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According to Howard Hawks, Ben Hecht, and others involved in Scarface (1932), the film's screenplay was a unique creation that owes little to the novel Scarface (1930), by Armitage Trail. Director Hawks claimed he based the film on his own knowledge of gangsters, particularly Al Capone (45-47). Although co-writers W. R. Burnett and John Lee Mahin credit Hecht with a complete transformation of an earlier version of the screenplay (Burnett 60; Mahin 246-47), the film does not depart as significantly from the novel as Hawks, Hecht, and others assert. The primary alterations in the novel take the form of compressing the narrative, eliminating most of the political commentary to appease censors, and introducing less controversial but more stereotypical commentary about the central character's pursuit of material success. Hecht seems to have provided the screenplay with tamer thematic material about the American Dream, derived in part from F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925).
Based on the career of Al Capone, Trail's Scarface depicts the rise of the gangster Tony Guarino. For the sake of compression, the screenwriters excised most of the first six chapters of the book. In those chapters, Tony takes on a stripper as his mistress, kills her gangster lover, earns medals for bravery in World War I, murders his mistress and her new lover, and adopts a different identity to avoid prosecution. The screenwriters did retain Tony's rise to power under the command of Johnny Lovo, including the murder of a rival crime boss; Johnny's efforts to maintain peace with the North Side gang; the North Side's attack with machine guns; Tony's successful counterattack; Tony's takeover of Johnny's gang; Tony's murder of his brother-inlaw; and Tony's death as a consequence of that murder. As he rises, Tony becomes involved with an attractive woman affiliated with the mob.
Despite those similarities, Hecht and Hawks took much of the credit for the narrative and characters for themselves, most likely to bolster their images and to gain added attention for the film. When confronted by Al Capone 's henchmen about the resemblance between Scarface and their boss, Hecht supposedly denied basing Tony (Paul Muni) on Capone but did not mention that a novel was the main source of the screenplay (Child 486-87). Although Hawks (45)...