Online versions of the Goldenrod Handouts have color images & hot links September 4, 2018 (XXXVII:2) http://csac.buffalo.edu/goldenrodhandouts.html Howard Hawks (and Richard Rossen): SCARFACE (1932, 93

min)

DIRECTED BY Howard Hawks (Richard Rossen, co-director) WRITTEN BY Armitage Trail (based on the novel by), Ben Hecht (screen story), Seton I. Miller (continuity), John Lee Mahin (continuity), W.R. Burnett (continuity), Seton I. Miller (dialogue), John Lee Mahin (dialogue), W.R. Burnett (dialogue), Howard Hawks (uncredited) PRODUCED BY Howard Hawks (uncredited), Howard Hughes (uncredited) MUSIC BY Adolph Tandler (uncredited) CINEMATOGRAPHY Lee Garmes, L. William O'Connell FILM EDITING BY Edward Curtiss, Lewis Milestone (uncredited) VISUAL EFFECTS Howard A. Anderson (process photography) Selected for National Film Registry by the National Film Preservation Board, 1994 CAST Paul Muni...Tony Camonte Ann Dvorak...Cesca Camonte Karen Morley...Poppy Osgood Perkins...Johnny Lovo C. Henry Gordon...Police Inspector Guarino George Raft... Guino Rinaldo Vince Barnett...Angelo Boris Karloff...Tom Gaffney Purnell Pratt...Mr. Garston - Publisher Tully Marshall ...Managing Editor Inez Palange...Tony's Mother Edwin Maxwell...Detective Chief HOWARD HAWKS (b. May 30, 1896, Goshen, IN—d. December 26, 1977, Palm Springs, CA), beginning in the 1920s, directed 47 films. His early work in the 1920s includes: The Road to Glory and Fig Leaves in 1926; A Girl in Every Port (1928) and Trent’s Last Case (1929). His work in the 1930s includes several noteworthy classics: Scarface (1932), Twentieth Century (1934), Bringing Up Baby (1938), and Only Angels Have Wings (1939). In this decade, he would also direct such films as: The Dawn Patrol (1930); The Crowd Roars, Tiger

Shark, and La foule hurle in 1932; Today We Live (1933) and Barbary Coast (1935); The Road to Glory and Come and Get It in 1936. He would direct the comedy classic His Girl Friday in 1940, and he would be nominated for a Best Director Oscar for Sergeant York (1941) in 1942. In the 1940s, he would also direct such films as: Ball of Fire (1941) and The Outlaw (1943); To Have and Have Not (1944) and The Big Sleep (1946); Red River and A Song is Born (1948); and I Was a Male War Bride (1949). He would continue in the 1950s with films such as: The Big Sky (1952), Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) Land of the Pharaohs (1955), and Rio Bravo (1959). He would finish his directing career with such films as: Hatari! (1962), Man's Favorite Sport? (1964), Red Line 7000 (1965), El Dorado (1967), and Rio Lobo (1970). In 1975, he would be given an Honorary Award at the Academy Awards as “A master American filmmaker whose creative efforts hold a distinguished place in world cinema.” He also produced 27 films and was a story or screenplay writer or co-writer for 25 films. RICHARD ROSSEN (b. April 4, 1893, New York City, NY—d. May 31, 1953, Pacific Palisades, CA) began his film career as an actor in 1911. As an actor, he appeared in 88 films, before transitioning to film directing. While still acting, he directed a film in 1917, Her Father’s Keeper. He wouldn’t stop acting until appearing in 1922’s Always the Woman. He, then, would assume the role of director, exclusively, beginning with Fine Manners in

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1926. His directing career would last until 1943, with the release of Corvette K-225. LEE GARMES (b. May 27, 1898, Peoria, IL—d. August 31, 1978, Los Angeles, CA) was cinematographer for 144 films. His early work includes: The Hope Chest (1918); Fighting Blood, Some Punches and Judy (Short), Gall of the Wild (Short), The Knight That Failed (Short) in 1923; The Square Sex (Short), Bee's Knees (Short), Find Your Man, and The Lighthouse by the Sea (uncredited) in 1924; The Popular Sin (1926); The Garden of Allah, Rose of the Golden West, The Private Life of Helen of Troy in 1927; The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come and The Barker in 1928; His Captive Woman, Love and the Devil, and Disraeli (photographed by) in 1929. In 1931, he was nominated for a Best Cinematography Oscar for Morocco (1930); he won the Best Cinematography Oscar the following year for Shanghai Express (1932). In the 1930s, he did cinematography for such films as: Lilies of the Field (1930) and An American Tragedy (1931); Scarface and Strange Interlude (photographed by) in 1932; George White's Scandals (1934) and Gone with the Wind (1939, photographed by, uncredited). In 1945, he, with Stanley Cortez, would be nominated for the Best Cinematography, Black-and-White Oscar for Since You Went Away (1944). In the 1940s, he would continue to do cinematography for films such as: Angels Over Broadway (1940, director of photography); The Jungle Book (director of photography) and Footlight Serenade in 1942; Stormy Weather (uncredited) and Jack London (uncredited) in 1943; Paris Underground (1945) and Duel in the Sun (1946, director of photography); The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (director of photography) and The Paradine Case (photographed by) in 1947; Portrait of Jennie (1948, uncredited) and My Foolish Heart (1949, director of photography). In 1960, he was is nominated for Best Cinematography, Color for his 1959 film The Big Fisherman. In the 1950s, he also would do cinematography for such films as: My Friend Irma Goes West (1950, director of photography), Detective Story (1951, director of photography), and The Lusty Men (1952); Land of the Pharaohs, The Desperate Hours (director of photography), and Man with the Gun (director of photography) in 1955; The Bottom of the Bottle and D-Day the Sixth of June (director of photography) in 1956. In the final years of his career, he would do cinematography for such films as: Misty (1961, director of photography), Hemingway's Adventures of a Young Man (1962), Lady in a Cage (1964, director of photography), A Big Hand for the Little Lady (1966, director of photography), and Why (1973). In addition to his extensive work as a cinematographer, he also directed six films. L. WILLIAM O’CONNELL (b. July 31, 1890, Chicago, IL—d. February, 1985, Pinopolis, SC) did cinematography for 180 films such as: Missing (1918), The Little Grey Mouse (1920), The Sky Pilot (1921), Custer of Big Horn (1926), Slaves of Beauty (1927), and A Girl in Every Port (1928); The Big Timer (director of photography) and Scarface in 1932; Charlie Chan in London (1934); Road Gang and Bengal Tiger in 1936; Alcatraz Island (1937) and Nancy Drew: Detective (1938); Nancy Drew... Trouble Shooter and Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase in 1939; The Blonde from Singapore (director of photography) and Dangerously They Live (director of photography) in 1941; After

