Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood

by Todd McCarthy

  Hughes may have thought that kowtowing to Hays on all these points would automatically give him both the Production Seal and New York censor approval, but he was dead wrong. To his shock, when Hays, after a four-month delay, finally got around to showing the most watered-down version of Scarface to the Board of Review, it was rejected in its entirety. “So much for the alleged ‘cooperation,’” hooted Quarberg, “which you see has all been … just a plain scheme to delay the release of Scarface as long as possible, if not indefinitely.” In a confidential letter to Hughes, he wrote, “As you undoubtedly realize by now, the men who are actually running the picture business, including Will Hays and the Big-Shot Jews, particularly the MGM moguls, are secretly hoping you have made your last picture. They are jealous of your successful pictures, and have resented your independence, and your entrance into the industry from the start. On top of all this, they are inwardly incensed, and further aggravated, because you purchased the film rights to Queer People.” He suggested that his boss release Scarface instantly wherever possible, including California, and quit the Hays Association “with a grand public gesture.”

  Furious with Hays after having been strung along by him for so long with no results, Hughes left New York on February 11 amid rumors that he was quitting the picture business; it didn’t help matters that for long periods over the next two months Hughes would be incommunicado aboard his yacht. At this point, Quarberg felt that his best bet would be to drum up so much press and public outrage against Hays and the suppression of the picture that the pressure would force it out. He started by trying to arrange for Senators La Follette and Brookhart, two personal friends, to introduce a resolution in the United States Senate calling for nationwide investigation of motion picture censorship. On February 29, he screened the original version of Scarface at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood for two hundred members of the press, who gave the film the “greatest ovation ever accorded any motion picture at any preview. Broke into spontaneous applause at finish. All singing praises of picture. Scarface talk of Hollywood.” Three days later, the Los Angeles Times published a column of unrestrained support for the film, calling it “the best, most incisive gangster film ever done” and stating, “Had Scarface been produced at the height of the gangster epidemic it would have been an enormous sensation.” Calling the film a “masterpiece,” Billy Wilkerson of the Hollywood Reporter charged Will Hays with “hysterical gestures” in regard to Scarface. Quarberg arranged to show the picture in New York to Robert E. Sherwood, a writer whose film column was syndicated in hundreds of papers nationally. Sherwood was also a screenwriter, and no one at the time seemed to notice that he had recently written a film for Howard Hughes, Cock of the Air. United Artists confirmed Quarberg’s suspicions that it was working at cross-purposes with Hughes when, directly contrary to Quarberg’s instructions, it showed Sherwood the Hays version with the hanging ending rather than the original, thus inadvertently giving Sherwood the chance not only to praise the picture but to “give the Hays office the verbal lacing of their lives.” Revving up his campaign even further, Quarberg suggested that Hughes file suit in New York, “applying for a restraining order to prevent the state censor board from interfering with the showing of Scarface.”

  Finally convinced that Quarberg was right about Hays fronting a covert industry-wide campaign against Scarface and himself, Hughes decided to take his earlier advice and launch the picture in a market where there were no censorship concerns. United Artists booked the film into the Loews State Theatre in New Orleans, where it had its world premiere on March 31, 1932. Seizing the opportunity he had long sought, Quarberg surrounded the opening with all attendant hoopla, including having the print delivered by an armored truck driven down the entire length of Canal Street to the theater, flanked by two police motorcycles with sirens blaring. Not surprisingly, Scarface became the hit of the season, doubling the grosses of the year’s biggest opening up to then.

  Emboldened, Hughes and United Artists planned a general release for April 22 in the same “original version”—that is, with the “yellow” ending in which a fleeing Scarface is shot by police—presented in New Orleans. Sensing the tide turning after the Los Angeles screening, the Hays Office had begun dissembling and releasing disinformation, most of which was designed to make it look as though it had been responsible for a version of Scarface that was presentable to the public, rather than the cause of its long delay. Three days before the New Orleans opening, the Hays Office stated that “the picture has been completely remade by [Lewis] Milestone, and that it is the new Milestone version which is to be released,” adding that, “it was the Howard Hawks version, now discarded, which had been rejected by the N.Y. censors.” At one time, Hughes had considered letting Milestone take a crack at recutting Scarface for the benefit of the New York board, but this was never done. After the successful Los Angeles press screening, the Hays Office had also tried to claim that the cut shown there “was their revised version of the picture,” all of which begins to explain the confusion about the different versions of Scarface that have come down through the years.

