Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood (26 page)

Whoever invented it, Hawks recognized that giving Raft something to do would go a long way to cover his awkwardness and inexperience. “Having George flip the coin made him a character,” Hawks said. “The coin represented a hidden attitude—a kind of defiance, a held-back hostility, a coolness—which hadn’t been found in pictures up to that time; and it made George
stand out.” Raft, who acknowledged that cheap hoodlums across the country began imitating him as soon as the film came out, admitted
that flipping the coin helped him with the stress of repeated takes. “I had to flip the nickel so that my hand was steady and firm, and I even managed to do it while staring at someone.”

Raft even managed to do it during his death scene. When Muni played the scene
of Scarface coming to his sister’s apartment and gunning down his best friend, Raft, who was tossing a coin on Hawks’s instructions, fell back and accidentally hit his head on the door. “When I slid down the door,” Raft recalled, “I was slightly unconscious and landed in a small pool of my own blood. My eyes sort of rolled up in my head, like people’s do when they are dying. The coin I had been
tossing fell out of my hand. I heard Hawks say, ‘Print.’ Everyone there said this was the greatest movie death scene they ever saw. Hawks filmed the coin rolling along the floor until it lost its motion, and fell flat. Hawks told me later, ‘The roll of the coin and then its falling still told the story of Gino’s death.’” None of this ended up in the finished film, however; Raft simply slumps down
in the doorframe upon being shot, shaking his head in stunned disbelief, his hand now empty of the coin it had been flipping.

Raft loved Hawks, saying he was “wonderful, wonderful” and that “he never bawled anybody out, in contrast to other directors, who’d always scream. He never talked above a whisper, and got the best out of everybody by being quiet.” Hawks later remarked, “Raft is one of
the few actors who is grateful for the start I gave him. For ten years after we made
Scarface
, Raft would write me every year saying he’d do any story, anytime, anywhere—for half his normal price.”

Working seven-day weeks when the industry norm was six, Hawks pushed ahead with shooting, with Mahin revising dialogue daily. When Hughes, whom Hawks had audaciously banned from the set, saw dailies
of the first car wreck caused by machine guns, he loved it so much he ordered Hawks to film several more of them, which depicted Scarface’s Reign of Terror. Inspired by newspapers’ habit of marking crime photographs with an X in the spot where bodies were found, Hawks wanted to use a running gag of a visual X in every scene involving a murder. He offered crew members first fifty dollars, then one
hundred for any clever suggestion that made it into the film, and there are several good ones: the cross of an undertaker’s sign above a crime scene on a sidewalk; the roof supports in the garage setting of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre; the Roman numeral X on the apartment where Tony comes to kill Rinaldi; and, most memorably, the X mark for strike on Gaffney’s bowling line score. As usual,
Hawks injected sly humor whenever possible, such as in the scene where Vince Barnett’s
secretary survives a raid on his boss’s headquarters while on the telephone, but he also made the violence as realistic as possible, even down to using real bullets to tear up the place in the same sequence. The director filmed the destruction once without actors, then had the actors play before rear projection
of the violence to heighten the realism. The use of live ammunition did have tragic consequences, however, on the night of July 16. Gaylord Lloyd, the brother of the celebrated comic star Harold Lloyd, was visiting during the filming of one of the big action set pieces. Against instructions, he changed position to get a better view and was hit in the eye by a ricocheting bullet. Despite prolonged
efforts by doctors, he lost the eye permanently.

Hughes and Hawks had taken the attitude that they were going to shoot the picture they wanted to make, but they still had to play ball with the Hays Office if they hoped to show
Scarface
to the general public. On July 8, a test scene was submitted to Hays as an indication of “the atmosphere” of the picture. Three days later, however, Colonel Joy
indicated to his boss that “inasmuch as they have everything in the story, including the inferences of incest, the picture is beginning to look worse and worse to us, from a censorship point of view.”

On July 22, Colonel Joy looked at rushes representing about a third of the picture and had lunch with Hawks and E. B. Derr, during which they “went over the shooting script with a fine tooth comb.”
Joy told Hays that “they agreed to eliminate or change the countless things which render the script a violation of the Code.” However, the filmmakers still hadn’t agreed to three things requested by Hays: making a suitable “foreword” that condemned gangsterdom, writing “a strong speech by a suitable character,” and making the title character “yellow at the end.”

