience for the sniveling cowardice with which he ends his life. Police tear gas drives him out and onto the stairway, where his gun is shot out of his hand. He asks to be given a break, then makes a run for it, whereupon he’s brought down by a few shots from the surrounding police, coming to rest beneath the sign announcing “The World Is Yours,” an echo of the beckoning “The City Is Yours” billboard in Underworld four years before.
This ending was shot at the end of September, with the Hughes team under the impression that it would win Scarface a Production Code seal and that the film would meet its newly advanced release date of November 12. Paul Muni caught the train back to New York the day after finishing these retakes in order to rush into rehearsal for Elmer Rice’s new play, Counsellor-at-Law. First National had been chomping at the bit waiting for Hawks to finish so he could return to direct a picture for them. The prolonged Scarface schedule had already forced him to yield the directing job on Environment (released as Alias the Doctor), starring Richard Barthelmess, to Michael Curtiz, and James Cagney and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. couldn’t wait much longer if they were going to team up in a boat-racing picture Hawks had proposed doing with them that fall. For his part, Hughes was anxious to begin recouping some money from his heavy film investments; his latest attempt to make Billie Dove a star, The Age of Love, was a bomb, and in August, after having spent more than $100,000 developing it, he had finally thrown in the towel on Queer People because of the strenuous opposition to it and a not entirely unrelated inability to find actors who would appear in it.
In the first week of October 1931, after nine months of work, Hawks departed Scarface and Howard Hughes’s employ and reported back to First National. Arguably, Scarface was entering the most difficult period of its birth pangs; additional scenes would be ordered shot, new titles would come and go, and tremendous battles would be waged between the Hughes side and the Hays Office, in particular, and various censorship forces, in general. Hawks, off directing The Crowd Roars, was around for none of it, and even Hughes, although deeply involved and kept informed by constant telegrams, letters, and phone calls, was away on his yacht during most of the struggle to keep Scarface from being dismembered or banned altogether.
In their absence, the standard bearer in the crusade on behalf of Scarface was Hughes’s publicity director, Lincoln (Link) Quarberg. A former newspaperman who knew key editors and writers on papers throughout the country and was known in town as the man who had dubbed Jean Harlow the “platinum blonde,” Link worked passionately and tirelessly to try to keep the film as undiluted as possible and was dead set against any compromise with the organs of censorship everywhere. Brash and extreme, he was prone to conspiracy theories when it came to the machinations of Hays, the studio heads, and government officials, but most of the time he was right. He eventually realized that Hays, having promised various censor boards a year earlier that he would rid the nation’s screens of gangster films, was dillydallying in order to keep Scarface away from the public indefinitely. Quarberg felt that the press and public would rally en masse behind Hughes, however unlikely the role of crusading civil libertarian might appear for the freewheeling millionaire. He also felt that “Elder Hays” and his ilk would ultimately do themselves in with their hypocritical self-righteousness, to the ultimate benefit of Scarface, if only Hughes would hang tough.
In mid-October, Colonel Joy, at Hughes’s expense, personally took a print of Scarface, as revised per the instructions of the Hays Office, to New York to show Will Hays and the New York Board of Review, which had to pass on all films to be shown in the state. At that time, the states with the most stringent cinematic morality standards were New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, which accounted for 40 percent of the nation’s moviegoing public. Many cities, notably Chicago and Dallas, had even tougher censor boards, and individual states could sometimes do surprising things; some months earlier, Maryland, one of the many states then considering a ban on gangster films, had cut the James Cagney smash The Public Enemy by about a half hour. It was this sort of haphazard, chaotic censoring that the Hays organization hoped to forestall, which was why Hughes felt at least halfway compelled to cooperate with him, in the hopes that clearance by Hays, especially in New York, would circumvent further censorship and open the doors to Scarface playing everywhere.
Joy showed Scarface to Hays and to Police Commissioner Mulrooney, who endorsed the picture. During his three weeks in the city, however, he insidiously refrained from screening it for the New York censors, because he and Hays feared that they might pass it. Instead, Joy returned to Hollywood to inform Hughes that more cuts would be needed, along with a new ending that would force Scarface to pay for his crimes. As Quarberg sarcastically remarked, “The Hays ending was a creative masterpiece. Although no gangster in real life has ever been hanged, they proposed to do just that with Scarface. And for fully four minutes after the picture, unmatched for realism, has logically ended, and the audience is walking out of the theatre, you are shown what happens to a bold, bad gunman—the trial, the conviction, the speech by the judge when he pronounces sentence, and all the other details of the hanging process, including the reading of the final death-warrant to the hangee, testing of the scaffold, dragging the condemned man to the noose, and finally the actual neck-stretching.”
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, e
ven 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.
Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood Page 20