Katie is home early again today after a grueling two-plus hour trip to the dentist. While convalescing, she's been reading The Marx Brothers Encyclopedia by Glenn Mitchell, which I checked out from the library the other day.
Here's an interesting bit about an early draft of the Marx Brothers' movie, Duck Soup, which in June 1933 sported the temporary title Grasshoppers. According to Mitchell, in the original ending, Chico was to assassinate arch rival Trentino (Louis Calhern) with a bomb, but instead winds up blowing up himself and his brothers as well. The five of them fly off to heaven—Harpo plucking a harp, naturally—and as Trentino opines, "Well, where we're going, there'll be peace and happiness," Harpo begins to clip his wings.
"Think of all the trouble we had down below," Trentino continues, "just because I called you an upstart." At which point Groucho slaps Trentino and the pair begins fighting once again.
The idea was quickly jettisoned. But the Three Stooges must have liked it—they basically recycled the idea for the end of their 1939 short Three Little Sew and Sews.
[Click here for a fuller discussion of Duck Soup's screenplay.]
One of two Marx Brothers movies preserved in the National Film Registry (the other is A Night At the Opera) and the last to include Zeppo, Duck Soup is the funniest of their films, an exercise in inspired anarchy that nevertheless works with the precision of a Swiss watch.
Without ever feeling overburdened by superfluous plot, Duck Soup is one of the few Marx Brothers movies that actually has one, or at least one that serves not merely as an excuse for humor, but as a catalyst for it. Considering how many chefs stirred this particular cinematic pot, however, not just the credited writers but also director Leo McCarey and the Brothers themselves, all concerned likely counted themselves lucky that the movie worked at all. A study of the screenwriting process reveals that the story was actually a mishmash of old vaudeville gags, Laurel and Hardy routines and entire scenes lifted nearly intact from the Marx Brothers' short-lived radio program. That Duck Soup wound up the most effortlessly brilliant entry in the Marx Brothers' oeuvre is something of a modern movie miracle.
Immediately after the release of the Marx Brothers' 1932 hit, Horse Feathers, work began on a follow-up, Firecrackers, to be set in the mythical Eastern European kingdom of Oo-La-La, with Ernst Lubitsch, whose resume was filled with comedies set in mythical Eastern European kingdoms, slated to direct. The script started as a handful of songs and a rough story idea from the songwriting team of Burt Kalmar and Harry Ruby, who had written songs for two other Marx Brothers movies, Animal Crackers and Horse Feathers.
His Excellency is due To take his station Beginning his new Administration. He'll make his appearance when The clock on the wall strikes ten.
Zeppo, by the way, who sings this opening number, was initially to play Groucho's son, as he had in Horse Feathers, and only at the last minute was the part rewritten to be Rufus T. Firefly's secretary, Bob Roland. It was probably just as well—it's his smallest part in the five films he appeared in and he was ready to leave the act and pursue a career as a Hollywood talent agent.
For the opening scene, a long sequence in a palace ballroom where foreign dignitaries and government officials have assembled to await the arrival of Freedonia's new leader, Kalmar and Ruby wrote two other songs, the two-line Freedonian national anthem and a big song and dance number for Groucho.
The last man nearly ruined this place He didn't know what to do with it. If you think this country's bad off now Just wait 'till I get through with it.
Together with "His Excellency Is Due," the scene plays out more or less as it did in the final film.
During these early stages of the story's development, Kalmar and Ruby also penned the opening lines of what would later become the song and dance number, "The Country's Going To War," which was a spoof of, among other things, the spiritual "All God's Chillun Got Wings," and a 1924 Eugene O'Neill play of the same name starring Paul Robeson.
Then it's war! Then it's war! Gather the forces! Harness the horses! Then it's war!
Taken together, the songs suggested something of a story arc—Rufus T. Firefly (Groucho) becomes leader of Freedonia and the country winds up in a war—but stitching those two bookends together proved to be a bit of a problem.
Grover Jones, a veteran of more than a hundred screenplays in his career, including the Ernst Lubitsch classic, Trouble in Paradise, made the first attempt at hashing out the storyline. Working with Kalmar and Ruby, Jones's draft of the script, now entitled Cracked Ice, imagined that Groucho, in addition to being president of Freedonia, is also an arms manufacturer who conspires with Chico to start a war to gin up a demand for his product, anticipating by nearly three decades Dwight Eisenhower's "military-industrial complex" speech, with Margaret Dumont throw in for comic relief.
Some of the jokes survive—the recurring bit with "His Excellency's car," the "gala day" line, opting for a "standing" army to save on chairs—as does the scene introducing Firefly and the garden party at Mrs. Teasdale's, but everything after the first act went out the window. (One of the rejected ideas was an opera sequence, with Chico and Harpo disrupting the performance. An expanded form of the idea was revived two years later as A Night At The Opera.)
Aside from the fact that many of his gags were belabored and not very funny, Jones fundamentally misunderstood the Brothers' appeal. It was one thing for Groucho to scam the sorts of people we instinctively root against—gangsters, gamblers and rich buffoons—or for Chico to scam Groucho; it was another thing altogether for Groucho and Chico to be those people we root against. (You can read this draft online here.)
Next the studio brought in Groucho Marx's favorite writer, Arthur Sheekman, who along with Nat Perrin, had been writing a radio show for the Brothers, Flywheel, Shyster, and Flywheel, which briefly aired on NBC radio from late November 1932 to May 1933. Arthur Sheekman had been a show business columnist for the Chicago Sunday Times where Groucho sought him out, befriended him and hired him to work on two Marx Brothers films, Monkey Business and Horse Feathers, the latter without credit, before becoming the chief writer on the radio show. Perrin, a former lawyer working in the Warner Brothers' publicity department, landed a job as a gag writer for Groucho after forging a letter of introduction from Broadway playwright Moss Hart.