Midnight with Boston Blackie (director of photography), Murder in Times Square (director of photography), The Boy from Stalingrad, Passport to Suez, and The Return of the Vampire in 1943; Stars on Parade (director of photography), Louisiana Hayride (director of photography), and Cry of the Werewolf in 1944; The Crime Doctor's Courage, The Power of the Whistler, and Life with Blondie in 1945; Blondie's Lucky Day (director of photography), Sweetheart of Sigma Chi, and Bringing Up Father in 1946; Jiggs and Maggie in Society (1947), Assigned to Danger (1948, director of photography), Jiggs and Maggie Out West (1950), Trouble In-Laws (1951, Short, director of photography), and The Gink at the Sink (1952, Short, director of photography).

PAUL MUNI (b. Frederich Meshilem Meier Weisenfreund, September 22, 1895, Lemberg, Galicia, Austria-Hungary [now Lviv, Ukraine]—d. August 25, 1967, Montecito, CA) began his acting career as an adolescent with the Yiddish Theater group located in the Bowery section of New York City. He made his Broadway debut in a 1926 production of We Americans. His first film role was in The Valiant in 1929. This performance led to his first Best Actor in a Leading Role Oscar nomination in 1930. He would go on to act in 29 roles, mostly in film. He was consistently nominated for the Oscar for Best Actor in a Leading Role in the 1930s: I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932) in 1934, Black Fury (1935) in 1936, and The Life of Emile Zola (1937) in 1938. He won the Oscar for Best Actor in a Leading Role in 1937 for The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936). During this time, he also acted in films such as: Seven Faces (1929), Scarface (1932), Bordertown (1935), The Good Earth (1937), and Juarez (1939). In the 1940s and 1950s he acts in films such as: Hudson's Bay (1941), Commandos Strike at Dawn (1942), Stage Door Canteen (1943), A Song to Remember (1945), Angel on My Shoulder (1946), Stranger on the Prowl (1952), and The Last Angry Man (1959), for which he was, once again, nominated for a Best Actor in a Leading Role Oscar in 1960. During the 1950s, he also acted in several televised theater series, such as: The Ford Television Theatre (1953), General Electric Theater (1956), and Playhouse 90 (1958). He also acted in the television series Saints and Sinners in 1962. ANN DVORAK (b. August 2, 1911, New York City, NY—d. December 10, 1979, Honolulu, HI) acted in 96 films, some of which are: Ramona (1916), The Man Hater (1917), The Five

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Dollar Plate (1920, Short), and The Hollywood Revue of 1929 (1929) in the 1910s and 1920s; Our Blushing Brides, Way Out West, and Madam Satan in 1930; Dance, Fools, Dance, Just a Gigolo, and This Modern Age in 1931; Scarface (1932); Massacre and I Sell Anything in 1934; 'G' Men (1935) and We Who Are About to Die (1937); Merrily We Live and Gangs of New York in 1938; Blind Alley (1939); Cafe Hostess and Girls of the Road in 1940; This Was Paris (1942); Flame of Barbary Coast and Masquerade in Mexico in 1945; Abilene Town (1946); The Private Affairs of Bel Ami and The Long Night in 1947; The Walls of Jericho (1948) and The Return of Jesse James (1950); I Was an American Spy and The Secret of Convict Lake in 1951.

GEORGE RAFT (b. September 26, 1901, New York, NY—d. November 24, 1980, Los Angeles, CA) acted in 84 parts in film and television, some of which are: Queen of the Night Clubs and Gold Diggers of Broadway in 1929; Goldie (1931); Dancers in the Dark, Scarface, Night World in 1932; Pick-up (1933), The Trumpet Blows (1934), She Couldn't Take It (1935), and Each Dawn I Die (1939); The House Across the Bay and They Drive by Night in 1940; Broadway (1942), Stage Door Canteen (1943), Johnny Angel (1945), Mr. Ace (1946), Intrigue (1947), Race Street (1948), Johnny Allegro (1949), Loan Shark (1953), Black Widow (1954), A Bullet for Joey (1955), Around the World in 80 Days (1956), Some Like It Hot (1959), and Ocean's 11 (1960); Batman (TV Series) and Casino Royale in 1967; Sextette (1978) and The Man with Bogart's Face (1980). OSGOOD PERKINS (b. May 16, 1892, West Newton, MA—d. September 21, 1937, Washington, District of Columbia) acted in 21 films, such as: The Cradle Buster (1922); Second Fiddle and Puritan Passions in 1923; Wild, Wild Susan (1925) and Love 'Em and Leave 'Em (1926); Scarface (1932); Madame Du Barry and The President Vanishes in 1934; Gold Diggers of 1937 (1936) and A Star Is Born (1937). C. HENRY GORDON (b. June 17, 1884, New York City, NY—d. December 3, 1940, Los Angeles, CA) acted in 80 films, such as: A Devil with Women (1930); Charlie Chan Carries On, The Black Camel, and Mata Hari in 1931; The Gay Caballero, Scarface, The Doomed Battalion, and Rasputin and the Empress in 1932; Gabriel Over the White House and Night Flight in 1933; Fugitive Lovers (1934); Under Two Flags and The Charge of the Light Brigade in 1936; Trapped by G-Men (1937); Tarzan's

Revenge, Invisible Enemy, and Yellow Jack in 1938; The Return of the Cisco Kid (1939); Passport to Alcatraz, Kit Carson, and Charlie Chan at the Wax Museum in 1940.

