Popular Culture Review Vol. 13, No. 1, January 2002 | Page 102
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Popular Culture Review
away from him. Such a man is like the insect whose legs we must tear off if we
want to remove him from the branch to which he is clinging.
If Scarf ace is the classic gangster film, there are two reasons why. First,
because it sketched in the dramatic rhetoric of the genre, which other films have
then developed. But this tradition of submachine gun bursts, bullet-riddled bodies,
and screeching breaks is the one that’s the least interesting, precisely because it had
no trouble at all establishing itself with the advent of sound and can now be found
everywhere. Hawks himself, perhaps the most skilled craftsman in Hollywood,
could have exploited this tradition much more fully had he wanted to. Air Force
(1943; dir. Howard Hawks) showed us last year the extent of his cinematic eloquence
when it comes to “action” scenes. But Scarface takes a different aesthetic direction,
one that connects it with a particular vein in American fiction—the depths of which
subsequent gangster films have hardly ever penetrated, even when they tried.
Hence the second sense in which Scarface is the classic gangster film:
i f s practically one of a kind. The mobsters’ violence and volatility are treated only
as a means to the end of establishing a special climate for the development of these
human puppets with instinctive drives. Faulkner and Erskine Caldwell created a
similar climate on their Southern plantations, and recently we have had the
opportunity to see the same aesthetic design in Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow o f a
Doubt (1943). If the director hadn’t in the end capitulated to the audience’s moral
sensitivity, this film would not have been unworthy of Scarface. One psychological
theme in particular is developed in Shadow o f a Doubt, as in Scarface: that of
incest, with even the Faulknerian intensifying device, in Hitchcock’s film, of giving
the niece and her uncle the same first name. Psychoanalysis has truly become a
Hollywood commonplace. Blind Alley (1939; dir. Charles Vidor), for instance,
shows us a gangster who uses his submachine gun as a figurative means to kill his
father. But this is nothing more than the cheap degeneration of a theme that American
cinema has only seldom treated with the simultaneous daring and discretion found
in Scarface.
We can see in this picture’s treatment of a theme like incest one of the
limits cinema imposes on itself, in contrast to the practice of the novel. What is
astonishing is not that the American cinema so rarely enters the domain of modem
fiction, but that it enters this domain at all. After one realizes the extent of censorship
on the other side of the Atlantic, or even simply the extent of the public’s self
censorship in the face of everything that disturbs its social and moral security, one
really has to marvel when from time to time one encounters, in a movie like
Scarface, emotions of the kind and of the intensity we associate with American
literature.
University of Michigan
Bert Cardullo