The new script, now called Grasshoppers, was cobbled together from previous drafts and from the radio show. With minor refinements, Flywheel, Shyster and Flywheel provided fifteen of Duck Soup's gags and routines, including Chico's trial for treason, and lines such as "Go, and never darken my towels again" and "Would you give me a lock of your hair—I'm letting you off easy, I was going to ask for the whole wig." (I knew there was a reason I bought the transcripts of the radio show some twenty years ago.)
Chico's first scene in Duck Soup was lifted nearly verbatim from the program's first episode. This, from the show's transcript:
"Hey, you remember when you giva me that picture of your wife?" "Yes." "Well, I start right out. Joosta like a bloodhound, I tell you. And in one hour, even less than one hour—" "Yes ..." "I losa da pisch." ... "Then you didn't shadow my wife?" "Sure, I shadow her all day." "What day was that?" "That was Shadowday. ... Monday I shadow your wife. Tuesday I go to the ball game—she don't show up. Wednesday she go to the ball game—I don't show up. Thursday was a doubleheader. We both no show up. Friday it rain all day—there'sa no ball game, so I go fishing."
For the movie, the jokes were further polished and the characters altered to suit the story. In addition, business was written for Harpo, who as a silent act was of course not on the radio.
(Producer Herman J. Mankiewicz, who later won an Oscar for co-writing Citizen Kane, also contributed to the finished product—what, exactly, I can't tell you.)
Finally, although director Leo McCarey wasn't credited with writing the script, I suspect he played a major role in the way the story played out. Originally a lawyer by trade, McCarey broke into the film business as a writer for the Hal Roach Studios; by 1929, McCarey was in charge of production there. A veteran director of comedy shorts, McCarey dipped into his past to provide the Brothers with new material. The scenes with Edgar Kennedy as the long-suffering owner of a lemonade stand are much more characteristic of the slow-burn frustration routines of W.C. Fields and Laurel and Hardy, whom McCarey had worked with extensively, than of the sort of comedy the Brothers had been doing. The scene where Chico and Harpo rob the safe is a reworked bit from Laurel and Hardy. And the famous mirror scene, which McCarey also suggested, was an old vaudeville routine.
McCarey was the first veteran comedy director the Brothers had ever worked with and to their delight, he encouraged improvisation on the set. And to the delight of many film fans, he also insisted on dropping the usual harp and piano interludes.
His main contribution, though, was knowing from experience what was funny and how to capture that comedy on film.
As filming came to an end in June 1933, the studio finally settled on a title, Duck Soup. The origin and meaning of the title has been the subject of speculation for years, and with his usual directness, Groucho explained it thusly: "Take two turkeys, one goose, four cabbages, but no duck, and mix them together. After one taste, you'll duck soup for the rest of your life."
In fact, though, "duck soup" was slang for "something easy to do," and Leo McCarey almost certainly suggested it—in 1927 while at Hal Roach's studio, he proposed pairing comedic actors Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy for the first time in short named, yes, that's right, Duck Soup.
In any event, Duck Soup was in keeping with the three previous Marx Brothers movies which had worked an animal into the title.
The movie premiered on November 27, 1933. Legend has it that Duck Soup flopped on its initial release, but in fact, it broke even at the box office, and although it did receive mixed reviews from critics, its relative lack of success (compared to its predecessors) may owe more to Paramount Pictures' lack of a marketing budget than to any inherent lack of interest on the part of the public. In any event, Paramount, which had been tottering financially throughout the Depression, soon after went bankrupt and the Brothers decamped for MGM where Irving Thalberg remade them in his own image. But that's a story I'll leave for another day.
Despite their ups and downs, Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby worked together as a songwriting team from 1920 until Kalmar's death in 1947. The pair wrote such songs as "Who's Sorry Now," "I Wanna Be Loved By You," and their biggest hit, "Three Little Words," which provided the title of the 1950 fictionalized film account of the partnership starring Fred Astaire and Red Skelton.
Grover Jones was twice nominated for an Oscar, for the original story Lady and Gent and for the screenplay for The Lives Of A Bengal Lancer (shared with four other writers). He also wrote Abe Lincoln in Illinois, and during the silent era, he directed twenty-one movies. Jones died at the age of forty-six following surgery.
After hopping a train from New York with Groucho and Nat Perrin to write Duck Soup, Arthur Sheekman continued to work in Hollywood, and met his future wife, Gloria Stuart, while writing the Eddie Cantor musical, Roman Scandals. (You may remember Stuart for her Oscar-nominated turn in the 1997 movie Titanic.) Sheekman and Stuart married in 1934 and remained married until his death in 1978.
Nat Perrin also stayed in Hollywood and did some uncredited script doctoring on Go West and wrote the screen story for The Big Store (recycling the name "Flywheel" and the plot of that movie from the radio show). He also wrote the hit play Hellzapoppin' and later produced The Addams Family for television. Although Duck Soup provided him with an entree into Hollywood, Perrin wasn't a fan of the movie. "[It] was so crazy—that was Leo McCarey's approach, and the boys loved working with him. But, to me, [A] Night at the Opera is a far better film. Of course, plenty of people disagree with me." He died in 1998.
Both Sheekman and Perrin remained lifelong friends with Groucho.
During a career which began in the silent era and ended in the early '60s, Leo McCarey directed 110 shorts and feature films. He was nominated for nine Oscars, winning four, one for directing Cary Grant's breakout performance in The Awful Truth, and three for writing, directing and producing 1944's best picture winner, Going My Way.
And as for the Marx Brothers? We'll be returning to them soon enough.
[To read about frequent Marx Brothers co-star Margaret Dumont, click here.]
[To read Part One, click here. To read Part Two, click here.]
III. Tabloid Cinema At Its Best Scarface premiered in New Orleans, Louisiana, on March 31, 1932, two years after Howard Hughes had acquired the film rights to the story. Denied a proper release thanks to the interference of the Hays Office, the National Board of Review and other state and local censorship boards, the movie played where it could.
