Scarface (1932) (4K UHD Review)
- Review Date: Mar 31, 2025
- Format: 4K Ultra HD
-
Director
Howard HawksRelease Date(s)
1932 (November 12, 2024)Studio(s)
The Caddo Company/United Artists (The Criterion Collection—Spine #1239)- Film/Program Grade: A
- Video Grade: B
- Audio Grade: B-
- Extras Grade: B-
Review
The Howard Hawks/Howard Hughes production of Scarface opens with the following title card, added late during the editorial process in order to appease the censors at the Hayes Office:\
“This picture is an indictment of gang rule in America and of the callous indifference of the government to this constantly increasing menace to our safety and liberty.”
Sure, it is. Scarface landed in 1932 during an interesting phase in American cinema, one in which studios had been taking advantage of the lack of enforceable standards in order to push boundaries and make money. The gangster genre was wildly popular at that time, and there was a constant tension between the tendency to glamorize these criminals on screen and the Hayes Office’s fervent desire to tamp down on that kind of thing. By the time that the Production Code was formally adopted in 1934, showing that crime doesn’t pay was one of its key mandates. Until then, it was more of a back-and-forth between the studios and the somewhat more toothless Hayes Office, and that resulted in films like Scarface that openly glamorize the criminal lifestyle while offering almost laughably contradictory moralizing that did little to make that lifestyle look any less appealing.
That irony is immediately obvious in Scarface, which offers not just one pedantic title card, but rather three. The first one quoted above is immediately followed by the next two:
“Every incident in this picture is the reproduction of an actual occurrence, and the purpose of this picture is to demand of the government: ‘What are you going to do about it?’
The government is your government. What are YOU going to do about it?”
In other words, you, Mr. & Mrs. John Q. Public, who just shelled out your hard-earned Depression era dollars in order to sit down and watch some wildly entertaining gangster escapism, well, you’re just going to have to do something about it, aren’t you? (And just in case the title cards were too subtle, the mayor verbalizes that exact same message later in the film almost word-for-word.) Gangland activity may be the “shame of the nation,” but we’re going to exploit that story in order to take advantage of your interest in it and pocket your money, and then we’re going tell you that you’re the ones who need to fix the situation. Check.
Scarface is based Armitage Trail’s 1930 novel of the same name, which was itself inspired by the life of Al Capone. Howard Hughes purchased the screen rights in order to capitalize on the popularity of the gangster genre, and taking no chances in an otherwise crowded field, he brought in Howard Hawks to direct. Since they were unable to generate any interest from the major studios, they ended up producing Scarface independently, which had some pluses and minuses during that era. Still, they were able to bring in Ben Hecht to write the screenplay (with contributions from Seton I. Mille, John Lee Mahin, W.R. Burnett), and while Hecht had his doubts about the project, he did his usual impeccably fine work.
Scarface is about the rise and fall of Prohibition-era gangster Tony Camonte (Paul Muni). Camonte starts out working for local boss Johnny Lovo (Osgood Perkins), but he’s bored by Johnny’s lack of vision, so he decides that this town isn’t big enough for him and pretty much anyone else. Aided by his faithful lieutenants Guino (George Raft) and Angelo (Vince Barnett), he starts taking over the territories of other bosses like Tom Gaffney (Boris Karloff), all without Johnny’s permission, and that sets off a gang war leaving a trail of bodies in the street. Tony also has his eye on Johnny’s moll Poppy (Karen Morley), but he’s tormented by his unrequited attraction to his own sister Francesca (Ann Dvorak), and that’s one dirty little secret among many that will ultimately lead to his downfall.
For a film that was made during the pre-Code era but still faced its own battles with censorship, Scarface thumbs its nose at those censors every chance that it gets. Tony’s incestuous desires toward his sister are obviously more than mere protective jealously, a fact that Francesca recognizes even if she can’t clearly articulate why:
“I don’t want anybody putting their hands on you.”
“What do you think you’re doing?”