  To ensure that his preferred version of the film be shown in all situations possible, Hughes put out the word that all prints with the “hanging” ending were to be rounded up and sequestered. The producer also finally resurfaced in the United States, turning up with Billie Dove at the opening of Scarface in his hometown of Houston on April 22. Hawks and Ann Dvorak, who had recently finished The Crowd Roars, also came in at Hughes’s request, and Scarface broke the opening-day house record at the Metropolitan Theater. Initial box-office results from other cities were strong as well, the tough Ohio censor board had just passed the picture without cuts, and it seemed that Quarberg’s persistence would pay off.

  Ironically, it was just at this moment of apparent victory that the tension that had long been felt between the Hughes organization and United Artists erupted into open fissures. In early April, without authorization from Hughes, Joe Schenck “had a print of Scarface cut and edited in New York to conform to all the latest censorship demands” in an attempt to get the picture out before Hughes filed legal action. A Hays-inspired attack on Scarface in the trade journal Film Daily provoked Hughes to withdraw all advertising from the publication, a move he forced a reluctant United Artists to make as well, and Schenck, who was still beholden to Hays even if Hughes wasn’t, became so embarrassed by Quarberg’s merciless attacks on “Elder Hays” that he demanded that Hughes restrain and, finally, fire the “meddlesome incompetent fool.” Hughes refused.

  Hughes’s response was to send telegrams to the eleven New York dailies, attacking the “politically controlled censor boards” and announcing immediate legal action to get the film shown in New York, Chicago, and elsewhere. In a last-ditch attempt to prevent such a move, Schenck submitted to the New York censors a “special print” including the Mulrooney antigun foreword and the hanging ending. In mid-May, Scarface was cleared for exhibition in New York State.

  Quarberg immediately put out a gloating press release declaring a “knockout victory over New York Board censors,” who placed their “stamp of approval on the original version of the picture.” In fact, the film had been approved “with eliminations,” but Hughes instructed United Artists not to publicize the fact that the New York version “is not original and unchanged version as of course picture will draw more customers if public told they will not see any censored version but will see the real thing and thus capitalize on the publicity we have already had on the controversy over censorship.” Personally, Quarberg was disappointed in Hughes for accepting the cuts in order to release the film quickly, rather than fighting it out, in court if necessary, for the original version. But financially, Hughes’s tactics paid off. Scarface finally opened in New York City on May 19, 1932. With local boy George Raft in town to boost interest further, the film played at the Rialto Theater for seventy-two hours straight at the start of its run and, as Variety put it, “opened like a machine gun in ac
tion,” grossing a tremendous $57,200 in its first week. As the trade paper described the patronage, “Picture is drawing a preponderance of male trade. Women represent only around 10% while the men represent everything from First to 10th Avenues. Femmes appear mostly to be of the carriage trade.” The film went on to gross $161,600 in seven weeks at the Rialto alone before heading out into neighborhood runs.

  Variety waited to review the hanging version at the film’s New York release. “Presumably the last of the gangster films, on a promise, it is going to make people sorry that there won’t be any more,” it predicted. Confirming that Hughes and Hawks had fulfilled their original intentions, the review stated that Scarface “bumps off more guys and mixes more blood with rum than most of the past gangster offerings combined. The blows are always softened by judicial preachments and sad endings for the sinners. But the punch is in the violence, the killings, the motives and the success of the cast in giving the director what he wants.” Word got out among the cognoscenti that, United Artists’ claims notwithstanding, the version on display in New York was not the one to see, so discerning New York critics and viewers wanting to see the unexpurgated version merely crossed the Hudson River into New Jersey.