Even in its compromised form, though, Scarface was the toughest, most violent picture of its era, boasting twenty-eight deaths (with more off screen), drive-by shootings, bombings, numerous car crashes, and for those lucky enough to see the original ending, a shootout worthy of a more modern movie. It's also credited with being the first picture to show a gangster using a machine gun and it gave us George Raft and his oft-parodied coin-flipping gangster routine.
Scarface is the story of Tony Camonte (Paul Muni), a vicious, small-time thug determined to take what he wants, and what he wants (in the words of Key Largo's Johnny Rocco) is "more." As the movie begins, Tony is working as hired muscle for Johnny Lovo (Osgood Perkins), a Chicago gangster who is tired of waiting in line behind Big Louie Costillo who has grown fat, happy and complacent after years of running Chicago's South Side. After removing Big Louie and taking over his operation, Lovo mistakenly believes he can handle Tony, aiming him like a tommy gun when he needs him, putting him away again when he's served his purpose.
But Tony is a sociopath unable to control his impulses or reign in his appetites. "Some day I'm gonna run the whole works," he boasts. "In this business there's only one law you gotta follow to keep out of trouble: Do it first, do it yourself, and keep on doing it." His ferocity gets Lovo embroiled in a gang war he's not ready for and eventually Tony also tires of waiting in line behind a mob boss he feels has grown fat, happy and complacent, wresting control from Lovo in a bloody confrontation.
Meanwhile, Tony's sister Cesca (Ann Dvorak) falls in love with Tony's best friend and partner in crime, Guino Rinaldo (George Raft), a development as dangerous for the would-be lovers as a gang war is for everybody else—Tony is in love with his sister and will allow no one, not even his best friend, to get close to her.
Predictably, Tony's lack of self-control leads to his downfall. "Someday you're gonna stumble and fall down in the gutter," a police detective tells him, "right where the horses have been standing, right where you belong." And you just know he's right. (If Ben Hecht didn't write that line, I'll eat the movie.) While typically Hawks's dramas focus on a man aware of his limitations as he runs smack up against a nearly-impossible task, Tony Camonte might be the least self-aware man Hawks ever spent time studying and his lack of self-awareness proves to be his Achilles heel.
The result is one of Howard Hawks's best movies, to my mind the first indispensable movie of his long career. The storytelling is taut, the action intense and well-staged. The camerawork is some of the most involved of his career, for example, using an uninterrupted tracking shot to open the movie in a style reminiscent of the silent opening of Rio Bravo.
Without calling attention to itself in the way, say, the opening of Orson Welles's Touch of Evil does, the shot establishes the ethnicity of the main characters, their buffoonish pretensions and tragic fall, Tony Camonte's treachery and the reluctance of a witness to get involved, all while creating an air of suspense that literally pulls the audience into the story.
Hawks was also beginning to experiment with faster-paced dialogue—twenty percent faster than anything he'd done before, he later said. Although it would be another two years before he began to experiment with overlapping dialogue and rapid-fire delivery in the screwball comedy Twentieth Century, a style that would characterized so many of his later films, the speed and fluidity of Scarface is a welcome relief from the static and stagy efforts of so many of his contemporaries.
Which is not to say that Scarface is a perfect movie. The constant moral- izing of police- men, reporters and politicians is clumsily written, repetitive and tiresome (blame the Hays Office, assistant director Richard Rosson and writer John Lee Mahin). The film's attempts at humor from Tony's illiterate secretary Angelo (Vince Barnett) are too broad for a movie this serious. Further, some have criticized Muni's performance in the title role—writer Ben Hecht who had himself recommended Muni for the part later complained, "He was a make-believe tough guy. You think he's a menace, but he doesn't do anything." (I myself have nominated Muni for a best actor award, so obviously I disagree; but it's a matter of taste.)
And those looking for Hawks's signature elements—male comradery, stoicism in the face of danger, and smart, independent women—will not find them here. What we today think of as a Howard Hawks movie was still a few years up the road.
Still, for all its flaws, Scarface is the best gangster movie of the early sound era and arguably the best gangster movie made before The Godfather in 1972.
It may also be the least glamorous look at crime before Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas. Without The Public Enemy's back story to explain away violent behavior (criminals are made, that film suggests, rather than born), without James Cagney's gleeful energy, Edward G. Robinson's genuine menace, or Clark Gable's roguish sexuality, the portrait of criminals presented in Scarface is of dull-witted buffoons and incestuous sociopaths. The violence may have been thrilling, but I can't imagine anyone walking out of the theater thinking, "Gee, I wish I were Tony Camonte."
Despite favorable reviews and strong box office in those theaters where it played, Scarface received no awards and no nominations. Hughes ultimately withdrew the picture from circulation and except for bootleg copies, it wasn't seen again until 1980.
Of the major participants, Hawks went on to become one of the most acclaimed directors in Hollywood history, giving us such gems as Rio Bravo, Red River, His Girl Friday, Bringing Up Baby, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep and many more. Howard Hughes, as fans of Martin Scorsese already know, was primarily interested in aviation, but he did produce twenty-six movies, including The Outlaw which in 1943 introduced Jane Russell's bosom to a grateful movie-going public. Paul Muni went on to become one of Hollywood's biggest names, earning six Oscar nominations, winning for The Story of Louis Pasteur. Ann Dvorak on the other hand, got into a contract dispute with Warner Brothers and despite a brief flurry of good movies in the early '30s, wound up making B-pictures until her retirement in 1952. (You can read more about her at Operator 99's blog "Allure.") George Raft had a long career playing gangsters and tough guys but he also had an uncanny ability to turn down good parts, rejecting the lead roles in High Sierra, The Maltese Falcon and Double Indemnity.
As for the authors of the screenplay, Ben Hecht was nominated for six Oscars during his career, winning two, for Underworld and The Scoundrel, though his best known work now is probably the screenplay for the Alfred Hitchcock classic, Notorious.