“Well, I’m your brother.”
“You don’t act like it. You act more like... I don’t know, sometimes, I think...”
There’s an almost orgasmic emphasis on gun violence in Scarface, one that draws a direct line between sexual potency and the size of one’s weaponry. When Tony gets his hands on a Tommy gun, he’s so aroused that he warns “Get out of my way, Johnny, I’m gonna spit” right before ejaculating the bullets into the wall. (The choice of the word “spit” there was hardly accidental, coming about as close to saying “spurt” as the censors would allow.) Even the otherwise aloof Poppy is attracted to Tony’s potency with a big gun, implying that Johnny hasn’t been able to satisfy her with his own more diminutive one. Hawks also uses one of his trademarked cigarette gags in order to symbolize the new connection between Poppy and Tony, showing her rejecting a light from Johnny in favor of one from Tony, but in this case it’s hard (so to speak) not to see an oral connection between them as well. For a film that was forced to present its sex and violence implicitly, Scarface is still shockingly explicit sometimes.
In Scarface, power is seductive, violence is appealing, and thumbing your nose at the law is gratifying. No amount of finger-wagging in the title cards will ever change that fact, nor will any of the other changes that were made in order to appease the censors. Yet those changes were in fact made, like adding the scene where the mayor tells the audience that they need to do something about gang violence, and another where a newspaper editor scolds one of his reporters:
“Say, chief, this fellow Camonte... The public’s interested in him. He’s a colorful character.”
“Colorful? What color is a crawling louse? Say, listen, that’s the attitude of too many morons in this country. They think these big hoodlums are some sort of demigods. What do they do about a guy like Camonte? They sentimentalize. Romance. Make jokes about him.”
Yet that whole speech is dripping with irony, since Scarface has already been doing its level best in order to sentimentalize and romanticize Camonte (hell, it even makes a few jokes about him). The one area where Hawks and Hughes did compromise up front is over the ending, which has Tony turning yellow when cornered by the cops and begging for his life, although there’s a vague implication that he may be just doing that in order to buy time for an escape (watch for Muni’s slight smile just before he runs off to meet his fate). Of course, that still wasn’t enough for the Hayes Office, so another ending was shot where Camonte is arrested, sentenced, and executed. Muni was no longer available so a stand-in was used, and Hawks had nothing to do with the scene either, leaving Richard Rosson to direct it instead. (Hawks told Joseph McBride in Hawks on Hawks that he didn’t have “a damned thing to do with” the other added scenes either, so it’s possible that Rosson directed those as well.)
Fortunately, while the added title cards and moralizing are still part of Scarface as we have it today, the revised ending has landed on the scrap heap of history. There will never be a director and/or producer’s cut of Scarface since so many compromises were made along the way, but as with so films from that era, the battles with the censors arguably strengthened the film as much as they weakened it. It’s still an intentionally glamorous view of the gangster world that no amount of censor-imposed deglamorization can possibly change. As a result, Scarface: The Shame of the Nation remains the pride of the very Hollywood that Hawks and Hughes had to go around in order to produce it. It’s classical Hollywood filmmaking at its finest, reminding everyone that the world is theirs, as long as they’ve got the will to take it.
Cinematographers Lee Garmes and L.W. O’Connell shot Scarface on 35mm film using spherical lenses, framed at the full Academy aperture of 1.37:1 for its theatrical release. The original nitrate negatives for Scarface no longer exist, and the best available element was a 35mm dupe negative, which was scanned in 4K with digital cleanup and grading performed by NBCUniversal StudioPost and MTI Film. Nitrate negatives from that era didn’t exactly resolve 4K worth of detail to begin with, so the fact that this was a third-generation element needs to be taken into consideration when judging the quality of the results. The image is consistently soft throughout, while textures like skin and clothing can only resolve so far. It is what it is. It’s as clean as possible, however, with no signs of damage remaining aside from some light density fluctuations. The grain is perhaps a bit better resolved in 4K than it is in 1080p, but that’s about the only difference between the two.
