The original release Scarface was delayed by a couple of years and the release was arranged only after some scenes were entirely jettisoned, others were inserted, a moral-mongering conclusion was retrofitted and the title officially changed to reflect these alterations: Scarface, Shame of a Nation. One may fantasize that Scarface in its original unexpurgated version may be an even more impressive achievement in the canon of gangster films, but even as it stands in its original release version, its influence on film history as the standard by which all subsequent cinematic portrayals of the rise and fall of a gangster must be judged remains solidified within its foundation. Paul Muni’s Tony Camonte is utterly lacking in sympathetic sensitivity and therefore makes him the true godfather to all movie gangsters to follow in the same mold.
The protagonist of Scarface points to a large illuminated sign through a window to intensify his ambitions to his “moll.” The expansive quality of his ambition is put on ample display with the words attached to the sign: “The World is Yours.” This overreach of this could not be more telling and it is precisely this extreme optimism that might will make right that places Scarface rightly at the top of the list for influencing every gangster flick to follow in its wake.
Several film historians list Josef Von Sternberg’s silent drama Underworld as the first modern gangster drama and its leading man George Bancroft as the first gangster star. This position within the historical context of one of Hollywood’s most dependable and longest-lasting genres is undeserved as a closer reading of that film reveals that if it should be viewed as a prototype of any genre, that genre would be film noir, whereas Scarface remains the quintessential template for all gangster films that were made and will be made.
The dimly lit world in which the bizarrely romantic love triangle of Bull, Rolls Royce and Feathers plays out in the silent gangster melodrama preceding the release of Scarface is one that is essentially stripped of any connection to the world lit by sunshine outside it. Sternberg seems to be suggesting that his underworld of gangsters is one that is distinctly alienated from the world the audience inhabits. It is precisely the opposite philosophical approach that lends Scarface not only its visceral power, but its status as the gangster film which truly is the template.
Tony Camonte’s rise—though not his fall—is intended to directly parallel the events in the real world inhabited by the audience. Specifically, a world which at the time of its release was only just becoming a world without Al Capone in almost total control of Chicago. The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre which is recreated in the film was only a few years removed and still hung heavily in the air as moviegoers lined up to buy tickets for Scarface. The primary difference between Underworld—which would make a claim to be the first Hollywood gangster movie and Scarface which really does stand as the first true Hollywood gangster film—is that the world of the former seems as far away from reality as Frankenstein or Metropolis whereas audiences coming out of a screening of Scarface may have seen newspaper headlines on the way home that seemed to continue the story of Tony Camonte and his crazy ambition to make the world his.