W.R. Burnett continued to work as a screenwriter and novelist, earning an Oscar nomination for 1942's Wake Island. Along with fellow novelist James Clavell, he also co-wrote the screenplay for The Great Escape in 1963.
Seton I. Miller went on to write sixty-nine movies, including the original screenplay for The Adventures of Robin Hood, and shared the Oscar for Here Comes Mr. Jordan with Sidney Buchman.
John Lee Mahin most often worked with director Victor Fleming (he of Gone With The Wind), contributing to ten of Fleming's movies. Mahin helped found the Screen Writers Guild, but opposed his co-founders' leftist politics and joined the Screen Playwrights instead. He was later an outspoken critic of Communism during the McCarthy Era but denied involvement in the blacklists of the period, saying, "If [screenwriters] were a threat to the American way of life, the American way of life isn't worth a shit, you know?" He was twice nominated for an Oscar, for Captains Courageous and Heaven Knows, Mister Allison.
Armitage Trail (a.k.a. Maurice Coons), whose novel inspired the movie, never saw the finished production. He died of a heart attack in October 1930 shortly after his arrival in Hollywood. He was only twenty-eight. His brother, Hannibal Coons, wrote for television, including twenty-five episodes of The Addams Family.
Scarface itself is now regarded as an indispensable part of the Hollywood film canon. Hawks called it his favorite movie and Jean Luc-Godard once named it the best American movie ever made. In his 1974 book Talking Pictures, Richard Corliss called Scarface "a kind of cinematic version of tabloid prose at its best" and "the alpha and omega of Hollywood's first gangster craze."
In 1994, the Library of Congress included Scarface in the National Film Registry, and in 2006, the American Film Institute selected it the sixth best gangster movie ever made. The AFI also included Paul Muni's Tony Camonte on its list of the fifty greatest villains of movie history.
And what did the movie's inspiration, Al Capone, think of Scarface? He liked it so much, he obtained a copy for his own personal collection.
Note: In Part One of this essay, I wrote, with regard to what role each of the credited writers played in preparing the final screenplay for Scarface, "Whether [Seton I.] Miller and [John Lee] Mahin worked together as a team or one after the other, I can't say (given the degree to which Miller later resented collaborating with other writers, the latter seems likely)." Since then, I found a photo of the "cutting continuity" (which Joseph's Glossary of Film Terms defines as "a list containing information about camera setups, dialogue, and other aspects of each shot of the final cut of the film") which lists Ben Hecht as the screenplay's author with "continuities" by Miller.
Assuming this is a copy of the cutting continuity for Hawks's version of the film (the document is dated 1931) before Richard Rosson shot additional footage, then I would have to conclude that Mahin was brought in to write the alternate ending for Scarface. Maybe other dialogue as well. I can't swear to this though since I haven't actually read the cutting continuity. It can be purchased for a mere $3500, which is about $3490 more than my budget allows for this sort of thing. If someone has read it, or otherwise can say where Miller and Mahin come into the story, let me know.
II. From Screenplay To Screen: Battling The Censors "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
For those unfamiliar with the words, that's the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States and it's been allowing sinners and saints, artists and hacks, and statesmen and blowhards alike, to speak their piece without fear of reprisal or prior restraint for over two hundred years.
Well, theoretically.
Despite the absolutist language of the amendment, courts have always recognized limitations on the freedom of speech (and speech is what I'm specifically writing about here), including but not limited to prohibitions against slander and libel, child pornography, incitement to riot, creating the danger of imminent harm (that is, yelling "fire" in a crowded theater), and publishing troop movements during times of war (and no doubt others I haven't thought about since law school); as well as reasonable "time, place and manner" restrictions on when, where and how speech is conducted (which is why protesters camp out across the street from the White House and not in the Oval Office). (Others would not doubt remind me of the Alien and Sedition Act of 1798, the so-called "Espionage" Act of 1917, the McCarthyism of the 1950s, and a lot of other episodes that would curl your hair.)
Still, it must be astonishing to a generation accustomed to watching pornography on their telephones to discover that for the first half of the 20th Century, the First Amendment did not apply to movies at all.
Huh? What?
In 1915 the United States Supreme Court ruled in Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio that the protections of the First Amendment did not extend to motion pictures. "[T]he exhibition of moving pictures is a business, pure and simple, originated and conducted for profit ... not to be regarded, nor intended to be regarded ... as part of the press of the country, or as organs of public opinion." Given that movies could be "used for evil," the Court reasoned, censorship was not beyond the power of the state.
Until the Supreme Court overturned Mutual Film in 1952 (Joseph Burstyn, Inc v. Wilson), Hollywood studios were subject to the whim of any government body with a mind to protect the public from itself.
The government of New York City was the first to begin censoring movies, forming the New York Board of Motion Picture Censorship in 1909. The city required all movies to receive its stamp of approval before being exhibiting in its jurisdiction. Because of the city's outsized commercial importance, the major studios agreed to submit their films for the board's review, which meant in effect that New York City was determining what the rest of the nation could see. To reflect that fact, the Board changed its name, first to the National Board of Censorship and then to the National Board of Review.
After the Supreme Court's decision in Mutual Film, seven other states created their own censorship boards. By the time Scarface went into production, one out of three moviegoers lived in states or cities that regulated the content of movies.
In the early 1920s, a series of scandals—for example, the Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle trial -- further eroded Hollywood's standing in the eyes of the public. To stave off the threat of even more state and local oversight, the studios asked former U.S. Postmaster General, Will Hays, to draft a set of guidelines of what would and would not be acceptable content in movies. In 1930, he produced a more formal document of prohibited topics called "A Code To Govern The Making Of Talking, Synchronized And Silent Motion Pictures," known informally as the Hays Code. (For a more detailed primer on the history of movie censorship, check out the article "Movie Censorship—A Brief History" at "The Picture Show Man.")