BORIS KARLOFF (b. November 23, 1887, Camberwell, London, England, UK—d. February 2, 1969, Midhurst, Sussex, England, UK) acted in 207 film and television roles, beginning with a bit part in The Dumb Girl of Portici in 1916. His career was pretty much cast in concrete with his 70th film role as the monster in Frankenstein (1931). His career spanned the 1910s

through the early 1970s, appearing in films such as: The Lightning Raider and The Masked Rider in 1919; The Last of the Mohicans (1920), Omar the Tentmaker (1922), The General (1926), Tarzan and the Golden Lion (1927), Vultures of the Sea (1928), and The Phantom of the North (1929). In addition to his career-defining role in Frankenstein, he also appeared in films such as The Criminal Code and Graft in 1931. In the 1930s, he also appeared in films such as: Scarface, The Miracle Man, The Mask of Fu Manchu, and The Mummy in 1932; The Ghoul (1933) and The Lost Patrol (1934); Bride of Frankenstein and The Raven in 1935; The Walking Dead, The Man Who Lived Again, and Charlie Chan at the Opera in 1936; Devil's Island, Son of Frankenstein, The Mystery of Mr. Wong, Mr. Wong in Chinatown, The Man They Could Not Hang, and Tower of London in 1939. In the 1940s and 1950s, he appeared in films such as: Doomed to Die, Before I Hang, and The Ape in 1940; The Climax and House of Frankenstein in 1944; The Body Snatcher (1945) and Bedlam (1946); The Secret Life of Walter Mitty and Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome in 1947; and Abbott and Costello Meet the Killer, Boris Karloff (1949), Abbott and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1953), and Frankenstein 1970 (1958). In the last decade of his career, he appeared in films such as: The Raven and The Terror in 1963; The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini and The Venetian Affair in 1966; Targets, House of Evil, and Fear Chamber in 1968; Cauldron of Blood (1970); Isle of the Snake People and Alien Terror in 1970. In the 1950s and 1960s, he was also very active in television acting, appearing in such productions as: The Boris Karloff Mystery Playhouse (1949, TV Series), CBS Television Workshop (1952, TV Series), A Connecticut Yankee (1955, TV Movie), The Alcoa Hour (1956, TV Series), Shirley Temple's Storybook (1958, TV Series), Playhouse 90 (1956-1960, TV Series), Route 66 (1962, TV Series), and The Wild Wild West (1966, TV Series). “Howard Hawks.” from World Film Directors v. I Ed John Wakeman HW Wilson Co NY 1987 (entry by Gerald Mast) Director, producer and scenarist, Howard (Winchester) Hawks, was born in Goshen, Indiana. A child of the American

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Midwest, like Thomas Edison. In the era of America’s romance with inventors and inventions, Hawks would travel on his love of machines to the art of machines, the motion picture. The son of a wealthy paper manufacturer and grandson of a wealthy lumberman, Hawks moved west with his family in 1906. They settled in Pasadena, California, where the warmer and drier air was kinder to his mother’s asthma. The movies themselves traveled west about the same time. The young Hawks moved between east and west for his education—prep school at Phillips Exeter, graduation from Pasadena High School, and a degree in engineering from Cornell University He began to spend time with the new movie companies that were turning Hollywood into a company town. In 1917 he worked as a prop boy for Famous Players-Lasky, assisting Marshall Neilan on Mary Pickford films. Later that year he joined US Army Air Corps as a flying instructor. He would combine his two loves—for flying and filming—in years to come. In the early 1920s, Hawks shared a Hollywood house with several young men on the threshold of movie distinction—Allan Dwan and Irving Thalberg among them. Thalberg recommended Hawks to Jesse Lasky, who in 1924 was looking for bright young man to run the story department of Famous Players. For two years Hawks supervised the development and writing of every script for the company that was to become Paramount, the most powerful studio in 1920s Hollywood. William Fox invited Hawks to join his company in 1926, offering him a chance to direct the scripts he had developed. The Road to Glory was the first of eight films Hawks directed at Fox in the next three years, all of them silent except The Air Circus (1928) and Trent’s Last Case (1929), part-talkies in the years of Hollywood’s transition between silence and sound. Of the Fox silents, only Fig Leaves (1926) and A Girl in Every Port (1928) survive. The former is a comedy of gender, tracing domestic warfare from Adam and Eve to their modern descendants. A Girl in Every Port is “a love story between two men,” in Hawks’ words—two brawling sailor buddies who fall for the woman. The motif of two friends who share the same love would recur in many Hawks sound films, particularly in the 1930s (Tiger Shark, Today We Live, Barbary Coast, The Road to Glory). The motif of two wandering pals, enjoying the sexual benefits of travel, returns with a gender reversal in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, with Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell playing the two traveling buddies. More than anything else, A Girl in Every Port declared male friendship one of Hawks’ primary concerns. With the end of his Fox contract in 1929, Hawks would never again sign a long-term contract with a single studio. It was the coming of synchronized sound that allowed Hawks to become so independent a film stylist. The Dawn Patrol (1930) was a remarkable early sound film in many respects. Its pacifism mirrored the reaction against the First World War in a