Joy looked at more footage on
July 29 and again on August 20, but he felt that “radical” revisions would still be necessary; as things stood, he believed, only fifty percent of theaters in the United States would play the picture.

During July, Los Angeles experienced one of its worst heat waves on record, which could conceivably have contributed to Hughes’s frayed nerves and severe strain over the progress of production.
Although thrilled with the results Hawks was getting, by midmonth he began putting heavy pressure on his director to pick up the pace; his original estimate of twenty-eight shooting days had already been reached and Hawks wasn’t even half done. For Hawks, there was also tremendous pressure at home, as Athole suffered one of her periodic attacks and had to be hospitalized. Under the circumstances,
her husband scarcely had time to visit, much less care for her. On the job, Hawks tried to reassure his producer that he needed the extra time to make the film they both wanted, and Hughes had no choice but to wait until Hawks finished the picture to his own satisfaction. He finally did so at the end of August after a sixty-day shoot, and Hughes announced a November 28 release date through United
Artists.

On September 8, Colonel Joy informed Will Hays about the film’s progress: “With Mr. Trotti we sat in with the executives of Caddo while the first rough-cut version of
Scarface
was screened, after which we argued for an hour for a complete revision of the ending of the story. If this suggestion is accepted, it will involve another five days’ shooting and will greatly weaken the value
of the picture,
but
it will relieve the picture of any nonconformance to the Code.”

Endless conferences, discussions, and negotiations dragged on through September, with Trotti suggesting that “the ending be changed to show Scarface going yellow and being taken by police. An entirely new thread will be run through the picture shifting its meaning as follows: The gangster is a great man as long
as he has a gun; once without a gun, he is a yellow rat. The final message of the picture will be—not to let criminals get possession of guns. Mr. Hawks was enthusiastic about the suggestion and will attempt to develop it and then sell the idea to Mr. Hughes.”

At the time, New York Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt, then a hopeful for the 1932 Democratic presidential nomination, was undertaking
major legislation against the private ownership of machine guns; there was much hue and cry about the issue of violence, and agitation to repeal Prohibition was reaching a peak. In mid-September, Joy and Trotti spent many hours with Hawks and Derr going over the antigun scenes as well as the new ending, which would take four days and $25,000 to shoot and “would be essential” if the picture were to
be passed. “Mr. Hawks has a splendid conception of the whole plan and a dramatic finish which ought to make the picture acceptable.”

This “dramatic finish” was the climax seen on most prints of the picture, the one commonly accepted as the “official” ending, but one that was made only in an attempt to placate the Hays Office. Hawks, of course, regretted being forced into the compromise, and it
seems probable that he recalled the never-seen original ending of
Scarface
when he (and an un-credited Ben Hecht) devised the violent conclusion to
The Thing
20 years later, in which the monster is shot to smithereens and still won’t go down. Unable to use Hecht’s original ending, Hawks came up with a way to meet
the censors’ insistence that Scarface turn “yellow” and be shown to be nothing without
a gun. He began with the scene in Scarface’s armored lair by changing the tenor of Tony and Cesca’s final moments together. When his sister is shot, Tony becomes hysterical, cries “I’m no good by myself,” and insists that she mustn’t die, making her realize that he’s actually afraid. This was designed to prepare the audience for the sniveling cowardice with which he ends his life. Police tear
gas drives him out and onto the stairway, where his gun is shot out of his hand. He asks to be given a break, then makes a run for it, whereupon he’s brought down by a few shots from the surrounding police, coming to rest beneath the sign announcing “The World Is Yours,” an echo of the beckoning “The City Is Yours” billboard in
Underworld
four years before.