It was in this climate that Hughes, Hawks and Hecht sought to make the ultimate gangster picture, one which as Hecht put it, would "double the casualty rate of any picture to date." Hecht's treatment had come complete with casting recommendations—for the lead, Paul Muni, a young New York actor who had made a couple of critically-acclaimed flops in Hollywood before retreating to the Broadway stage; and for the part of Johnny Lovo, Tony's boss, Osgood Perkins who had played the lead in Hecht's Broadway play The Front Page. Hawks cast George Raft for the key role of Tony's sidekick, Guino Rinaldo. Before turning to acting, Raft had been a boxer in New York's Hell's Kitchen and had well-known mob connections, both lending authenticity to the part. In the role of Tony's sister and Rinaldo's love interest, Hawks cast bit player Ann Dvorak after seeing her dance at one of Raft's parties.
Principal photography began in June 1931 and continued until October. The film's release was delayed until March 31, 1932, while Hughes wrangled with both the Hays Office and New York's National Board of Review over the film's content.
Tim Dirks, at his indispensable website "Filmsite," details the various cuts, edits and alternate scenes deemed necessary to get the film out the door.
For example, Tony Camonte's mother explicitly disapproves of her son, calling him "bad" and "no good." Hawks dialed down the violence as much as possible, showing no blood despite a body count of nearly thirty and leaving many of the deaths to occur off screen. (He instead used a recurring visual motif, the letter "X," to signal to the audience that a death had occurred, paying his crew $100 a piece for ways to fit the X into the production, the most inventive being the murder of Boris Karloff in a bowling alley—he rolls a strike, marked with an "X" on his scorecard, just as he's gunned down.)
Hawks also de-emphasized the incestuous relationship that had inspired Hecht's screenplay in the first place.
"We made the brother-sister relationship clearly incestuous," he explained later, "but the censors mistook our intention and objected to it because they thought the relationship between them was too beautiful to be attributed to a gangster. We had a scene in which Muni told his sister that he loved her, and we couldn't play it in full light. We wound up play it in silhouette against a curtain with the light coming from outside. It was a little bit too intense to show faces—you wouldn't dare take a chance."
Despite the changes, the Hays Office refused to give Scarface its stamp of approval—unusual at a time when the Code was unenforceable and honored in the breach if at all—forcing Hughes to bring in assistant director Richard Rosson after filming was complete to shoot an alternate ending, one where a cringing, cowardly Tony Camonte is brought before a judge and sentence to death. By that time, Muni was no longer available and a stand-in (whose face is never shown) was used in his stead.
In addition, Rosson added several moralistic speeches with lines such as "Don't blame the police. They can't stop machine guns from being run back and forth across the state lines. They can't enforce laws that don't exist." A disclaimer was tacked on to the beginning of the film as well as a subtitle, "The Shame Of The Nation," both designed to shift the blame for bootlegger violence from police and political corruption to public indifference.
And still the Hays Office did not approve the film. Hughes finally got tired of waiting and shipped the movie out to any theater that would take it. Some states, New Jersey for example, saw the original cut; New York saw a cut with the bowdlerized ending. Scarface did well wherever it played but didn't play in enough places to make back its costs and eventually Hughes withdrew the film from circulation. Except for bootlegged 16-millimeter prints, the public didn't see it again for nearly fifty years when Universal Pictures bought Scarface in preparation for Brian DePalma's 1983 remake. (The original cut of Scarface wasn't seen in New York until 1980.)
Of the seemingly endless series of movies Hollywood produced during Prohibition to cash in on the public's obsession with gangsters, three stand out today—Little Caesar, The Public Enemy and Scarface. The first two made stars of Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney, respectively, but the best, and at the time most controversial, was Scarface.
The story of a ruthless thug's rise and fall was a familiar one to audiences when the film first appeared in theaters in 1932. But those lucky enough to see the uncut version of Scarface saw a more violent and more complex treatment of the subject than anything that had come before it. Both bucking censorship and helping to usher it in, the production of Scarface is the stuff of legend; the finished movie is a classic.
I. From Novel To Screenplay: "A Real Tough Shoot-‘em Up" The movie Scarface was based on a novel of the same name by a young writer of pulp fiction, Maurice Coons, whose friendship with the Sicilian gangs that ran the slums of Chicago gave his material an air of authenticity. Writing under the pseudonym Armitage Trail, Coons fashioned a tale of a small-time thug, Tony Camonte, who claws his way up the mob ladder only to fall once he reaches the top. It was a thinly-disguised portrait of Al Capone, the same sort of story that writers all over the country were churning out in novels such as W.R. Burnett's Little Caesar and for pulp magazines like Black Mask. As Hollywood sought to exploit the gang wars of the Prohibition Era for its own profit, studios snapped up many of these stories and began to adapt them into motion pictures.
Howard Hughes, the eccentric millionaire business man, aviator and movie producer, was eager to jump on the gangster bandwagon with a picture of his own that would "knock the audience out of its seats." Although he had successfully produced a number of movies, including The Racket, The Front Page and the Oscar-winning comedy Two Arabian Knights, Hughes's one experience as a director, helming 1930's Hell's Angels to financial disaster, convinced him that despite his money and his enthusiasm, he needed a real director to get his project off the ground.
Enter Howard Hawks.
Born in Indiana to a wealthy merchant, and raised in Southern California, Howard Hawks had studied mechanical engineering at Cornell and served in the United States Army Air Service before returning to California to work as a prop man for the Mary Pickford Company. That in the wide-open days of the silent era he went from prop man to director in just three years was not all that unusual. By the time Hughes acquired the film rights to Scarface, Hawks had already directed ten movies and was a veteran of the gangster genre, helming The Criminal Code to critical acclaim and commercial success the year before. Always independent minded, Hawks walked out on a contract with Jack Warner to take the job with Hughes, resulting in a lawsuit that Hawks ultimately lost.
