Gangsters, Scarface (1932), and a Brief History of Movies

[Based on lectures in the sociology of film and popular culture]

The history of motion pictures dates back to 1893, to the invention of the kinetoscope by Thomas Edison. From then until about 1905 motion pictures were mostly a novelty: they might be 15 seconds of vaudeville performers or acrobats or dancers, shown as part of the travelling circus. People simply amazed by pictures which moved. 

Beginning in about 1905 and throughout the teens, motion pictures began to be shown in their own places of presentation, the nickelodeon theater. Mostly located in the cities, people would cram into the theaters, which were very crowded and featured poor sanitation and no ventilation. By 1914, there were 18,000 nickelodeon theaters in the US, movie admissions were about 7 million per day, and movies were a $300 million industry. 

Nickoledeon theatres were primarily located in the cities, with 400 to 500 in NYC alone. Thus, the people who frequented them most were working-class, usually immigrants or children of immigrants. The urban working classes were the primary audience in terms of ticket sales, and they were also the most enthusiastic consumers of movies.

In the late teens and 1920s, the movie industry began moving to Hollywood, and the business of movie-making underwent expansion. The industry became dominated by a few large studios: Paramount, Fox, MGM, Universal, Warner Bros. At the time, these companies not only made the movies, but also controlled their distribution and exhibition. Each of them owned hundreds of movie theaters around the US. 

As Hollywood and the movie industry became big business in the 1920s, they started to focus on getting middle-class audiences, in distinction from the working-class immigrants living in the city. But it wasn’t easy at first. People still associated motion pictures with the dirty, crowded nickelodeon theaters in the city. Movie theaters were unsafe places where the immigrants hung out, while movies held the stigma of being lowbrow, cheap entertainment. 

So in trying to reach more affluent audiences, studios began building “movie palaces,” huge and incredibly lavish theaters with 1,000 seats, built to look like opera houses or legitimate theater. Some of them even had orchestra pits. An usher dressed in a suit would take your ticket and show you to your seat. They Did this to put the middle-class at ease, under the pretense of being legitimate culture rather than cheap entertainment. 

New technologies allowed the studios to make longer movies (the 2 hour feature-length film) and make movies which were more expensive to produce. The first of the blockbusters was Birth of a Nation (1915), directed by DW Griffith. It's a movie about Civil War and Reconstruction from the South’s perspective, where KKK are the heroes and deeply racist in its depiction of blacks. The movie was two and half hours long, with incredible re-creation of Civil War battle scenes. It first showed at the White House for Woodrow Wilson. Years later, new technologies also allowed for inclusion of sound in movies, the “talkies.” The first movie with sound was The Jazz Singer (1927), starring Al Jolson, a musical and a huge hit which made lots of money for Warner Brothers. 

As it became possible to make longer movies and movies with sound, the big 6 strengthened its power over the industry. Movies became more expensive to produce, and this drove out independents who couldn’t compete. Various movie genres developed as studios sought to capitalize on successful formulas: the musical, the western, “screwball” comedy, and the gangster. Genres emerged because when one movie proved popular and profitable, the other studios would rush out to make a movie just like it to draw the same type of audience.   

Three movies in the early 1930s defined the gangster genre. First, Little Caesar in 1930, then The Public Enemy in 1931, and finally Scarface in 1932. One of the key factors that distinguished the gangster was ethnicity, as the gangster was always a working-class son of immigrants living in the big city. Rico in Little Caesar and Tony in Scarface were Italian-Americans, while in the Public Enemy the gangster was Irish. The actors who played them were also ethnic, but ironically not of the same ethnicity, they were mostly Jewish. Edgar G. Robinson (played Rico in Little Caesar) was born Emmanuel Goldenberg, Paul Muni (star of Scarface) was born Friedrich Meyer Muni Weisenfreund. Ethnicity has been constant feature of gangster movies to this day, if we look at the Godfather, Goodfellas, or the Sopranos. When they made a remake of Scarface in early 1980s, Al Pacino was cast to play a Cuban immigrant living in Miami. 

One of the important things about the gangster movies of the 1930s is that the gangster could talk because of new technologies. This allowed filmmakers to accentuate, emphasize the ethnicity of the gangster, to give the gangster and his friends a noticeable or even exaggerated ethnic accent. It Also meant that they could capture the sounds of the city—the traffic, police sirens, the hustle and bustle—and it allowed them to accentuate the violence of the gunshots in Scarface. 

Another crucial feature of the 1930s gangster film was that it was told from the gangster’s point-of-view. There were gangster movies in the silent era of the 1920s, but they were from the point-of-view of the police and authorities, like "What are we going to do about the immigrant problem?" or "How do we raise immigrants to higher moral standard, turning them into law-abiding Americans?" The gangster film of the 1930s was shot from the perspective of the gangster himself. 

