{"id":9571,"date":"2009-08-20T20:27:17","date_gmt":"2009-08-21T00:27:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=9571"},"modified":"2010-07-01T18:59:45","modified_gmt":"2010-07-01T22:59:45","slug":"the-great-boris-karloff-bowling-scene-from-scarface","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=9571","title":{"rendered":"The Great Boris Karloff Bowling Scene From Scarface<\/i>"},"content":{"rendered":"

… directed by Howard Hawks. This is for Peter Nellhaus<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It’s a wonderful sequence, spare and violent, ominous and yet elegant – not one shot too many, a perfect mix of mess (the sound of the bowling alley mixed with the crowd with the strange eerie whistling going on over it – the whistle that we now know means some bad shit is going to go down) and clarity. You don’t need to say too much or do too much to create an entire event. Story, story, story. Those old-time movie directors, secret auteurs though they all may have been (and I believe they were), never spoke in terms of art, although they obviously made art. They all talk in terms of STORY. Even down to the philosophy of the closeup, which Howard Hawks was quite eloquent about. There aren’t many closeups in his films. A closeup really meant something back then. Yes, it is the most efficient way to shoot a scene sometimes, but it’s not always the best, in terms of emotion. If you hold your closeups back, and use them sparingly, then they really have some impact. The first closeup of Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby<\/i> comes almost 20 minutes into the picture. It’s the first closeup of anyone in the picture. Unheard of today, especially for a star of Hepburn’s magnitude. But when it first comes, that shot is meant to be subjective<\/i>, or, editorial<\/i> – it almost reads as an aside to the audience, like in the days of Shakespeare. You rarely see that kind of spareness with closeups nowadays, because a lot of film directors come from the television world, which is the world of closeups (and it makes sense there, with the small screen, and the limited format) – but it’s really wonderful to get into the groove of the old pictures, and realize how much they tell, without either banging you over the head with it, or leaving too much to the imagination so that the event becomes murky. In Scarface<\/i>, Hawks gets it all just right.<\/p>\n

Yes, the film is violent in an almost documentary fashion. But Hawks had a lot of fun here, with themes and motifs and symbols. The film is so full of X-es that I eventually stopped looking for them. They are in shadow on the wall, an X on Ann Dvorak’s back made by her dress straps, and more. It’s a motif that works on mutliple levels. It could be a cross (the shadows from the windows), which adds a troubling layer of potential martyrdom and noble suffering to the picture, and to the depiction of Tony. But here’s Hawks to Peter Bogdanovich on all of those X’es:<\/p>\n

In the papers, in those days, they’d print pictures of where murders occurred and they always wrote “X marks the spot where the corpse was.” So we used Xs all through the film. When anyone connected with the picture thought up some way of using an X, I’d give him a bonus.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The theme is visible in the props, costumes, lighting design and motif of the film, but not in the dialogue at all. It works on you, as opposed to insisting itself on you.<\/p>\n

And here, in the bowling scene, Hawks manages to get an “X” in the middle of the action, hidden, totally in context, so it works on multiple levels. He just bowled a strike. X means strike. But we also know what else it means, and so we know his days (even seconds) are numbered. X is about to mark his corpose. It reminds us of what is really going on. Brilliant.<\/p>\n

The Boris-Karloff-bowling scene in Scarface<\/i> is a masterpiece of storytelling, just in terms of the shots chosen for this short scene. There are about 15 shots all told. That’s all you need. You don’t need to do too much else as a director – at least not if you are confident of the EVENT you are trying to portray.<\/p>\n


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… directed by Howard Hawks. This is for Peter Nellhaus. It’s a wonderful sequence, spare and violent, ominous and yet elegant – not one shot too many, a perfect mix of mess (the sound of the bowling alley mixed with … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[24],"tags":[286,119,1419],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9571"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9571"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9571\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14353,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9571\/revisions\/14353"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9571"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9571"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9571"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}