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The story starts as Prohibition begins. The booze business is booming, and there is plenty of dirty work to be done. Nobody does it quite so well as young Al Capone, an up-and-coming junior exec on the payroll of a Chicago racketeer named Johnny Torrio. When the aging Torrio retires, Scarface Al inherits the South Side, begins to expand the old firm. With appallingly creative criminality, he buys up the mayor and city council, rationalizes his rackets (gambling, prostitution, protection, beer and whisky manufacture and distribution) with the help of college-trained efficiency experts. At 28, he is the J. P. Morgan of the U.S. underworld, with a gross income of $2,000,000 a week and a private army of 700 men.
Capone's collapse is as swift as his climb. The St. Valentine's Day massacre of seven of "Bugs" Moran's boys in a North Side garage, followed by the killing of a corrupt Chicago Tribune reporter—named Jake Lingle in real life, Mack Keely (Martin Balsam) in the movie—shocks Chicago's voters. In 1931 a reform slate is elected, and in 1932 Capone is put away for eleven years on a federal income tax rap. Released from stir after seven years, he dies in 1947 of what the picture prissily describes as "an incurable disease" (it was last-stage syphilis). His monument : the vast crime cartel that has since expanded into "The Syndicate System."
In general, the story sticks reasonably close to the shameful truth, and the scriptwriters (Malvin Wald and Henry Greenberg) pass up most of the obvious opportunities for the sick-thrill sort of violence. The rogues' gallery—Murvyn Vye as Bugs Moran, Nehemiah Persoff as Johnny Torrio, Lewis Charles as Hymie Weiss—is unusually photogenic. In the title role, rubber-faced Rod Steiger presents a startling physical likeness to Gangster Capone but in bestial force the actor comes about as close to the original as a tomcat does to a tiger.