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Learning Beyond the Classics
Directed by Howard Hawks
With Paul Muni, Ann Dvorak, George Raft
Not Rated, 99 minutes, DCP

Pulp writer Armitage Trail based his 1930 novel Scarface on the life of Al Capone. When Howard Hawks adapted it in 1932, the film arrived a golden era of gangster films as the Hays Code would arrive and require all criminal behavior depicted in films be punished, thus gutting much of the genre’s major appeal. While Brian De Palma’s 1983 version may be better known today and certainly more often postered on dorm room walls, Hawks’ Scarface stayed closer to the original book that follows Tony Camonte (Paul Muni) as an Italian immigrant gangster and Capone proxy who climbs the 1920s Chicagoan crime syndicate ladder into the dizzying heights of high society through a violent, murderous campaign.

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