W.R. Burnett took first crack at the screenplay. A native of Springfield, Ohio, Burnett had failed in his first attempt at fiction, writing a hundred unpublished short stories and five unpublished novels before throwing in the towel and taking a job as a night clerk at a hotel in Chicago. It was there that he became acquainted with Chicago's underbelly; his experiences and observations inspired his 1929 novel, Little Caesar, a smash hit that served as the basis for Edward G. Robinson's classic gangster film.
But evidently, Burnett's screenplay for Scarface failed to satisfy Hughes's vision of "a real tough shoot-'em up," and while enough of his work survived to earn Burnett a screen credit, Hughes and Hawks would look elsewhere for the final screenplay of their gangster thriller.
They next turned to Ben Hecht, arguably the greatest screenwriter of all time, certainly belonging near the top of a very short list. Before moving to Hollywood, he had worked as a journalist in Chicago and Berlin, written novels and co-authored the hit play The Front Page with Charles MacArthur (Howard Hughes produced the film adaptation in 1931). In 1926, Hecht moved to Hollywood after receiving a telegram from Herman J. Mankiewicz (who with Orson Welles won best original screenplay for Citizen Kane). The telegram read, "Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots. Don't let this get around." Mankiewicz was right. Hecht eventually became the highest paid writer in Hollywood, earning as much as $100,000 a month, and won an Oscar in its first year of existence for the gangster picture Underworld.
Film historian Richard Corliss later called Hecht "the Hollywood screenwriter."
During their conversations about the project, which initially didn't interest Hecht, Hawks commented that Capone reminded him of the Borgias, whose unsavory stew of incest, murder and intrigue ruled Italy during the Renaissance Era. That was enough of a hook for Hecht who—to the consternation of his agent who had negotiated a salary of a $1000 a day instead of a flat $20,000—wrote a 60-page treatment of the story in eleven days.
As Hecht envisioned the story, Tony Camonte's ascension through the ranks to the position of crime boss is accomplished not through brains and cunning but through sheer aggression so irrational, unrestrained and often at odds with Tony's own best interests that it takes more calculating men by surprise, overwhelming them before they see the threat. One of Hecht's keenest insights, that criminals aren't so much masterminds as ruthless, undisciplined children, came from his conversations with gangsters while working as a journalist in Chicago, and Hecht portrays Tony as a child who, as Naomi Wise put in an essay for Take One magazine, "refuses to recognize the existence of the wills of other humans." As a result, despite the violence depicted in Scarface, the movie plays more as a comic satire about preening buffoons and apes in hats than the reverent portrait of larger-than-life anti-heroes too many gangster movies devolve into.
In adapting Scarface, Hecht cut out the novel's backstory and cop brother, and added a sister for whom Tony has incestuous desires apparent to everyone but himself, a desire that ultimately proves to be his Achilles heel. He also used Scarface as a vehicle for criticizing his fellow journalists whom he felt had helped glorify gangsters. Hecht based the character Johnny Lovo, Tony's boss, on Johnny Torrio, and North-side boss Big Louie Costillo on Big Jim Colosimo. He also drew on several incidents well-known to movie audiences, such as the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, the murder of Legs Diamond in a hospital bed and Deannie O'Bannion's assassination in a flower shop.
After receiving Hecht's treatment, Hawks turned the story over to a pair of young writers, Seton I. Miller and John Lee Mahin, who are credited with their movie's "continuity and dialogue." Miller was a young writer who had worked with Hawks before, co-writing the early Louise Brooks effort A Girl In Every Port, and providing the dialogue for The Dawn Patrol and The Criminal Code (the latter scoring him an Oscar nomination). Like Miller, Mahin was twenty-eight; unlike Miller, Scarface was Mahin's first screenplay. He had been working in New York as a journalist (and was fired by William Randolph Hearst for writing a negative review of Hearst's mistress, Marion Davies) until heading for Hollywood at the invitation of fellow journalist Ben Hecht.
Handing a screenplay from writer to writer was not an unusual procedure in those days—Hollywood studios approached screenwriting as an assembly line process for decades, with one team of writers developing the story, another team working on the dialogue and yet another providing re-writes, with very little collaboration between the separate groups. In this case, Hecht fleshed out the novel's storyline, invented many new ideas, defined the characters, wrote dialogue, then Miller and Mahin worked out the "continuity"—the progression of the scenes—and wrote additional dialogue.
Whether Miller and Mahin worked together as a team or one after the other, I can't say (given the degree to which Miller later resented collaborating with other writers, the latter seems likely). It is also unclear which, if either of them, did the rewrites attempting to satisfy the censorship boys in the Hays Office. Hawks himself did some work on the script although as was often the case, did not take a credit.
In any event, the process of producing a screenplay for Scarface turned out to be relatively painless. Getting the movie from the page to the screen proved to be anything but.
If choosing the best screenplay of the year were simply a question of counting up the quotable lines, Animal Crackers would be the hands-down winner for 1930-31. Not only did that movie give us Groucho Marx's most famous monologue—a description of the most inept African safari of all time—but it also included the "Take a letter to my lawyer" routine, the "Strange interlude" bit, Groucho's signature song "I Must Be Going," Chico's first piano performance of "I'm Daffy Over You" and some of the best work of Harpo's career.
In adapting the stage play that he and George S. Kaufman (with songs from Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby) had written two years before, Morrie Ryskind retained the best jokes and the bare structure of the story, and jettisoned as much of the connective tissue as he could, but Animal Crackers never quite escapes the staginess of its origins and even if one of the supporting characters and I share the same name, I get a bit restless waiting through the dull stretches of creaky plot contrivances for another of the Marx Brothers' wonderful comedy routines. It's not much of a knock considering how often these great routines pop up, but in a year loaded with great screenplays—not just my nominees, but also The Dawn Patrol (John Monk Saunders), M (Fritz Lang and Thea Harbou), The Front Page (Charles Lederer and Bartlett Cormack) and The Public Enemy (Harvey Thew)—it's just enough of a flaw to make me look elsewhere for the best screenplay of 1930-31.
