The 1927 silent gangster film, Underworld, shares a screenwriter with Scarface in the person of Ben Hecht. Perhaps by the time Hecht decided to write the story of Tony Camonte’s rise to power a half a decade later, he had learned from the mistakes of the past that had been made in the silent film directed from his screenplay by European immigrant Josef von Sternberg. Or, perhaps, with Howard Hawks at the helm, Hecht merely found an American-born director with a more innate sense of the grounded reality of the real underworld in which gangsters moved.
In its state as a silent film, Underworld is reliant on the much-heralded conventions that make cinema a “visual medium.” The judicious use of both high-angle shots and low-angle shots heightens the effect of the chiaroscuro blending of light and shadow that successfully blankets the characters within an underworld of their own that denies entry to anyone not specifically invited. While such a reliance on cinematographic effects may succeed in placing Underworld at the beginning of a line that stretches through Double Indemnity to Touch of Evil, it does not effectively place it within the lineage stretching from Little Caesar to the retelling of the rise and fall of the Kray brothers in Legend. Von Sternberg may deserve some credit for making the first proto-film noir, but Howard Hawks deserves all the credit for making the first true Hollywood gangster film.
The singularly intense use of shadows and light in Scarface is presented in a manner designed specifically to link its protagonist to real life analogues. Tony Camonte is never more clearly linked to the real life gangster Al Capone than in the sequence which recreates the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in silhouette. Restrictions imposed by the censors mandated that the brutal murder of multiple victims be portrayed with shadows, but Hawks takes this imposition and endows it with far greater meaning and subtext by tilting the camera upward from the fallen corpses to reveal an architectural structure holding the roof up. The pattern of this structure can be viewed as a series of the letter “X” which represents that each of the men below has been X-ed out, but it can also be interpreted as the universal sign for doing business: signing your name next to the line marked X. With this one simple shot, Scarface becomes the most influential gangster film of all time.
When Hawks tilts that camera up to reveal “X” after “X” above the corpses of recently disposed wiseguys in Scarface, he is making the connection between the world of legitimate business in the world above and the gangsters operating in the underworld below. This setup become the primary thematic mechanism behind the evolution of gangster films that finds its ultimate parallel in The Godfather series and the 1983 remake of Scarface itself.
