“Loosely based on the career of Al Capone, Scarface was released as ‘the gangster film to end all gangster films,' but in fact triggered off a whole series of imitations. It is Hawks' best prewar film.... Its violent visual style, its cutting, and its cynicism and sense of character are as arresting today as they were then.
“Screenwriter Ben Hecht and Hawks create a world for Scarface and his mob that is not unlike the court of the Borgias in Renaissance Italy with similar intrigues, double crosses, and gratuitous murders. Scarface himself is more arrogant and stupid than his counterpart in Von Sternberg's Underworld and gets to the top only through ambition and the fact that he has what was then a new absolute weapon, the machine-gun. His lieutenant, Little Boy, is characterized by his habit of perpetually flipping a coin, and other mobsters are identified by their own special peculiarities of behavior - a device often imitated in (later) gangster films” --Georges Sadoul, “Dictionary of Films”