April 9, 1932: Scarface: The Shame of the Nation premieres, directed by Howard Hawks, and produced by Hawks and another Howard H., Howard Hughes.
The Great Depression was a time of fear and anger, and this allowed gangster movies to be popular. This would also be true of horror movies. Before calendar year 1931 was over, "the Castellamamrese War" was ended, with the assassination of Joseph Masseria, then the leading Mafia figure in America, and the establishment of "The Commission" by Lucky Luciano to govern organized crime in America; the conviction of the real-life big boss in Chicago, Al Capone, known as "Scarface"; and 2 classic gangster films were released: Little Caesar starring Edward G. Robinson, and The Public Enemy starring James Cagney.
During the year, another was made: Scarface, a reference to one of Capone's nicknames, starring Paul Muni. It wouldn't be released until the next year, but was a runaway hit, and was remade in 1983 with Al Pacino.
Frederich Meshilem Meier Weisenfreund, born in 1895 in what is now Lviv, Ukraine, was an Austrian Jew. He made his name as a teenage actor in Chicago's Yiddish theater, and went to Hollywood, turning his nickname "Moony" into "Paul Muni." He was such an expert with makeup, including playing characters much older than himself, that he became known as "the new Lon Chaney." (This was before Lon Chaney Jr. became a well-known actor.)
In Scarface, Muni plays Italian immigrant gangster Antonio "Tony" Camonte, who violently rises through the Chicago gangland, with a supporting cast that includes real-life pal of gangsters George Raft, and horror icon Boris Karloff. Camonte's rise to power dovetails with his relentless pursuit of his boss's mistress, while his own sister pursues his best hitman. In an overt tie to the life of Capone, a version of the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, perpetrated in Chicago on February 14, 1929, is depicted.
Muni was so well-respected as an actor that, in 1936, he was not nominated for his starring role in Black Fury, but came in 2nd (to Victor McLaglen for The Informer) on the basis of write-in votes, which were allowed that year.
In a 1976 episode of M*A*S*H, Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pierce, played by Alan Alda, discussed his childhood by saying, "You knew where you stood in those days. Franklin Roosevelt was always President. Joe Louis was always the Champ. And Paul Muni played everybody."
Everybody? He played Don Juan, Hudson's Bay Company founder Pierre-Esprit Radisson, Napoleon Bonaparte, Franz Schubert, Benito Juárez, Louis Pasteur (for which he won his only Oscar), Émile Zola, and Joe Gans (a black boxer). He retired from acting after starring in The Last Angry Man in 1959, and died in 1967, at age 71.
Over 60 years after his Scarface , there was a remake. Actually, it would be fairer to call it a "re-imaging." It starred Al Pacino as Tony Montana, with cocaine replacing bootleg liquor as the trafficked drug of choice. The casting was a twist: Like Muni's character but unlike Muni himself, Pacino actually was Italian-American, but the character was Cuban. Like Camonte, Montana lived like a sewer rat. Unlike Camonte, Montana at least died like a man.
But Pacino himself gave credit where it was due:
I had been wanting to see Scarface since 1974... The film just stopped me in my tracks. All I wanted to do was imitate Paul Muni. His acting went beyond the boundaries of naturalism into another kind of expression. It was almost abstract what he did. It was almost uplifting.
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April 9, 1932 was a Saturday. Carl Perkins, the guitarist whose song "Blue Suede Shoes" made him one of the founding fathers of rock and roll, was born.
Baseball was in Spring Training. Football was out of season. And the NBA hadn't been founded yet. But there was one score in North American major league sports: The Toronto Maple Leafs beat the New York Rangers, 6-4 at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto, to complete a 3-game sweep of the Stanley Cup Finals. I have a separate entry for that event.
In English soccer, Liverpool hosted North London team Arsenal at Anfield, and won, 2-1.
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