There’s no HDR grade, but SDR in 4K can still take advantage of 10-bit color, which quadruples the gradations between pure white and pure black compared to what’s available with the 8-bit color of Blu-ray. At a minimum, that means that there’s less chance of banding being visible on some displays, and it can offer more detail to the grayscale. That said, the overall exposure latitude of vintage nitrate negatives never had that much dynamic range to begin with, and the fact that this is a third-generation element reduces it even further, so the elimination of potential banding artifacts is about the only real advantage here. On the other hand, while the grain in SDR does retain that seductive silvery nitrate look to it, it’s possible that an HDR grade might have been able to enhance that effect a bit. Still, that’s a pretty slim reason to include an HDR grade, and this looks fine as is.
Audio is offered in English 1.0 mono LPCM, with optional English subtitles. The audio was remastered from the optical tracks on a 35mm nitrate fine-grain positive provided by Cinémathèque québécoise. Much like the video, the limitations of the source need to be taken into consideration when assessing the audio quality. Scarface was also a relatively early sound production, so there were other limitations already baked into the source due to the original recording and mixing that were involved. It’s pretty clean, although some light hiss is still audible, and there aren’t any major pops or clicks. The dialogue is clear enough, although it inevitably sounds a little thin and muffled at times, and the music shares the same characteristics.
Criterion’s 4K Ultra HD release of Scarface is a two-disc set that includes a Blu-ray with a 1080p copy of the film. There’s also a 10-page foldout booklet featuring an essay by Imogen Sara Smith and restoration notes. There are no extras on the UHD, but the following extras are included on the Blu-ray only (all of them in HD):
- Scarface with Megan Abbott and Bill Hader (37:47)
- Hawks’s Use of Sound in Scarface (17:18)
- Alternate Ending (13:06)
Scarface with Megan Abbott and Bill Hader is a conversation between the critic and comedian/actor discussing their love of Scarface and the gangster genre in general. That might seem like an odd pairing, but given how dry and scholarly that Criterion extras can be sometimes, it’s actually an enjoyably entertaining dialogue between the two of them. It’s just two fans talking about something that they love, which gives it a more casual vibe, but they offer plenty of genuine insights as well.
Hawks’s Use of Sound in Scarface is a visual (and aural!) essay by Lea Jacobs, professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin. She covers the early years of talkies and the way that Hawks transitioned from the silent era. She provides plenty of examples of how he used sound in Scarface, noting the interplay between the dialogue, effects, and editing. She closes by discussing how Hawks continued to develop his use of sound over the years that followed.
Finally, the Alternate Ending shows the Richard Rosson-directed coda to the film in context with the preceding scenes, in order to show how it originally flowed. It’s easy to understand why Hawks refused to have anything to do with it—it’s not just didactic, but also completely arbitrary. The Hayes Office must have wanted him to face justice at the hands of the law, but he died in a hail of police bullets in the original ending, so it was still legal justice of one form or another.
About the only thing that’s missing from any domestic releases is the brief introduction by Robert Osborne of Turner Classic Movies that was on Universal’s 2019 Blu-ray. However, Via Vision in Australia had a different slate of extras on their 2021 Blu-ray that included a commentary by Drew Caspar, plus interviews with Tony Rayns and Matthew Sweet (no, not that Matthew Sweet). You’ll want to hang onto that if you’ve already got it. As far as upgrading from Blu-ray to UHD goes, well, that’s a little dicey. There’s a fair argument to be made that Scarface didn’t really need a 4K release, given the nature of the extant elements. Yet it’s unquestionably for the best that those elements have been scanned in 4K, preserving every possible nuance that they contain at maximum resolution. And as long as they’ve been scanned in 4K anyway, then why not release the film in 4K as well? It’s the best possible version of Scarface that you can possibly buy.
-Stephen Bjork
(You can follow Stephen on social media at these links: Twitter, Facebook, BlueSky, and Letterboxd).