period that produced such antiwar films as What Price Glory?. The Big Parade, and All Quiet on the Western Front. The flying sequences in The Dawn Patrol were as photographically brilliant as they were aeronautically accurate. Flying and filming had never before been so beautifully mated, and Hawks flavorful dialogue sounded as if it were uttered by human beings, not orating actors. The affected, stilted diction that marred so many early talkies was entirely absent. Dialogue in Hawks’ films would always suggest the feel and flavor of spontaneous conversation rather than scripted lines—he in fact not only permitted his players to improvise but deliberately hired players

who would and could. Scarface (1930-1932) brought this spontaneous quality from the wartime skies to the urban streets. Scarface remains simultaneously one of the most brutal and most funny of gangster films—“as vehement, vitriolic, and passionate a work as has been made about Prohibition,” in the opinion of Manny Farber. When Tony Camonte lets go with his new machine gun into a rack of pool cues, or the O’Hara gang shoots a restaurant to smithereens, they are murderous children having “fun,” one of the most important words in Hawks’

critical lexicon. Hawks’ antihero Tony, a fanciful portrait of Al Capone sketched by Paul Muni, is not only a spiteful kid; he also nurses an unarticulated and repressed sexual attraction to his own sister and guns down their best friend (George Raft) who invades this Freudian turf. Hawks’ recurrent piece of physical business for Raft—the obsessive flipping of a coin—has survived ever after as the quintessential gangster’s tic. It introduced the familiar Hawks method of deflecting psychological revelation from explicit dialogue to the subtle handling of physical objects. As John Belton notes, “Hawks’ characterization is rooted in the physical. Scarface also introduced Hawks to two important professional associates: Howard Hughes, who produced the film and would weave through Hawks’ entire career as either ally or enemy; and Ben Hecht, the hard-drinking, wise-cracking writer who, like Hawks, wanted to make films that were “fun.” Hecht and Hawks were kindred cynics who would work together for twenty years. Hughes, however, had his own war to win. A lifetime foe of film industry censorship boards, Hughes resisted attempts to soften Scarface. He finally relented, not by toning down its brutal humor but by inserting a drab lecture on the social responsibility of voters. He also concluded the film with the fallen mobster’s whining cowardice, to take the glamor out of his defiance. But Hughes was so enraged at being pressured into these emendations that he withdrew the film from circulation for four decades. Only his death returned it to American audiences. Hawks traveled to other studios and genres in the 1930s. Columbia gave him a prison movie, The Criminal Code (1931). The Crowd Roars (1932) at Warner Brothers was his first picture about auto racing, another Hawks hobby; he designed the automobile that won the 1936 Indianapolis 500. Tiger Shark (1932), for Warners’ subsidiary, First National, took Hawks to

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sea with Edward G. Robinson and the fishing fleet. Hawks depicted the professional business of tuna fishing in this film with the same documentary accuracy and regard for detail that he devoted to flying in The Dawn Patrol or driving in The Crowd Roars. His earliest talkies established a key pattern: in the words of Andrew Sarris, “The Hawksian hero is upheld by an instinctive professionalism.” Hawks returned to wartime professionals in Today We Live (1933) and The Road to Glory (1936). The former was adapted from “Turn About,” a story by William Faulkner, and began Hawks’ personal and professional association with the writer. Like Hawks, Faulkner loved flying and, like Hawks, had lost a brother in an air crash. Both men also liked drinking and storytelling. Hawks and Faulkner would drink, fly, and tell stories together over the next twenty years. Today We Live, made at MGM, began another Hawks pattern—walking off the set when studio bosses interfered with his filming. Today We Live was the only film Hawks completed under a three-picture agreement with MGM. After tolerating Louis B. Mayer’s interference on this first film, mostly in the handling of star Joan Crawford, Hawks refused to finish two others (The Prizefighter and the Lady, and Viva Villa!). He would never return to MGM. Perhaps Hawks’ most interesting genre films in the 1930s were screwball comedies. Hawks was a master of a genre that has come to represent one of the period’s most revealing reflections of American aspirations. As the philosopher Stanley Cavell argued, the screwball comedy enacts the “myth of modern marriage,” the basis of our culture’s idea of happiness. While Hawks always added comic touches to serious stories—from Scarface in 1930 to El Dorado in 1967—the pure comedy provided much broader comic possibilities. Love and friendship had always been closely intertwined in his films, and since Hawks friends fight as much as they talk, fight because they are friends, each convinced of his own rightness, it was a very short step from male friends to male-female lovers. The Hawks screwball comedy is distinctive in that the hero and heroine are as much friends as lovers and as much fighting opponents as spiritual kin; it is a comedy of ego in which two strong personalities fight because they love. Hawks’ first work in this genre Twentieth Century (1934), was adapted from a stage play by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur. Along with Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night, made in the same year and at the same studio (Columbia), Twentieth Century was one of the films that defined the screwball genre. The two warring egos of Twentieth Century are the monomaniacal impresario Oscar Jaffe (played by the monomaniacal ham, John Barrymore) and his actress Galatea, Lily Garland (played by Hawks’ own cousin, Carole Lombard, in her first major comic role). The film demonstrated several Hawks traits, including breakneck dialogue that refused to soften or sentimentalize the combat, and the revelation of internal psychological states through concrete external objects—the

visible, photographic means of making clear inner feelings that his characters never verbally express….The film also set the two essential Hawks patterns with movie stars: making a familiar star into a comedic parody of his own persona (as Hawks would later do with Cary Grant, Humphrey Bogart, John Wayne, and Marilyn Monroe); and inventing the persona of a total unknown (future Hawks Galateas included Frances Farmer, Rita

