Revisioning modern American history in the age of Scarface (1932)

Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television

Volumn 24, Issue 4, 2004, Pages 535-563

  Smyth, J E ^a  

^a YALE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61149665378     PISSN: 01439685     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/0143968042000293865     Document Type: Review

References (65)

1. Carlos Clarens, Crime Movies from Griffith to the Godfather and Beyond (New York, 1980). Although Carlos Clarens occasionally cited the basis for classic gangster scripts, he was not interested in the potential of these historical adaptations (pp. 43, 53, 66)
2. Among many, Pierre Sorlin, The Film in History: restaging the past (Totowa, NJ, 1980)
3. Philip Rosen, Securing the historical: historiography and the classical cinema, in Rosen and Patricia Mellencamp (eds), Cinema Histories/Cinema Practices (Frederick, MD, 1984), pp. 17-34, 24-25
4. Rosen, Change Mummified (Minneapolis, MN, 2001), Chapter 4, passim
5. Marc Ferro, Cinema and History (Detroit, MI, 1988)
6. George F. Custen, Biopics: how Hollywood constructed public history (New Brunswick, NJ, 1992), pp. 3-31
7. Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation (Norman, OK, 1992)
8. Marc C. Carnes (ed.), Past Imperfect: history according to the movies (New York, 1995), passim
9. Robert A. Rosenstone, Visions of the Past (Cambridge, MA, 1995)
10. Stephen C. Caton, Lawrence of Arabia: a film's anthropology (Berkeley, CA, 1999)
11. Natalie Zemon Davis, Slaves on Screen (Cambridge, MA, 2001)
12. The scholars recapitulated their earlier work in a special issue on film history in The Public Historian: A Journal of Public History, 25:3 (2003)
13. Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane (New York, 1959)
14. Northrop Frye, The Critical Path: an essay in the social context of literary criticism (Bloomington, 1973)
15. Claude Levi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked: introduction to a science mythology (New York, 1969)
16. Miriam Bratu Hansen, The mass production of the senses: classical cinema as vernacular modernism, in Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams (eds), Reinventing Film Studies (London, 2000), pp. 332-350
17. See also Bordwell et al., The Classical Hollywood Cinema: film style and mode of production to 1960 (New York, 1985)
18. Rick Altman, Film/Genre (London, 1999)
19. First published in The Partisan Review (February 1948)
20. Andrew Bergman, We're in the Money: Depression America and its films (New York, 1972)
21. Eugene Rosow, Born to Lose: the gangster film in America (New York, 1978)
22. and Robert Ray, A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema (Princeton, NJ, 1985), pp. 74-77
23. Stephen Louis Karpf, The Gangster Film: emergence, variation, and decay of a genre (New York, 1973), p. 212
24. See also Clarens, passim, and Jonathan Munby, Public Enemies, Public Heroes (Chicago, 1999) for similar perspectives
25. Garth Jowett, 'Bullets, beer, and the Hays Office', in John O'Connor and Martin A. Jackson (eds), American History/American Film (New York, 1979), pp. 57-75
26. Richard Maltby, 'Tragic heroes? Al Capone and the spectacle of criminality', 1948-1931, in John Benson (ed.), Screening the Past: the 6th Australian history and film conference papers (Bundoora, 1993), pp. 112-119
27. Maltby, "Grief in the limelight": Al Capone, Howard Hughes, the Hays Code and the politics of the unstable text, in James Combs (ed.), Movies and Politics: the dynamic relationship (New York, 1993), pp. 133-181; Munby, passim
28. David E. Ruth, Inventing the Public Enemy: the gangster in American culture, 1918-1934 (Chicago, 1996), p. 1
29. J. E. Smyth, Cimarron: the new Western history in 1931, Film & History, 33:1 (2003), pp. 9-17
30. and Young Mr. Lincoln: between myth and history in 1939, Rethinking History, 7:2 (2003), pp. 193-214
31. Hayden White, Historiography and historiophoty, The American Historical Review, 93:5 (1988), pp. 1,193-1,199
32. Preston William Slosson, The Great Crusade and After, 1914-1928 (New York, 1930)
33. and Louis M. Hacker, American Problems of Today: a history of the United States since the World War (New York, 1938)
34. Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: the American historical profession and the 'objectivity' question (Cambridge, 1988)
35. and Charles and Mary Beard, The Rise of American Civilization (New York, 1927)
36. Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: an informal history of the nineteen twenties (New York, 1931), p. viii
37. Joseph Gollumb, Meeting the crime wave: a comparison of methods, Nation, 112 (1921), p. 82
38. Fred L. Holmes, Making criminals out of soldiers, Nation, 121 (1925), p. 114
39. WB Collection, USC; George F. Custen, Twentieth Century's Fox: Darryl F. Zanuck and the culture of Hollywood (New York, 1997), p. 136
40. Creighton Peet, Doorway to Hell, Outlook (November 1930)
41. The National Board of Review and Film Daily also included The Public Enemy. See Jack Alicoate, ed., The 1931 Film Daily Yearbook (New York and Los Angeles 1932), pp. 23, 63
42. Fred D. Pasley, Al Capone: the biography of a self-made man (Garden City, NY, 1930), pp. 20-21
43. WB, Wisc., cited in Roger Dooley's From Scarface to Scarlett (New York, 1981), p. 254
44. See also Henry Cohen, 'An ordinary thug', introduction, in The Public Enemy (Madison, WI, 1981), pp. 16-17
45. PCA Files, AMPAS, letter from DFZ to Jason Joy, 6 January 1931
46. PCA Files, AMPAS, August Vollmer to Will Hays (script review), 20 April 1931
47. William Boehnel, Variety
48. PCA Files, AMPAS, Letter to DFZ from Jason Joy, 26 January 1931
49. Walter Noble Burns, The Saga of Billy the Kid (Garden City, NY, 1927)
50. John Bright, Hizzoner Big Bill Thompson, an Idyll of Chicago (New York, 1930), pp. 10-12, also emphasized the corrupt mayor's frontier background
51. Burns, The One-Way Ride: the red trail of Chicago gangland from Prohibition to Jake Lingle (Garden City, NY, 1931), p. 1
52. Burns wasn't the only one to make this connection. See O. O. McIntyre, Bad man, Cosmopolitan (February 1931), pp. 52-53
53. David E. Ruth, Inventing the Public Enemy (Chicago, 1996), p. 32
54. John Landesco, Organized Crime in Chicago (New York, 1929), p. 221
55. See John McCarty, Hollywood Gangland: the movies love affair with the mob (New York, 1993)
56. See William MacAdams, Ben Hecht (New York, 1990), pp. 124-126
57. Trail, Scarface (1930) (London, 1997)
58. Scarface, Miller typescript, folder 6, p. 3 (BYU), undated
59. Todd McCarthy, Howard Hawks (New York, 1997), p. 151
60. Variety, 24 May 1932
61. Sherwood, The moving picture album, The Hollywood Citizen-News, 2 April 1932
62. A syndicated column, it also appeared in Pawtucket Times, 2 April 1932
63. AMPAS, MGM Collection, Manhattan Melodrama, advertising manual by Howard Dietz (1934), pp. 35-36
64. See also Little Caesar PCA files, AMPAS, letter to Warner from Joe Breen, 24 August 1936
65. The New York Times, 27 May 1936, 27:1