World Film and Television Progress (1938)

AL CAPONE is GOING MAD — The story of 'Scarface' Capone's rise and fall told by H. E. BLYTH Alphonse capone is going mad. In his cell in the U.S. Penitentiary on Alcatraz Island, California, gangland's greatest "big shot" goes in daily fear of his life. He who boasted in his hey-day that he never doublecrossed a pal has been squealing on his fellow-convicts, and they have sworn to get him. Already he has been stabbed in the barber's shop with a pair of scissors. The story of "Scarface" Al is almost unbelievable— written in a novel it would be condemned as wildly impossible. Even Hollywood's gangster films in their most extravagant moments have never exaggerated the actual state of affairs that once existed in Chicago. People then were killed in spots as public as Regent Street or the Strand — Jake Lingle, crime reporter of the Chicago Tribune, was bumped off in a subway as crowded as Piccadilly Circus at rush hour. Hollywood, if anything, has tended to minimise the gangster's activities; there has seldom been any exaggeration in the pictures it has made of gang warfare, wildly impossible though some of them may have seemed. Moreover, Hollywood, in glorifying the gangster during the period before the advent of the G-man, was doing no more than the general public of America had already done. To many Capone was a hero. He gave lavishly to charity, he lived in utmost respectability with his wife, he patronised the arts. He was a devotee of grand opera — Rigoletto, II Travatore and Aida. He was fabulously wealthy, a sure sign of merit in the eyes of all business men. And above all he was a showman, always in the public eye. During the hard winter of 1930-1931 he opened a soup kitchen in Chicago and fed 8 between two and three thousand people daily. To one and all, therefore, Capone was a "right guy". And no one believed more implicitly in this tradition than Capone himself. The cinema merely took him at his own valuation. Thus was the great gangster tradition born in the cinema. This is why so many gangsters on the screen have also been "right guys", and why so many of them have been devotees of good music. The gangster film has always been based on fact, for it has done no more than write a page of American history which posterity will view with amazement. Dozens of famous gangster films have either wittingly or unwittingly reconstructed actual incidents in the history of the crime lords. Grace Moore's picture On Wings of Song, for example, bore a marked resemblance to the story of Big Jim Colosimo, Chicago's first "Big Shot", who fell suddenly and desperately in love with Dale Winter, an opera singer, whom he finally married. Miss Winter, alas, was very soon a widow. In G-Men there was a reconstruction of the unsuccessful ambushing of John Dillinger at the Little Bohemia Road House in the Wisconsin Woods, while in Public Hero No. 1 his death is pictured, although in the film he is seen leaving a vaudeville performance while in reality he was shot down outside the Biograph Cinema, on Chicago's North Side, after seeing Clark Gable's gangster picture, Manhattan Melodrama. More recently, there was an echo of the trial of Charles "Lucky" Luciano, the vice lord, in Bette Davis's film, Marked Woman. And here it should be emphasised that vice, even more than booze, has always been one of the gangster's basic sources of income. Colosimo, Torrio, and Capone were all said to be proprietors of an extensive chain of brothels where negresses used to hold daily classes in perversion for young girls. Only O'Banion would have nothing to do with vice. But of all gangster films, Scarface probably comes the nearest to telling the truth, though the exact outline of actual fact has not been followed. Those who now read here for the first time the true story of the real "Scarface" can compare the incidents of his life with those depicted in the film. And if they have thought in the past that Hollywood has been guilty of exaggeration in its gangster films, they can now compare fact with fiction. Not even Scarface tells the whole truth, or plumbs to its foulest depths the diseased mind of gangland's most infamous killer. Of all gangsters, Capone was the greatest. Colosimo, Frankie Yale, Dillinger, Jack Diamond, Baby Face Nelson, John Scalise, all of whom died a violent death — these were "Big Shots", but Capone eclipsed them all. Not even Dion O'Banion, that smooth-tongued, smiling Irishman, ex-choir boy, florist and teetotaler, and one of the most pitiless killers Chicago ever knew, equalled Capone in cunning and cruelty. Not even O'Banion's henchman, Earl Hymie Weiss, who smeared his bullets with garlic so that they might poison if they did not kill, and whose ingenious brain gave to gangland and the films that ghastly ceremonial known as "being taken for a ride" — not even "Little Hymie" could outwit Al Capone. O'Banion