Instead, the award goes to René Clair for his delightful and inventive musical comedy, Le Million. The story is tight and precisely put together, the songs and dialogue are witty and memorable, and the resulting comedy is as light and frothy as a glass of cold champagne.
Le Million is the story of a struggling artist (René Lefèvre), in debt to his landlord and every shop owner in town, who discovers he has won the lottery—if only he can find the ticket. He remembers it's in the pocket of a jacket he left with his fiancee (Annabella), but she's given the jacket to a beggar (Paul Ollivier) on the run from the police who then sells the jacket in a thrift store to an opera singer who thinks it's just perfect for his role in La Boheme. Soon everybody is scrambling to get their hands on that jacket, a chase that climaxes in an on-stage scrum in the middle of the tenor's performance. Le Million influenced the title sequence of A Night at the Opera, and as a comedy, it can stand comfortably alongside the Marx Brothers' classic. It really is that good.
And if that was all there were to it, Le Million would still be one of the best movies of the year. That Clair also takes time, as the characters race around at a non-stop clip, to explore two of his favorite themes, the outsize role of money in society and the fragile nature of love, makes Le Million one of the best movies of any year, a deserving award winner.
Clair gets great mileage out of the deference we pay to money and the people who have it regardless of their worth as human beings, and we laugh at the contortions of the shopowners to ingratiate themselves to a man they had just minutes before been chasing through the streets. Clair also shows us the lengths supposedly respectable people will go to get their hands on money they aren't entitled to, such as the ironically-named Prosper (Jean-Louis Allibert) who lets his friend the artist sit in jail just to increase his chances of getting to the lottery ticket first.
As for the beggar who took loan of the jacket then sold it, he turns out to be Grandpa Tulipe, a master criminal who leads a well-organized band of highly-efficient thieves. But even they aren't content merely to steal, they feel compelled to dress up their base impulses with the same sort of respectable lies Bernie Madoff no doubt told himself:
"We are the foot soldiers of inequality! We take back the spoils of social injustice! And under the watchful eye of the police, We redistribute wealth and private property."
Clair concludes that "money isn't everything" but then adds this telling postscript:
"So say folks who are intelligent To folks who haven't got a cent. We'll believe what they say, When they give all their money away."
The second of Clair's favorite themes, that along with the notion that pos- sessions are a trap, real love is fragile and fleeting and not a game human beings are really adept at, could have become the stuff of a pretty conventional romantic comedy but for Clair's skill at spinning out the courtship. "We're just sort of engaged," the artist tells the beautiful model in his arms after his fiancee has caught them in an embrace. The fiancee herself is an outrageous flirt and isn't sure she wants to help him even of it does mean riches for them both. As expected, the two reunite and break apart and reunite and break apart throughout the movie, but it's only while they're trapped on stage behind a piece of scenery while the tenor and the coloratura sing of love that they reveal to each what's really in their hearts.
This doesn't even touch on the fact that Le Million made the most innovative use of sound to date in the Early Sound Era, introducing ideas that still crop up in movies and television. But that's the subject of my next essay, "Achievements In The Use Of Sound: René Clair's Le Million."
Despite how unappealing the idea of watching a seventy-eight year old French musical comedy might sound to a casual movie fan, Le Million really is a Saturday night movie, full of slapstick and sightgags, and the only thing that keeps me from naming it the best Fun-Stupid movie of 1930-31 is my reluctance to task your patience with subtitles. But if you're willing to take a chance then I'm telling that this is the one French movie you can brag to friends about watching, understanding and enjoying.
Or to put it another way, Katie-Bar-The-Door started out watching Le Million I think mostly to humor me, became completely enchanted with it and wound up talking about it for days afterwards. In fact, she's the one who urged me to choose it for best screenplay over it's better-known competition. And she was right.
Born in Paris in 1898 as René-Lucien Chomette, René Clair worked as a journalist and an actor before directing his first film in 1924, Entr'acte, an exercise in Dadaism that included jumbled footage of Paris and a coffin that runs away from a funeral. He achieved his first lasting success in 1930 with Under The Roofs Of Paris, an amiable comedy about the intersecting lives of four Parisians. Convinced there was no point in merely replicating theater or radio performances on film, it was in this film that Clair first began to experiment with the new sound technology. As I will discuss at more length in my next essay, Clair's use of sound in Le Million was both inventive and influential and was a landmark achievement of the Early Sound Era.
Clair made three more movies in France, including the classic À Nous La Liberté, then relocated to Hollywood in 1935 where he worked until after World War II. His Hollywood films aren't on par with his best French work, but he did direct I Married A Witch and Then There Were None, both critically-acclaimed box office hits. During his career, he directed thirty movies, his last in 1965, and died in France in 1981 at the age of eighty-two.
Acknowledgment: Usually when I write these essays, I sit in front of my DVD player (or VCR or YouTube) and take notes in longhand, transcribing quotes and making my usual witty observations. But Katie and I got Le Million from Netflix and I sent it back before it occurred to me that I would need to watch it again to write this lengthy post about it. I don't know what I was thinking.
So I scoured the internet for usable quotes (the witty observations, fortunately, were firmly embedded in my head), came up empty at the usually reliable Internet Movie Database, then found a very useful and interesting blog called "The Criterion Contraption," written by Matthew Dessem who is attempting to watch and review every movie in the Criterion Collection catalogue. Obviously, he's even crazier than I am, which is saying something, and my hat's off to him. It's a good blog and if you're interested in the sort of movies Criterion sells on DVD and are looking for an in-depth review, I recommend you head on over there.
Anyway, his review of Le Million is chock full of good quotes, not to mention several screen captures of the movie itself, and I relied on his good work as a research tool. Hopefully, he and you are okay with that.
Now this is how you adapt a classic novel for the big screen.
