Howard Hawks’ pioneering screwball classic Twentieth Century plays on Turner Classic Movies on Monday, October 6 (with replays in November and December). My feature article on the film was recently published on the website.

Twentieth Century Howard Hawks’ rapid-fire farce Twentieth Century (1934), a comic collision of tempestuous personalities in the rarified world of Broadway, is the proto-screwball comedy. It’s a genre born of the depression where the airs of the rich and sophisticated were deflated through madcap behavior and zany antics, all pitched at a breakneck pace. The elements of screwball had been kicking around the early sound era in the rat-a-tat pacing of the streetwise Warner Bros. pictures, the lampoons of the decadent rich in such films as Frank Capra’s Platinum Blonde (1931), and the show-biz pictures like Morning Glory (1933) and What Price Hollywood? (1932), but it took Howard Hawks to combine them in this screen adaptation of the Broadway farce. Hawks was a director more known for his male-centric action movies than zany comedies; his early thirties hits include the war picture The Dawn Patrol (1930), the prison drama The Criminal Code (1931), the race track thriller The Crowd Roars (1932) and the original Scarface (1932), the quintessential gangster film of the era. Twentieth Century was his first comedy of the sound era, but his mix of frantic pacing, whiplash shifts in tone and devil-may-care direction of glamorous stars in wacky parts launched the defining comedy genre of the thirties. John Barrymore, on the downhill slide of his career, zings through the film as the self-promoting Broadway producer Oscar Jaffe, showing a comic mastery that Hollywood rarely tapped. Carole Lombard, a pretty but largely undistinguished clothes horse of a leading lady, revealed a knockabout facility for physical comedy and a flair for tempestuous characters as Lily Garland, a lingerie model pulled out of the department store runway and transformed into Jaffe’s latest discovery….

Read the entire feature on the TCM website here.

‘Do it first, do it yourself, and keep on doing it’

The original Scarface, loosely but boldly based on the notorious life and legend of Al Capone, didn’t invent the modern American gangster film. It blew it up. It reinvigorated and redefined the nascent genre, thanks to the rat-a-tat direction of Howard Hawks and scrappy performance of Paul Muni, a pug of an actor who packs his firecracker frame with dynamite.

The movie transformed the story of an insolent immigrant hood who blasts his way to the top spot of the Chicago crime world into a perverted twist in the American dream (“The World Is Yours,” flashes an advertisement outside the gangster’s new, bullet-proofed digs, a tease as much as a promise). And the film cast Tony Camonte, a scrappy street mutt of a gangland soldier with big ideas, bad taste and a dangerous lack of inhibitions, as its Horatio Alger.

Films like The Public Enemy and Little Caesar had whetted the American moviegoing appetite for crime movies that delivered a vicarious thrill before delivering a sentence of poetic justice. Scarface delivered something more dynamic and insidious, so much so that censors pressured producer Howard Hughes to cut out the more audacious elements. Hughes hired lesser hands to add sanctimonious lectures denouncing the criminal scourge, flat scenes that have all the impact of blanks in the film’s barrage of live ammunition.

Paul Muni as Scarface with his latest toy

What’s amazing is how much escaped the censors’ scissors: the incestuous attraction between Tony and his party-girl sister (Ann Dvorak); the real-life gangland events “ripped from the headlines” and referenced in Tony’s bloody climb to the top (Hawks brilliantly re-creates the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in an evocative scene of shadows and sound effects); the brutal montage of drive-by machine-gun hits in the mob war, with thrilling high-speed car chases and careening getaways through the rain-soaked streets of Chicago city sets, victims crumpling like paper in their wake.

The way Hawks marks Camonte’s victims with the shadow of an “X” (echoing the scar marking Camonte’s cheek) is still effective, and his inventive touches, from the death of Boris Karloff’s mob boss suggested in the falling of a bowling pin to a machine gun blasting away falling leaves of calendar pages, evoke the brutality of Camonte’s bloody reign without showing a single murder. In these days of blood-soaked gangster operas, this incendiary masterpiece still packs firepower.

Originally published as part of the “MSN Cadillac” series.