Scarface

Scarface (1932) is Howard Hawks' gangster drama, free to watch online on iFILM. Prohibition-era Chicago, where Italian immigrant Tony Camonte shoots and schemes his way from hired muscle to crime kingpin.

Tony starts out guarding a local boss. Then come the street ambushes, the carved-up territories, the bootleg money piling up faster than he can spend it. Paul Muni plays him as a man wired wrong from the start, grinning through each killing. Alongside the body count runs a sicker thread: his jealous, possessive grip on his kid sister Cesca (Ann Dvorak), whom he tries to wall off from his own world. A young Boris Karloff turns up too.

Loosely modeled on Al Capone, the film became the blueprint for the genre and the seed of Brian De Palma's 1983 remake with Al Pacino. Censors forced a tacked-on subtitle and a softened ending because the original cut hit too hard. Stream Scarface (1932) online on iFILM.