Hayworth, Jane Russell, Lauren Bacall, Montgomery Clift, Joan Collins, and Angie Dickinson). Bringing Up Baby (1938) at RKO, “the screwiest of screwball comedies” for Andrew Sarris, was also the first of Hawks’ four screwball comedies with Cary Grant. In these films the smooth Grant not only becomes the alter ego of the icily smooth Howard Hawks behind the camera; he also becomes the butt of jokes that the world longs to inflict on the icily smooth. “Whereas the dramas show the mastery of man over nature. . . ,” according to Peter Wollen, “the comedies show his humiliation, his regression.” Hawks endlessly submits Grant to degrading attacks on his handsome masculinity, usually by removing his pants and putting him in a dress. In Bringing Up Baby Grant is a nearsighted zoologist who

spends a midsummer night’s eve with Katherine Hepburn, apparently chasing leopards and lost dinosaur bones. What he finds instead is his love and his eyesight—indeed his recognition that love is the secret of vision. In His Girl Friday (1940), adapted from The Front Page, another Hecht-MacArthur stage hit, Hawks changes the gender of the original newspaper reporter from male to female (Rosalind Russell), initiating a contest with her editor (Grant) that is both love and war. In the end, she too recovers her eyesight to discover love in their combative friendship…. Hawks spent the early 1940s with two personalities less slick, cool, and distant than Grant. Gary Cooper made two films for Hawks, both in 1941. Sergeant York, produced at Warners by Jesse Lasky, Hawks’ first boss, features Cooper as the homespun pacifist who became a World War I hero. Hawks’ most honored film in his lifetime, Sergeant York brought him his only Academy Award nomination for best director….Another wartime alternative to Cary Grant was Humphrey Bogart. The Bogart quality Hawks exploited—quite the opposite of Cooper’s open warmth—was a tendency to hide the heart behind a tough mask of emotional indifference and vocal taciturnity. Hawks had always liked characters who did and felt more than they said and Bogart became an especially effective partner for Hawks’ newest find, Lauren Bacall.... If the decade and a half from 1938 to 1952 marked Hawks’ Cary Grant period, split by the war years, the final two decades of Hawks’ creative career marked his John Wayne period. Red River (1948) was both Hawks’ first Wayne film and his first Western apart from The Outlaw, a Billy the Kid film that Hawks began in 1941 but quit on account of conflict with its producer, Howard Hughes. Hughes’ resulting resentment had considerable impact on Red River, for he demanded that Hawks

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delete footage resembling scenes in The Outlaw or face a lawsuit. Red River was Hawks’ most epic film, the story of a cattle drive from Texas to Kansas, in which the wanderers travel thousands of miles, facing both the external challenge of the physical universe and the internal struggle against their own psychological defects. Wayne plays the older rancher, Thomas Dunson, a man whose will, determination, and courage have built a cattle empire; Montgomery Clift, in his first film role, plays the younger partner, Matthew Garth_Duson’s adopted son, friend, and “lover.” When Dunson’s unswerving commitment to his own values threatens the success of the drive, Matthew usurps Duson’s command in a Western Mutiny on the Bouny. Dunson swears to track Matthew down and kill him. He tracks him down, but as father faces son and friend faces friend, Dunson learns that a vow spoken in haste and anger is not worth defending. In Red River Hawks shaped the essential John Wayne persona—the inflexible man of honor, courage, and will whom no adversary can break but love can bend. After Red River, Hawks and Wayne took three more trips to the Old West—in Rio Bravo (1959), El Dorado (1967), and Rio Lobo (1970). They also traveled to the wilds of Africa in Hatari! (1962), where Hawks’ extended sequences of tracking wild animals provide another masterly film document of courageous and knowledgeable professionals performing an exotically difficult job. As both Wayne and Hawks grew older, their films together showed their age while defying it, settling into a comfortable social landscape with comfortable friends to perform tasks beyond the capacity of younger, less experienced men…. The final fifteen years of Hawks’ life brought him wider public recognition than he had ever known in his busiest years of studio activity. Respected inside the industry as one of Hollywood’s sturdiest directors of top stars in taut stories, Hawks acquired little fame outside it until the rise of the auteur theory in France, England, and America between 1953 and 1962. To some extent, it was the auteur theory that made Hawks a household name and Hawks that made auteur theory a household idea. In their campaign against both European “art films” and solemn adaptations of literary classics, articulators of the auteur view—François Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, Peter Wollen, V.S. Perkins, Ian Cameron, Andrew Sarris, John Belton, William Paul—looked for studio directors of genre films whose work displayed both a consistent cinematic style and consistent narrative motifs. Hawks was the model of such a director. He spent fifteen years in interviews denying any serious artistic aspiration, claiming that all he wanted to do was tell a story. But a Hawks story had an unmistakable look, feel, and focus. His style, though never obtrusive, had always been built on certain basic elements: a careful attention to the basic qualities of light (the lamps that always hang in a Hawks frame); the counter-point of on-frame action and off-frame sound; the improvisationally casual sound of Hawks’ conversation; the reluctance of characters to articulate their inner feelings, and the transference of emotional material from dialogue to physical objects; symmetrically balanced frames that produce a dialectic between opposite halves of the frame. So too, Hawks’ films, no matter what the genre, handled consistent plot motifs: a small band of professionals committed to doing their jobs as well as the could; pairs of friends who were

also lovers and opponents; reversal of conventional gender expectations about manly men and womanly women. Dressed as routine Hollywood genre pictures, Hawks’ films were psychological studies of people in action, simultaneously trying to be true to themselves and faithful to the group. In his classic conflict of love and honor, Hawks was the American movie descendant of Corneille. He died at the age of eighty-one in Palm Springs, California, from complications arising from a broken hip when he tripped over one of his dogs. Even as he grew older he continued to ride his motorcycle and raise his martini. He was married three times, and had four children–two of whom work in the film industry. His primary legacies are his films and his persona as the modest professional in a bombastic business, a man who could make the structures and the strictures of that business work for him, so he could tell the stories he wanted to tell in the way he wanted to tell tem.