  There were still some battles to be fought. It took the Pennsylvania Censor Board another two months to reverse its original decision and pass Scarface, and some cities, such as Dallas, insisted on the hanging ending. In Chicago, where Hughes’s previous gangster saga, The Racket, had never been permitted to play, the showing of Scarface was similarly blocked indefinitely. Ultimately, the censorship battle over Scarface held up the film’s release for just five to six months, not the two years often claimed by Hawks and many film historians.

  Overall, Scarface did very well at the box office, but it did not clean up as it might have had it been released at the height of the gangster craze, or had it enjoyed unlimited access to the nation’s markets. Between its first wave of bookings in 1932 and its final run in 1935, Scarface grossed $905,298 for United Artists, a healthy figure but well under half, for instance, of the $2,361,125 grossed by Hughes’s biggest hit, Hell’s Angels. Hughes’s deal gave him 75 percent of the gross. The original budget of Scarface was $600,000, but all the additional shooting and editing demanded by Hays had run costs well over $700,000. After all accounts were in, Hughes earned just a small profit on Scarface based upon domestic returns alone, although he received additional revenues from other territories, including Great Britain, where the film did well.

  Between 1936, when domestic distribution rights to Hughes’s productions were taken over by Astor Films, and 1947, when they were all reissued, Scarface grossed an additional $297,934, giving the picture a total U.S. gross of $1,203,233 before it was withdrawn from circulation. Thereafter, based on its reputation and almost utter unavailability, it became one of the most sought after films among buffs and scholars, viewable only overseas or at clandestine screenings, where the prints shown were almost invariably awful 16mm bootleg dupes of who knew what version of the film. Not until 1980, when most of the Hughes titles were bought by Universal, could Scarface once again be properly seen. Its return was heralded by a special showing at the New York Film Festival—marking the official Manhattan premiere of the original version, never before allowed into the city—and a screening at the Directors Guild of America in Los Angeles. Following were limited theatrical and video release, as well as Brian De Palma’s popular 1983 remake for Universal; the excess and carnage in this version should have been enough to set Will Hays spinning in his grave.

  Persuaded by Schenck not to make Queer People, frustrated over the enormous effort he’d put into films for marginal returns, and increasingly enamored of aviation, Howard Hughes, to the undoubted relief of the moguls, left the film business for nearly a decade. (When he returned, the censorship battle over Jane Russell’s appearance in The Outlaw would make the fight over Scarface look like a schoolyard squabble.) Often scornful of his Hollywood work-for-hire, Ben Hecht in later years denigrated Scarface: “I didn’t look at it,” he lied. “I thought it was a cheapy film. Just cheap stuff.” In fact, Hecht was deeply impressed with the film as it took shape on-screen, saying after he first saw it that, “It is the best-directed picture I have seen.” However, he did offer an interesting critique of Muni’s performance: “He didn’t use any of his talents in Scarface. He was a lyric actor with a great deal of emotion. He was a make-believe tough guy. You think he’s a menace, but he doesn’t do anything. You write the part for him, you say he’s tough, he’s ruthless, but … he just stares. He’s intelligent enough not to do the wrong thing.” He also remarked, “I knew Capone. But as Muni played it, Capone was a silent, moody fellow who was a little like Hitler.”

  As for Hawks, whenever he was asked about his favorites among his own pictures, even as he shuffled the titles of the others, Scarface always remained at the top of the list. At least part of the reason was his fondness for the circumstances under which it was made. It was his favorite, he said in the 1970s, because, like high fliers and gamblers, “we were completely alone, Hughes and I.” Speaking like John Wayne in Rio Bravo, he said he was proud that “we didn’t get any help from anybody. And that’s why I think I liked it best.”

