Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood (28 page)

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grossed an additional $297,934, giving the picture a total U.S. gross of $1,203,233 before it was withdrawn from circulation.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.

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 the 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.”

Hawks’s passion for cars was at the root of his next film. As the sorry changes were being wrought on
Scarface
, Hawks was plotting to make his return to First National very much on his own terms.
The Barker: A Play of Carnival Life
, by Kenyon Nicholson, had been produced on Broadway in 1917 starring Walter Huston as a barker who is living with a younger woman. When his son comes to visit, the father doesn’t want him to discover the arrangement, so the older man has his girlfriend recruit a friend of hers
to seduce the son. Hawks liked this basic situation and decided to fold it into the sort of competitive story between two men that he instinctively favored.

More involved in yachting and boating of late, thanks to Athole, than in auto racing, Hawks initially considered setting the story in the milieu of speedboat racing, with James Cagney and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. as the leads, but he soon returned
to the sport he knew better. As the resulting film,
The Crowd Roars
, eventually turned out, the story concerned an older, experienced race-car driver who takes his green-but-avid younger brother under his wing. The change from father-son to brother-brother could easily be interpreted as an autobiographical move on Hawks’s part, a way of portraying his relationship with Kenneth on-screen. However,
Hawks’s original workup of the story, in which the characters are unrelated, shows that there’s nothing to this analysis; the story is more an expression of how women can disrupt the close relationship between close male friends. Joe Greer, a “hard-boiled veteran of the racing game; four-time winner at Indianapolis,” arrives with his buddy Spud Smith in Wichita, home of racing hopeful Eddie Murphy.
After Eddie impresses him with his skills, Joe asks the kid to drive his number-two car in a race the next day. When Eddie wins, Joe invites him on the remainder of the tour, which ends in Los Angeles with the winter racing season.

Back in L.A., Joe’s mistress, Lee, quickly comes to resent Joe’s preoccupation with Eddie, whom Joe now feels is a potential champion. When Joe and Lee split up, Lee
goes to stay with her friend Anne Morton—“a
pretty girl, no virgin”—to persuade her to hook Eddie, then sink him. Instead, after a wild party, Anne falls in love with Eddie after sleeping with him, which finishes off Joe and Eddie’s friendship. In the next race, Eddie races against Joe furiously; trying to avoid Eddie, Joe’s buddy Spud crashes and dies, whereupon the guilt-ridden Eddie disappears.

Suddenly, it’s Indy 500 time, and everyone converges there. Eddie and Anne meet again. During the race, Joe breaks an arm but keeps driving, but after Eddie, Anne, and Lee meet him during a pit stop, Eddie takes over in Joe’s car. Haunted by the black smoke of an accident he is forced to pass through again and again, as he did when Spud died, Eddie spins out, but he’s okay, and the foursome, reunited
and grinning, head off “already planning next year’s race.”

In October 1931, shortly before he reported back to Hughes to rewrite material for
Scarface
retakes, Seton Miller was paged by Hawks to help him with the story; this would be their eighth, and final, collaboration. At once, the character relationships changed: Joe Greer and Eddie became brothers, and Lee is introduced at the outset,
traveling with Joe and Spud. With his initial success, Eddie quickly becomes so cocky and obnoxious that Lee comes to hate him, and she isn’t pleased when her friend Anne falls in love with him rather than getting him out of the picture. Instead of being Eddie’s fault, Spud’s death is laid at Joe’s feet, and Joe then becomes a derelict. Wandering into Indianapolis, he runs into Lee in a hash house,
and Joe watches his brother doing well in the race until Eddie breaks his arm. Joe jumps in to drive while Eddie takes the mechanic’s seat, and as they spin out, the upbeat “wait ’til next year” ending remains.

Ever since seeing him for the first time, Hawks had wanted to work with Cagney, whose electric performance in
The Public Enemy
had shot him to stardom. With gangster films now out and
Warner Bros. wanting to modify the star’s image somewhat from the bantam tough guys he’d been playing,
The Roar of the Crowd
, as it was known during production, seemed like a good fit. To turn the Hawks-Miller story into a full screenplay, the studio’s new production chief, Darryl F. Zanuck, turned to the lot’s star writers, Kubec Glasmon and John Bright, who had written the previous four Cagney
films. Hawks was about to leave for Indiana with cameraman Hans F. Koenekamp to shoot some background racing footage in Indianapolis, so Glasmon and Bright joined them, stopping in South Bend on the way to attend the Notre Dame–University of Southern California football game, soak up some atmosphere, and meet some actual race drivers.

Older and more conservative Glasmon was a mentor to Bright,
a brash young left-winger who was responsible for a fair share of the proletarian fire that ripped through Warner Bros. films of the early 1930s. Unsurprisingly, Hawks took an immediate dislike to him, and Bright returned the compliment. While in Indianapolis, Glasmon and Bright stayed at a fleapit they called the “Hotel Cesspool” in order to hang out with the drivers, while Hawks stayed at the
mansion of Fred Dusenberg, the maker, with his brother Augie, of the most elegant new car in the country. Dusenberg readily agreed to loan quite a few racing cars for use in the picture, and Hawks slyly managed to induce him to throw in a new Dusenberg for himself in exchange for the publicity.