Who the Devil Made It Conversations with Legendary Film Directors. Peter Bogdanovich. Ballantine Books NY 1997 . . .I liked almost anybody that made you realize who in the devil was making the picture. . .Because the director’s the storyteller and should have his own method of telling it. Howard Hawks Among American directors, Orson Welles referred to Hawks as “certainly the most talented.” French critic Henri Agel wrote: “Hawks is one of the rare patricians of the screen and his ethic is of human nobility.” Offbeat critic Manny Farber said: “Howard Hawks is the key figure in the male action film because he shows a maximum speed, inner life, and view, with the least amount of flat feet. His best films have the swallowed-up intricacy of a good softshoe dance.” But French director Jacques Rivette nailed it: “If Hawks incarnates the classic American cinema, if he has brought nobility to every genre, then it is because, in each case, he has found that particular genre’s essential quality and grandeur, and blended his personal themes with those the American tradition had already enriched and made profound.” The great variety of Hawks’ pictures—there really isn’t any kind of movie he didn’t make—speaks for a restless desire to challenge oneself, perhaps almost as a kind of renewal. His characters do that—it is a part of their professionalism as well as of their bravery. Hawks put it simply: “For me the best drama is the one that deals with a man in danger.”

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[Bogdanovich of Hawks] He said to me once—and I remembered it quite often on every picture I’ve made: “Always cut on movement, and the audience won’t notice the cut.” Comedy and drama were often interchangeable with Hawks: he said that when he read a story, he first tried to see if a comedy could be made of it and if not, he made a drama. So many things Howard said to me echo in my head, and did on every film I made. In 1965, on the set of El Dorado, he told me: “An audience doesn’t know the geography of a place unless you show it to them. If you don’t show them, it can be anything you want it to be.” In other words: a movie is the world you make it. And Hawks made his worlds his way, was an amazingly modern picture maker—his work stays in tune with changing times far more than most. He also had a sharp eye for human archetypes, a nearly flawless sense of human nature’s contradictions in mythic form. He also had an almost infallible nose for movie mistakes: terrific advice I didn’t always heed and regretted when I didn’t…. If you had to pick your own favorites, which would you say they were? I think Scarface is the favorite, because we got no help from anybody—we were outlawed....Also, I like Red River. And Rio Bravo was fun. And Bringing Up Baby. I like the comedies—I like it when you go and hear people laugh and you know they like it.

Roger Ebert: “In Memory: Howard Hawks,” December 29, 1977 When Howard Hawks came to visit the Chicago Film Festival in 1968, they asked Charles Flynn to get up on the stage and introduce him. And Flynn, who was helping to run Doc Films at the University of Chicago at the time, gave an introduction that was so simple in its eloquence that I remembered it the other day, when I learned Hawks had died. "Howard Hawks makes movies about airplanes," Flynn said. "He makes movies about fast cars. He makes movies about men who do things: Soldiers, and cowboys, and private eyes, and hunters, and racing car drivers, and the men who built the pyramids. Mr. Hawks makes movies about men and women and sometimes the battles in those are bigger than the ones in his war movies. Mr. Hawks makes Westerns and war movies, comedies and dramas, backstage romances and melodramas, and he has been doing it since 1926. There is, in fact, almost no kind of

movie that Mr. Hawks can not make, and has not made, and there is almost nobody at all who can make them better than he does." It was a perfect introduction, as lean and spare and honest as a Howard Hawks movie - and without, as Hawks observed later, a lot of flowery crap about Art. Hawks never consciously aimed for art in his films, and was perhaps quietly amazed that people found it there. But they did. He was never as well known with the public as some of his contemporaries, like Hitchcock and DeMille and Ford. But if you loved movies, you lost a friend the other day. Hawks directed some of the greatest entertainments ever made, and fundamentally shaped the way we perceive many of the great stars. Humphrey Bogart was partially the creation of Howard Hawks, In “The Big Sleep” (1946) and “To Have and Have Not” (in which Lauren Bacall told Bogey: "If you want anything, just whistle. You know how to whistle, don't you? You just pucker your lips and blow."). Cary Grant was partially the creation of Hawks, in “Bringing Up Baby” and “His Girl Friday” (which was “The Front Page,” rewritten by Hawks to give one of the male roles to Rosalind Russell). John Wayne is another mythic presence created in several Hawks films. Marilyn Monroe was never more sexy or more vulnerable than in “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.” Dean Martin and Robert Mitchum may have thought they knew how to play drunks - but they played their definitive drunks for Howard Hawks, in “Rio Bravo” and “El Dorado”. Those last two Westerns, made in 1959 and 1967 respectively, had a little something in common with Hawks' last film, “Rio Lobo”, made in 1970. They all had the same plot, about the out-of-town gunman who rides in and meets his old friend, the drunken sheriff, and teams up to help him clear out the bad guys. To Hawks, it didn't matter that the story was the same: It wasn't what happened that made a movie good, but the way people behaved toward each other, the way they looked and spoke and moved and lit a cigarette. Onstage at the film festival, Hawks poked a little fun at himself over those three Westerns. "I made “Rio Bravo” with John Wayne," he remembered. "It worked out pretty well and we both liked it, so a few years later we decided to make it again. Worked out pretty good that time, too. So now I'm preparing “Rio Lobo”. I called up Duke and asked him if he wanted to be in it. Sure, he said, he'd do it with me. I asked him if he wanted me to send the script over. 'Hell, Howard,' he said, 'I've already done the goddamned script two times'." Now he'll never do it again. But Howard Winchester Hawks, who died Monday at the age of 81, had not retired. He was planning another Western up until a few weeks before his death. Wanted to get John Wayne to star in it. It was about… hell, you know what it was about. Scarface from Public Enemies Public Heroes Screening the Gangster from Little Caesar to Touch of Evil. Jonathan Munby U Chicago Chicago & London 1999 The early 1930s gangster film was singled out for censorship. . . . Significantly, it is the cultural historian rather than the film studies scholar who has highlighted the more seditious features of Hollywood’s gangster. Situating the gangster film in the