Being a (failed) writer myself, it has often struck me how few great movies have been based on great books. They are such radically different media—one visual, one verbal—that what works brilliantly in a book doesn't work at all on the screen, and vice versa. I mean, despite at least four attempts (and a reported fifth on the way), no one has ever figured how to translate the last line of The Great Gatsby—arguably the greatest last line in all of literature—into anything other than the most banal cinema.
Faithful attempts to film great books often wind up turgid (For Whom The Bell Tolls), incomprehensible (Even Cowgirls Get The Blues) or nine hours long (Greed). And that's when Hollywood is bothering to be faithful at all. Who can forget the liberties Demi Moore took with The Scarlet Letter to disastrous effect, or the unmitigated mess Brian De Palma made of The Bonfire of the Vanities?
That an adaptation of the best book ever written about World War I should have resulted in the best movie ever made about World War I is, in context, a bit of a miracle.
If you don't know the novel All Quiet On The Western Front, you certainly should. Written by Erich Maria Remarque, it's the story of a schoolboy's journey from gung-ho volunteer to disillusioned war veteran. Remarque had been a soldier, conscripted along with his friends at the age of eighteen, serving in the trenches with the German army in France, and the novel captures both the horrors of war and the lust for empire and glory that led to it. The novel sold 2.5 million copies in the eighteen months after its publication in 1928 and was quickly acquired by Universal Pictures.
The adaptation of Remarque's novel was handled by two celebrated Broadway playwrights with an assist from a veteran Hollywood director of silent B-pictures.
Maxwell Anderson is best remembered now for such Broadway hits as What Price Glory, Anne of a Thousand Days and The Bad Seed. He worked on screenplays throughout his career, with All Quiet On The Western Front earning him his only Oscar nomination. He primarily wrote political dramas and often wrote his plays in blank verse, including Key Largo, later adapted into the classic movie starring Humphrey Bogart and Edward G. Robinson. In 1933, he won the Pulitzer Prize for his play Both Your Houses, a polemic aimed at seedy Washington politics.
George Abbott began his Broadway career as an actor before turning exclusively to writing. Like Anderson, he was a successful playwright, penning mostly musicals such as Pal Joey and Damn Yankees. He won five Tony awards, became a Kennedy Center honoree in 1982, and, for his play, Fiorello!, a musical based on the life of reform-minded New York mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, Abbott was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.
Unlike his two co-writers, Del Andrews was primarily a director, and not a well-known one either. He directed forty movies, mostly westerns at a time when westerns were strictly B-picture kiddie fare, and comedy shorts featuring actors you've never heard of. So far as I can tell, none of these films still exist, although the westerns did star Fred Thompson and Hoot Gibson, two of the biggest western stars of the Silent Era. I can't tell you much more about him than that—he was born in 1894, he died in 1942, he was married and he had a son—but I'm willing to bet he knew plenty about how to get a story on film in a hurry and I suspect he was paired with Anderson and Abbott, who were great playwrights but knew little about Hollywood, to tutor them on the finer points of movie-based storytelling.
Despite the feeling that you are watching a completely faithful adaptation of the novel, the movie actually differs significantly in its structure. The novel begins in medias res, the novel's hero Paul already a grizzled veteran of a long and pointless war, revealing most of his back story through a series of flashbacks as he muses on how he and his classmates moved from the classroom to the trenches, and for most of them, to the grave. The book is elegiac, both haunting and haunted, and one of the finest anti-war novels ever written.
The movie straight- ens out the chro- nology, beginning with a school teacher's patriotic harangue and then following the students as they first volunteer and then discover the reality of war's horrors. As an audience, you arrive at Paul's conclusions at the same time he does, giving the movie an immediacy and growing tension. Both approaches are effective, but I suspect each approach is best suited for its respective medium.
Writing credits in old Hollywood movies are often confusing and the credits for All Quiet On The Western Front are no different. Del Andrews was credited with the "adaptation," Maxwell Anderson with the "adaptation and dialogue," and George Abbott with the "screenplay." The technical meaning of each is a bit murky, especially since they've evolved over the years, but my understanding is that in 1930, "adaptation" referred to the overall structure of the piece, "dialogue" to the words the actors spoke and "screenplay" to both dialogue and the physical staging of the work.
Further confusing the issue is that the studio released two versions of All Quiet On The Western Front, the sound version we know today and a silent version, with Walter Anthony providing titles, for those theaters which had not yet made the conversion to sound.
Judging from the way the credits read, I would guess that Anderson, with the guidance of veteran director Andrews, decided on the basic flow of the story—which scenes to include and in which order—and then went on to write a draft of the screenplay's dialogue. Then for whatever reason, I'm guessing that the producers brought in Abbott to significantly rework Anderson's draft. But I could just be talking through my hat.
What I do know is that All Quiet On The Western Front is a terrific movie based on a terrific book and for that miracle, its screenplay wins the Katie Award for best screenplay of 1929-30.
Named for Katie-Bar-The-Door, the Katies are "alternate Oscars"—who should have been nominated, who should have won—but really they're just an excuse to write a history of the movies from the Silent Era to the present day.
To see a list of nominees and winners by decade, as well as links to my essays about them, click the highlighted links:
Remember: There are no wrong answers, only movies you haven't seen yet.
The Silent Oscars
And don't forget to check out the Silent Oscars—my year-by-year choices for best picture, director and all four acting categories for the pre-Oscar years, 1902-1927.
Look at me—Joe College, with a touch of arthritis. Are my eyes really brown? Uh, no, they're green. Would we have the nerve to dive into the icy water and save a person from drowning? That's a key question. I, of course, can't swim, so I never have to face it. Say, haven't you anything better to do than to keep popping in here early every morning and asking a lot of fool questions?
Katie is home early again today after a grueling two-plus hour trip to the dentist. While convalescing, she's been reading The Marx Brothers Encyclopedia by Glenn Mitchell, which I checked out from the library the other day.
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