  Scarface is far from a typical Hawks film. Few of his other films have a “rise and fall” structure (perhaps Land of the Pharaohs comes closest), and rarely again would overt stylistic flourishes assert themselves so prominently. Only a few more times would he work with “actors” rather “personalities,” and only in his World War II films would contemporary “issues” again play a role in his work. Certainly, it would be wonderful to see the true “original” version of Scarface, before the Hays Office became an artistic collaborator on it; at the same time, even the tampering that was done to the picture couldn’t eviscerate it, since Hecht and Hawks’s cynical, playful, irreverent, defiant attitude comes through in nearly every scene. Muni’s characterization may, in essence, be an artificial contrivance, but Hawks’s direction to lighten his approach, to give Tony a childlike glee, was crucial and allows the performance to work anyway. Karen Morley is overly sullen as Poppy, the wafting moll, lacking the sassy vibrance that practically any Warner Bros. contract actress could have brought to the role, and even Osgood Perkins is perhaps a bit too cultured and refined as the boss Scarface must mow down to take over the town. The only significant flaw, however, is the characterization of the police as one-dimensional boobs. It would seem that Hecht and Hawks missed a beat in not at least making the lead cop on the case, Guarino, someone formidable or at least interesting to watch. C. Henry Gordon, however, comes off like a mediocre member of a stock company, rushing to and fro in almost mock-earnest fashion in his futile effort to get the upper hand on Scarface. The scenes with Tony’s mother, which would have given the picture’s cynicism an added layer of depth had they been done Hecht’s way, also lend an air of creakiness to film as seen today. But Scarface remains, as it was in 1932, the last word on Chicago gangs-terdom of the 1920s, the smartest, cleverest, punchiest portrait of an individual mobster’s rise and fall. As would repeatedly happen throughout his career, Hawks didn’t make the first entry in a given genre, but he made one of the best.

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  Back to Warners: The Crowd Roars

  Hawks came out of the Scarface experience not only liking the film but quite liking his producer. Judging that he and Hughes had become “very good friends,” Hawks and the multimillionaire played golf together numerous times at various country clubs. At the time, Hawks had a four handicap, while Hughes had a five or six, and Hawks was amused that Hughes would never bet more than a dollar. He was also impressed by Hughes’s “amazing stick-to-it-ive-ness” in improving his game. Hawks went for dinner several times to Hughes’s Muirfield Drive home even though he tried to avoid it “because we were so badly fed. I’d get there for dinner and the butler would say, ‘I don’t know where he is.’ And I’d say, ‘Well, I’ll find him.’ And I’d go out and down to th
e garage and find him underneath the car, and he didn’t know what time it was.”

  Hawks felt that they had one major thing in common: “He was not a communicative man … and neither am I.” But in addition to films, the men’s relationship seemed based more than anything on their mutual fixation on cars and planes: Hughes drove and admired Hawks’s Dusenberg and decided he wanted one himself, although he continued to drive his beat-up Chevy when out by himself. “Many times he would call me and take that funny little Chevrolet that he had, and we’d go out in the desert and talk where—heck, I could yell and he wasn’t afraid of being overheard, because he was extremely sensitive about that.”

  Given that Hughes was well on his way to becoming one of the three or four most famous aviators in America, Hawks still needed in his own mind to place himself above his friend, saying that Hughes asked him frequently about planes he was building “because I’d been flying for a lot longer than he had.” Hawks never flew any of his friend’s planes, since Hughes never labeled any of his control-panel dials—“That’s kind of a quirk that he had,” Hawks said admiringly—nor was Hawks terribly fond of riding as a passenger in planes piloted by Hughes, “because I didn’t think he was a great flyer by any manner or means.” In the end, despite the tycoon’s eccentricities, Hawks found Hughes’s outlook on things very compatible to his own. “I liked the way he did things. He would argue like the devil over ten cents and go out and spend three or four thousand dollars. And it never took me any time to get a decision from him. I was a great admirer of his aeronautical world, of the things he did. He built a pursuit plane that was far better than any the combined army and navy have … so that has to be pretty damn good engineering.” Hawks said, “As far as I’m concerned, my type of man, Hughes was that type.”