So what is the gangster’s perspective? In one sense, it conforms perfectly to the American Dream, to the Horatio Alger story of going from rags to riches. The gangster craves success, power, material possessions, women (especially white women), and respect from the dominant culture. In one sense, the gangster is like all other immigrants who work hard to try to make it into the middle-class and become accepted into mainstream America.

  

But the gangster also knows that in order to be a success in America, you have to be a capitalist, not a worker. The gangster knows that the straight life, the life of working hard for somebody else, is for suckers. It will get you nowhere, leave you stuck in some dead end job. The gangster wants to be a success, and he knows that in order to be a success in America, you have to be a capitalist, not a worker, but the problem is that the gangster doesn’t have access to legitimate capital. The gangster is never going to own an oil well, or a steel mill, or a bank. The one thing he does have access to is illegal capital: drugs, prostitution, gambling, and during Prohibition, alcohol. Remember that alcohol was illegal in the US beginning in 1920, after passage of the Volstead Act, which instituted Prohibition in America from 1920 to 1933. 

In fact, part of the popularity of the gangster and the gangster film during the early 1930s can be explained by the fact that Prohibition was becoming increasingly unpopular during the Depression. Think about it, if ever you needed a drink it was during the Depression. Prohibition became the focus of a lot of resentment during the Depression, especially because working-class immigrants saw it as WASP America’s attempt to police and control them, and they were right. So the hatred of Prohibition helped make the gangster a sympathetic figure for many audiences, especially working-class immigrants. 

So the gangster is a criminal, but he’s also a perfect capitalist—he succeeds because he meets the demands of his consumers and he crushes the competition. In Scarface, Tony keeps looking out his window and seeing a neon sign that flashes “The World is Yours.” It’s such a powerful message, not only the words “The World is Yours” but also the fact that it is flashing in neon.

The gangster also behaves like the perfect consumer, shows off his success by buying new suits, new cars, cigars and jewelry. And he also tries to acquire white women as the ultimate conquest and status symbol. Yet the gangster continues to be denied legitimacy and respect: he has all the right material possessions, but not the proper taste or culture. There's a funny part in Scarface where Tony is showing off all his material possession to a woman he’s trying to impress, and she remarks that its kind of “gaudy,” meaning that its tacky, tasteless, vulgar and unrefined. Only Tony doesn’t know what the word gaudy means, so he says “glad you like it.” So the gangster finds himself in the gap between two Americas: between the America of economic opportunity where anyone can make it (at least in theory) and the America of WASP elitism, the nativist culture of White Anglo-Saxon Protestants.

A final point about censorship. Although cinema was becoming more respectable and reaching middle-class audiences during the 1920s, movies remained controversial. They angered people who were concerned about sexual morality, who worried about what they saw on-screen and the permissiveness associated with Hollywood in general. When the gangster genre came out, they worried about the violence and lawlessness embodied by the gangster. So beginning in the early 1920s, these moralists began campaigning to have the government regulate and possibly censor movies for content.

Scarface is based on the life of a real life gangster, Al Capone, and makes reference to some-life events, like the St. Valentine’s Day massacre. The fear was that the gangster film  romanticized and glamorized the gangster life, and to a certain extent this was true, because it was a story told from the gangster’s p.o.v. and it was tremendously popular with working-class, immigrant audiences.  

So in response the filmmakers had to try to stave off the censors, to provide a “moral lesson” that being a gangster was a bad thing, that crime doesn’t pay, and so on. That’s why the full title of the movie was “Scarface: The Shame of a Nation” and in the beginning we see a message that the gangster is a “problem that must be solved.” This kind of thing was in all the 1930s gangster movies, a kind of disclaimer like “don’t try this at home,” gangsters are bad, but it seems contrived because the actual movie does glamorize the gangster life. Eventually, in 1935, the Production Code Administration issued a moratorium on the production of all gangster films—not only were the studios barred from making gangster films, but the old ones couldn’t be shown in theaters, so for many years Scarface and the others were basically unseen.

In Scarface, there is a very awkward scene midway in the movie, where a police detective and a publisher are going on about gangsters and what the government should do about them. It's a weird scene because the lighting and angles are totally different from the rest of the movie, and the scene doesn’t fit into the plot at all. One of the police detectives points right at the camera and says, “Now, what are YOU going to do about it.” And this Italian stereotype pops out of nowhere and says “Its-a-true, they-a disgrace-a my people.” This scene was added as a response to pressure from the censors. The studio held up the release of the movie until the scene was added, and the reason it’s so awkward is because the director, Howard Hawkes, refused to participate.