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context of the Depression, Richard Pells, for example, interprets the gangster as “a parody of the American Dream. . . a psychopathic Horatio Alger. . . a reproach to both the principles of the market place and the reigning values of American life.” For what made Little Caesar, Public Enemy, and Scarface so different from anything that had come before was that their protagonists spoke in ethnic urban vernacular voices. Edward G. Robinson (Little Caesar), James Cagney (Public Enemy), and Paul Muni (Scarface) were stars of a stock entirely different from what had come before. Most obviously, they were not Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Edwin G. Robinson’s real name was Emmanuel Goldberg, and Paul Muni’s real name was Friedrich Muni Meyer Weisenfreund. Both were New York Lower East Side immigrant Jews who had gained their formative theatrical experiences on the Yiddish stage. James Cagney was also a city boy from the Lower East Side (of Irish Catholic stock) who had honed his performance skills on the vaudeville stage, and who prided himself on having learned Yiddish to survive in the ghetto street culture. The collusion of real and cinematic identity had everything to do with the refinement of the gangster as an “authentic” American type. Fears about Hollywood’s contributions to the general breakdown of social mores that had been spawned in the 1920s took on even more intensity in the aftermath of the Crash. More significantly, if this fear was directed at issues of sex and nudity during the 1920s, it found a new target in the glorification of lawlessness in 1930. Here was the most obvious sign of Hollywood’s capacity to facilitate social degeneration. Furthermore, to valorize gangsterdom and bootlegging in the context of the early Depression years could only intensify such objections. To temper things, Hollywood introduced a form of self-censorship that suited, ultimately, its own interests. The gangster film disclaimer was the most obvious example of this. The rhetoric of civic responsibility comes to form a frame narrative, as it were, which attempts to impose a preferred reading on the rest of the text. Such an imposition, however, had to compete with a range of other meanings, including precisely a rejection of moral and civic norms. SCARFACE: “THE WORLD IS YOURS” (ONLY IF YOU CAN “TALK NICE”) To the extent that it is clearly based on the exploits of Al Capone (even including the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre), we might call Scarface an attempt at documentary expressionism. But rather than pretend to execute an

environmentalist (disinterested, objectivist, and historical realist) representation of the world of the criminal “other” (like Public Enemy), Scarface declares itself as a deliberately subjective and allegorical view of gangsterdom. Like Little Caesar, Scarface’s narrative is structured around a rise and fall motif. The mythology of capitalist opportunity and success is given distinctly public marking in the form of a travel company’s neon billboard towering above the urban landscape that announces “The World is Yours.”

Just as Rico in Little Caesar is ascetic and intensely jealous of Olga (his partner’s lover) and just as Tommy Powers in Public Enemy cannot make love to Gwen (Jean Harlow), Tony also cannot fit into the heterosexual economy. Scarface, building on its predecessors, takes the problem of the gangter’s sexuality to a new level of intensity through the suggestion of incest. Tony makes the wrong object choice in falling for his own sister,

Cesca (Ann Dvorak). Insanely jealous of the love his partner Guido (George Raft) feels for her, Tony kills him. Questions of literacy and elocution are understood as questions of power. Scarface’s producers came under pressure to add a scene featuring a moral diatribe by a press representative and moral custodians against the gangster. It was hoped this would help temper the movie’s encouragement of sympathy for such criminals. Scarface was prohibited from release until censors’ demands were met. The theme of incest was problematic enough, but worse still the film seemed to condone Tony’s behavior. The film simply glorified the gangster and offered no moral lesson. Structurally, this arose, as I have argued, from the problem of having a decentered hero as the primary figure for audience identification. . . . After protracted argument producer Howard Hughes gave way to the intervention, which involved not only adding scenes but cutting a major (and violent) action sequence. What resulted, however, was not a successful (re)moralization of the plot. (Howard Hawks refused to participate in the shooting of added scenes.) The ending of Scarface features our protagonist suddenly turning yellow, which is entirely out of character with Tony’s general portrayal as someone cool in the face of fire. Sound’s introduction to the gangster film was an essential element in lending sanction to the perspective of the ethnic cultural “other” on the American screen. The contentious meaning of these early 1930s gangster films was contingent not only on the time they appeared (on the back of the Wall Street Crash and in the last years of Prohibition) and the medium in which they appeared (the mass cinema), but on the irony of how

