"Underworld" Review

 

by Daniel White

After completing The Salvation Hunters, Josef von Sternberg was hired by MGM where he directed The Exquisite Sinner (1926). Unhappy with the results, the studio shelved the picture, and the two soon parted ways after he became frustrated with their interference while making The Masked Bride, a Mae Murray vehicle.

Hired by Charlie Chaplin to direct his former leading lady Edna Purviance, in The Woman of the Sea, von Sternberg completed that film, but Chaplin, like MGM before him, was unhappy with the finished product and refused to release it (no copy of either movie is known to exist).

Arriving at Paramount in the summer of 1927, von Sternberg impressed the studio executives with his salvaging the troubled production of Frank Lloyd's Children of Divorce and was awarded the gift of directing Underworld, Hollywood's first foray into the gangster genre.

An accomplished piece of film making, Underworld is a tight, well-paced flick with an engrossing story by Ben Hecht, who won the first Academy Award for best story.

The movie opens with gregarious gangster Bull Weed (George Bancroft) robbing a bank in the middle of the night. Exiting, he encounters a drunken sot (Clive Brook) who recognizes Bull ("The great Bull Weed - closing another bank account"). Weed hustles the stew bum into his getaway car and takes him back to his hideout where calling himself Rolls Royce, he admits to being a lush but insists he's not a snitch. Pleased by his loyalty, Weed employs the former lawyer in his speak easy, the Dreamland Cafe. At the gin mill, we are introduced to the denizen's of the underworld, including Bull's main squeeze, Feathers (the attractive, sexy Evelyn Brent), and his rival, the sadistic, ominous, Buck Mulligan (Fred Kohler), who, like real life mobster Dion O'Banion, uses a flower shop as a front for his criminal activities.

A cinematic tour de force, Underworld is over-the-top entertainment, and as exciting and polished today as it was when it first appeared 95 years ago. Josef von Sternberg, in only his fourth film (if you count the two "lost" movies), is an assured master, in total control of the medium. D W Griffith may have invented the close-up but Josef von Sternberg utilizes it here to perfection. Indeed there is one scene that is startling in its effect: at a Bacchanalian free-for-all he displays the distorted, ugly faces of the revelers so jarringly, the ghastly images will not soon be forgotten.

A critical and commercial success, Underworld assured von Sternberg that he had finally found an artistic home at Paramount. There he would remain for the next eight years, making some of the greatest films ever to come out of the studio system during the Golden Age of Hollywood. Among those would be the seven incomparable gems he created with Marlene Dietrich.

With Larry Semon, Helen Lynch, and Shep Houghton, Underworld is available on YouTube in a crisp, pristine print by The Criterion Collection.