Plumbing the Depths: Beasts in the City—Horror Meets the Gangster

“I’m gonna spit!” Tony Camonte (Paul Muni) shouts in Scarface (1932) when first getting his hands on a Tommy Gun, before ripping gunfire into a wall. This scene in an early sound-era gangster film (with masturbatory undertones) presents the Chicago hood on the rise in his crime syndicate as a nightmarish machine of destruction.