Scarface 4K (1932/Criterion 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray w/Blu-ray)

Picture: B+ Sound: B Extras: B Film: B-

It's not often that an academic extra on a physical media release shifts my perspective on a film. They tend to be dry, ponderous, and bookish, merely confirming things we as astute viewers already knew. So imagine my surprise when, after watching film scholar Lea Jacobs break down director Howard Hawks' editing and use of sound on Criterion's 4K edition of Scarface, I found my feelings about the proto-gangster picture totally changed.

Hawks' 1932 film - the progenitor of not only an entire genre but of a subculture thanks to Brian De Palma's insane 1983 remake - was never a personal favorite. As an early sound film, everyone acts as if they're trying to reach the back of the house. Paul Muni as Italian immigrant Tony Camonte, the titular not-Al-Capone-but-no-really-it's-Al-Capone gangster, is overly expressive and big. (No wonder Al Pacino felt he had to turn his take, Tony Montana, up to 11.) George Raft, as Muni's sidekick Rinaldo, is more muted by comparison but still very stagy. Ann Dvorak as Cesca, Tony's sexed-up kid sister, is a classic silent film femme fatale with her big eyes and bigger hysterics. Boris Karloff, as the rival Irish gangster Gaffney and one year removed from Frankenstein, is the only one who seems to understand the pitfalls and potential of the new sound world.

And then there's the subtle-as-a-crowbar-to-the-face moralizing. The police chief sermonizes to Tony that he and his kind (gangsters? Italians? why choose!) are ruining America. A scene around the midpoint of the film, where an old politician is in a room with a bunch of even older, well heeled concerned citizens, wringing their hands about Tony's crime spree, is capped by the pol looking directly at the camera and scolding us viewers for not doing enough to stop the criminal menace ravaging our cities. But perhaps because producer Howard Hughes thought all that would go over viewers' heads, the film opens with the following text: ''This picture is an indictment of gang rule in America and of the callous indifference of the government to this constantly increasing menace to our safety and our liberty. Every incident in this picture is the reproduction of an actual occurrence, and the purpose of this picture is to demand of the government: ''What are you going to do about it?'' The government is your government. What are YOU going to do about it?''

None of that stopped Hughes or Hawks from loading the film with violence and sex, which gives Scarface a luridness exceptional even for a pre-code gangster picture. Still, it always felt cheap and, frankly, silly. And racist. As an Italian American, it's not all that fun to watch Muni and Vince Barnett, playing Tony's secretary Angelo, lean all the way in to the early 20th century stereotypes: the greasy criminal, the dark and vulgar menace, the illiterate buffoon who-ah talk-ah like-ah dis and can't-ah read or write-ah. This genre's foundation is as bigoted as any in Hollywood, and Scarface and Little Caesar especially could easily be placed alongside Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind as very important and very racist Hollywood products. (In fairness, I find De Palma's version equally repellent, but for different reasons.)

Still, when Criterion announced its 4K release - which is superb, by the way - it was an opportunity to revisit Scarface after not seeing it in something like 20 years. It played better this time, even as the anti-Italian-ness of it all felt way more present. There's rarely a scene where Hughes, Hawks, and screenwriter Ben Hecht don't miss a chance to slip the knife into the shiftless immigrant. But it was after watching Jacobs' breakdown of Hawks' technique where the film gained a new dimension. She places Scarface in the broader context of the silent-to-sound transition, as well as the more specific one of Hawks' oeuvre, and makes the case that it not only helped Hollywood solve its problems with how to make talkies but gave Hawks the framework for making rat-a-tat-tat comedies.

The screwball comedy is typically traced back to Frank Capra's 1934 masterpiece It Happened One Night.

Hawks would engage with the style in his own masterworks Bringing Up Baby (1938) and, more expertly, His Girl Friday (1940). Jacobs, though, argues that the first shoots of the screwball genre can be found here, in Scarface, via Hawks' machine gun-like dialogue - meant to solve the problem of actors used to intertitles 1) not knowing their lines and 2) being very languid in their deliveries - and his frenetic editing around that kind of delivery. It's an eye-opening observation that argues without Scarface there likely would not have been, at least, His Girl Friday. And, more importantly, it takes Scarface out of the ghetto of Poverty Row studios (though its original distributor was United Artists for one of Hughes' companies and NOT Warner Bros. (the home of the Gangster Genre of the time) and anti-immigrant race baiting and elevates it into something like a cinematic skeleton key.

That's not to say Scarface works only as a piece of film text. There is something undeniable in its directness and vulgarity, and there's an electricity crackling through it that's undiminished nearly a century later. But finding hidden depths to its tabloid brutality so many years later is perhaps the true mark of its genius. It's not the best gangster film of the early sound period, but it may just be the most important.

Which would explain why it has entered the Criterion Collection. It presents the film in a 4K digital restoration, with crisp and deep blacks and an overall excellent picture, with an uncompressed monaural soundtrack that does justice to Hawks' lively production. Scarface has never looked or sounded this good, and likely will never look or sound better.

However, some felt the 1.0 PCM Mono on this 4K edition and the regular 1080p Blu-ray also included (solid, but no match for the 4K disc) is slightly lacking versus the slightly clearer DTS-HD MA (Master Audio) 2.0 Mono lossless mix on the Blu-ray that was part of the Limited Edition The World Is Yours box set. Either way, the image on that disc is not as good as either in this Criterion set - important for those who want to hear (and see) why Jean-Luc Godard called the 1932 film one of the ten best early sound films. You can read more about that and the solid 4K 1983 remake of Scarface at:

http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/15578/Scarface+4K+(1983/Universal+4K+Ultra+HD+Blu-

The extras, which appear on the Blu-ray disc, include an alternate ending from the censored version of the film (which is absolutely lousy), a conversation with author Megan Abbott and actor Bill Hader (which is fine if you like a couple friends chatting about a movie they both like), and that video essay from Jacobs. There's also a booklet essay from critic Imogen Sara Smith. A trailer would have been nice, as would have something that located Scarface's place within the broader gangster picture and its long, long life as an influential piece of cinema. But we have a 4K edition of a 92-year-old B-picture restored to something close to glory. Why complain?

- Dante A. Ciampaglia