This ending was shot at the end of
September, with the Hughes team under the impression that it would win
Scarface
a Production Code seal and that the film would meet its newly advanced release date of November 12. Paul Muni caught the train back to New York the day after finishing these retakes in order to rush into rehearsal for Elmer Rice’s new play,
Counsellor-at-Law
. First National had been chomping at the bit waiting for
Hawks to finish so he could return to direct a picture for them. The prolonged
Scarface
schedule had already forced him to yield the directing job on
Environment
(released as
Alias the Doctor
), starring Richard Barthelmess, to Michael Curtiz, and James Cagney and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. couldn’t wait much longer if they were going to team up in a boat-racing picture Hawks had proposed doing with
them that fall. For his part, Hughes was anxious to begin recouping some money from his heavy film investments; his latest attempt to make Billie Dove a star,
The Age of Love
, was a bomb, and in August, after having spent more than $100,000 developing it, he had finally thrown in the towel on
Queer People
because of the strenuous opposition to it and a not entirely unrelated inability to find
actors who would appear in it.

In the first week of October 1931, after nine months of work, Hawks departed
Scarface
and Howard Hughes’s employ and reported back to First National. Arguably,
Scarface
was entering the most difficult period of its birth pangs; additional scenes would be ordered shot, new titles would come and go, and tremendous battles would be waged between the Hughes side and
the Hays Office, in particular, and various censorship forces, in general. Hawks, off directing
The Crowd Roars
, was around for none of it, and even Hughes, although deeply involved and kept informed by constant telegrams,
letters, and phone calls, was away on his yacht during most of the struggle to keep
Scarface
from being dismembered or banned altogether.

In their absence, the standard bearer
in the crusade on behalf of
Scarface
was Hughes’s publicity director, Lincoln (Link) Quarberg. A former newspaperman who knew key editors and writers on papers throughout the country and was known in town as the man who had dubbed Jean Harlow the “platinum blonde,” Link worked passionately and tirelessly to try to keep the film as undiluted as possible and was dead set against any compromise with
the organs of censorship everywhere. Brash and extreme, he was prone to conspiracy theories when it came to the machinations of Hays, the studio heads, and government officials, but most of the time he was right. He eventually realized that Hays, having promised various censor boards a year earlier that he would rid the nation’s screens of gangster films, was dillydallying in order to keep
Scarface
away from the public indefinitely. Quarberg felt that the press and public would rally en masse behind Hughes, however unlikely the role of crusading civil libertarian might appear for the freewheeling millionaire. He also felt that “Elder Hays” and his ilk would ultimately do themselves in with their hypocritical self-righteousness, to the ultimate benefit of
Scarface
, if only Hughes would hang
tough.

In mid-October, Colonel Joy, at Hughes’s expense, personally took a print of
Scarface
, as revised per the instructions of the Hays Office, to New York to show Will Hays and the New York Board of Review, which had to pass on all films to be shown in the state. At that time, the states with the most stringent cinematic morality standards were New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, which accounted
for 40 percent of the nation’s moviegoing public. Many cities, notably Chicago and Dallas, had even tougher censor boards, and individual states could sometimes do surprising things; some months earlier, Maryland, one of the many states then considering a ban on gangster films, had cut the James Cagney smash
The Public Enemy
by about a half hour. It was this sort of haphazard, chaotic censoring
that the Hays organization hoped to forestall, which was why Hughes felt at least halfway compelled to cooperate with him, in the hopes that clearance by Hays, especially in New York, would circumvent further censorship and open the doors to
Scarface
playing everywhere.

Joy showed
Scarface
to Hays and to Police Commissioner Mulrooney, who endorsed the picture. During his three weeks in the city,
however, he insidiously refrained from screening it for the New York censors, because he and Hays feared that they might pass it. Instead, Joy returned to Hollywood
to inform Hughes that more cuts would be needed, along with a new ending that would force Scarface to pay for his crimes. As Quarberg sarcastically remarked, “The Hays ending was a creative masterpiece. Although no gangster in real
life has ever been hanged, they proposed to do just that with
Scarface
. And for fully four minutes after the picture, unmatched for realism, has logically ended, and the audience is walking out of the theatre, you are shown what happens to a bold, bad gunman—the trial, the conviction, the speech by the judge when he pronounces sentence, and all the other details of the hanging process, including
the reading of the final death-warrant to the hangee, testing of the scaffold, dragging the condemned man to the noose, and finally the actual neck-stretching.”