Analysis Of Scarface: The Shame Of A Nation

: The Shame of a Nation (Hawks, 1932)

According to film theorist Thomas Schatz, “a genre approach (to film) provides the most effective means for understanding, analyzing, and appreciating the Hollywood cinema (Schatz vii).” His approach to film is strongly supported by theorist Edward Branigan’s engagement of the filmic point of view and the narrative representation of character interaction (Branigan), and André Bazin’s arguments of objective reality pressed against audience interpretation.

Through yScarface the application of these theorists, this paper will examine Scarface: The Shame of a Nation (1932).Scarface: The Shame of a Nation (1932) features Paul Muni as Tony Camonte, a recklessly ambitious gangster, bent on climbing to the top

(1981). Hollywood genres: formulas, filmmaking, and the studio system. New York, N.Y.: McGraw-Hill, c1981.

This source was chosen because in reviewing 1930s Hollywood genre films, the historical reflection of this film with Prohibition and the ending of the Great Depression. During this time period the ongoing racial challenges were also wide spread in America. Little is mentioned of the results of World War I and the tensions and actions that would ultimately lead to World War II. The result of deliberate omission was that most of Hollywood film did not have a real sense of what to show, or how to draw an audience.

Drawing inspiration from the headlines of the day’s news media, Hollywood formulated the gangster film, a new and darker genre of film that responded to American circumstances and gave audiences an emotional outlet. Considering what Schatz said about the gangster era and the genre, I wonder how he would look at this genre of film, now that it has been demonstrated that spectatorship has changed over

As we have that over time, genre would have to change because audiences will change. With time the audience will seek the truth relevant to their own lives, and that is what they will look for in a film.

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The images found in Scarface serve to clarify the reason During the 1930s, blacks were not what Hollywood wanted for its films. If blacks appeared in any film, it was in the role of servant, mammy, or doorman, and these roles were neither accessible nor essential for this film’s narrative. This lack of lead roles served as a way of preventing audiences from noticing how people of color were treated in American society.

With Scarface, we see that the editing of dark images acts to convey a realistic and gritty story of criminal rise and fall, as a mediated documentary that ends with the press of Hollywood re imagination to convey a moral. When it came to editing in 1939 there were rules for how you would edit your films to fit Hollywood standards and the Hays application of censorship.

When we see film as an exhibition of our history With Movie and film history have historical studies that have swayed the audience. The cultural and social context of movie going has an innovative approach to cinema