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sound helped expose the cultural prejudice involved in their own censure by civic and moral pressure groups. Censorship in Scarface (Wikipedia) Scarface was produced and filmed before the Motion Picture Association (MPAA) was founded and before the "R" rating was established. Will Hays was the chairman of the Motion Pictures Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) at the time. This board later became known as the Hays Office. The goal of the Hays office was to censor out nudity, sexuality, drug use and crime.[40] More specifically, the Hays Office wanted to avoid the sympathetic portrayal of crime by either showing criminals recognizing the error of their way or showing the criminals get punished.[41] J.E. Smyth called Scarface, "one of the most highly censored films in Hollywood history."[42] Howard Hawks believed the censorship office had personal vendettas against the movie specifically, while Hughes believed the censorship was due to "ulterior and political motives" of corrupt politicians.[43] However, James Wingate of the New York censor boards rebutted that Hughes was preoccupied with "box office publicity" in producing the film.[44] After repeated demands for a script rewrite from the Hays Office, Hughes ordered Hawks to shoot the film, "Screw the Hays Office, make it as realistic, and grisly as possible."[45] The Hays Office was outraged by Scarface when they screened it. The Hays office called for scenes to be deleted, scenes to be added that condemn gangsterism, and a different ending. They believed that Tony's death at the end of the film was too glorifying. In addition to the violence, the MPPDA felt that an inappropriate relationship between the main character and his sister was too overt, especially in one scene where he holds her in his arms after he slaps her and tears her dress; they ordered this scene be deleted. Hughes, in order to receive the MPPDA's approval, deleted some of the more violent scenes, added a prologue to condemn gangsterism, and wrote a new ending.[46] In addition, a couple scenes were added to overtly condemn gangsterism such as a scene in which a newspaper publisher looks at the screen and directly admonishes the government and the public for their lack of action in fighting against mob violence and a scene in which the chief detective denounces the glorification of gangsters.[47] Hawks refused to shoot the extra scenes and the alternate ending so they were directed by Richard Rossen, earning Rossen the title of "co-director".[48] Hughes was instructed to change the title to The Menace, Shame of the Nation or Yellow to clarify the subject of the film; after month of haggling, he compromised by titling it Scarface, Shame of the Nation and adding a foreword condemning the "gangster" in a general sense.[49] Hughes also made an attempt to release the film under the title "The Scar" when the original title was disallowed by the Hays office.[50] Besides the title, the term "Scarface" was removed completely from the film. In the scene where Tony kills Rinaldo, Cesca says the word "murderer", but she can be seen actually mouthing the word "Scarface".[51] The original script had Tony's mother loving her son unconditionally, accepting his lifestyle, and even accepting money and gifts from him. In addition, there was a politician who, despite campaigning against gangsters on the podium, is shown partying with them after hours. The script ending had Tony staying in the building, unaffected by tear gas and a multitude of bullets fired at him. It is not until the building is on

fire that Tony is forced to exit the building, guns blazing. He is sprayed with police gun fire but appears unfazed. Upon noticing the police officer who had been arresting him throughout the film, he fires at him, only to hear a single "click" noise implying that his gun is empty. He is then killed after being shot several times by said police officer. A repeated clicking noise is heard on the soundtrack implying that he was still attempting to fire while he was dying.[45] “Al Capone” (Wikipedia) Alphonse Gabriel Capone (January 17, 1899 – January 25, 1947), sometimes known by the nickname "Scarface", was an American gangster and businessman who attained notoriety during the Prohibition era as the co-founder and boss of the Chicago Outfit. His seven-year reign as crime boss ended when he was 33. Capone was born in New York City, to Italian immigrants. He was a Five Points Gang member who became a bouncer in organized crime premises such as brothels. In his early twenties, he moved to Chicago and became a bodyguard and trusted factotum for Johnny Torrio, head of a criminal syndicate that illegally supplied alcohol—the forerunner of the Outfit—and was politically protected through the Unione Siciliana. A conflict with the North Side Gang was instrumental in Capone's rise and fall. Torrio went into retirement after North Side gunmen almost killed him, handing control to Capone. Capone expanded the bootlegging business through increasingly violent means, but his mutually profitable relationships with mayor William Hale Thompson and the city's police meant he seemed safe from law enforcement. Capone apparently reveled in attention, such as the cheers from spectators when he appeared at ball games. He made donations to various charities and was viewed by many as "modern-day Robin Hood". However, the Saint Valentine's Day Massacre, in which seven gang rivals were murdered in broad daylight, damaged Chicago's and Capone's image, leading influential citizens to demand government action and newspapers to dub Capone "Public Enemy No. 1". The federal authorities became intent on jailing Capone and prosecuted him in 1931 for tax evasion, which was at that time a federal crime; the prosecution was a novel strategy. During a highly publicized case, the judge admitted as evidence Capone's admissions of his income and unpaid taxes during prior (and ultimately abortive) negotiations to pay the government taxes he owed. He was convicted and sentenced to 11 years in federal prison. After conviction, he replaced his defense team with experts in tax law, and his grounds for appeal were strengthened by a Supreme Court ruling, but his appeal ultimately failed. Capone showed signs of syphilitic dementia early in his sentence and became increasingly debilitated before being released after eight years of incarceration. On January 25, 1947, Capone died of cardiac arrest after suffering a stroke.

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COMING UP IN THE FALL 2018 BUFFALO FILM SEMINARS SERIES 37

SEPT 11 DOROTHY ARZNER, CHRISTOPHER STRONG, 1933 SEPT 18 OTTO PREMINGER, LAURA, 1944

SEPT 25 GIUSEPPE DE SANTIS, BITTER RICE, 1949 OCT 2 AKIRA KUROSAWA, RASHOMON, 1950

OCT 9 PIER PAOLO PASOLINI, THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. MATTHEW, 1964

OCT 16 ROBERT BRESSON, MOUCHETTE, 1967 OCT 23 MIKE HODGES, GET CARTER, 1971

OCT 30 DAVID LYNCH, THE ELEPHANT MAN, 1980 NOV 6 KRZYSZTOF KIESLOWSKI, THREE COLORS: BLUE, 1993

NOV 13 ALAN MAK AND WAI-KEUNG LAU, INFERNAL AFFAIRS, 2002

NOV 20 MARTIN SCORSESE, THE DEPARTED, 2006 NOV 27 TOM MCCARTHY, SPOTLIGHT, 2015

DEC 4 JOHN HUSTON, THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING, 1975 CONTACTS:...email Diane Christian: engdc@buffalo.edu…email Bruce Jackson bjackson@buffalo.edu...for the series schedule, annotations, links and updates: http://buffalofilmseminars.com...to subscribe to the weekly email informational notes, send an email to addto list@buffalofilmseminars.com....for cast and crew info on any film: http://imdb.com/

The Buffalo Film Seminars are presented by the State University of New York at Buffalo and the Dipson Amherst Theatre, with

support from the Robert and Patricia Colby Foundation and the Buffalo News.