1927’s Underworld is often described as the first gangster movie, or the first film noir. It’s neither really, but it’s easy to see why the tags stick. It is undeniably the movie that kicked off the gangster craze in the late 1920s and early 1930s and there’s enough moody lighting in it to tick any number of noir boxes.
But really it’s a tale of doomed romance, the story of a gangster’s moll caught between not two but three men – her original guy, who she wants to do right by, a psychopathic rival, and the guy she falls for.
For a silent movie it has a lot of psychological nuance, though the performances are pretty broad. As are the names – George Bancroft plays decent arch criminal Bull Weed, Evelyn Brent plays his gal, Feathers McCoy. Fred Kohler (broadest of them all) is the crazed and envious gangster Buck Mulligan. And Clive Brook is Rolls Royce Wensel, who we meet as a derelict alcoholic before he is restored to his former station as a lawyer by Bull Weed’s kindness.
Which is how Wensel comes into the orbit of Feathers, so-called because of the way she dresses. As movie romances go, theirs is a fairly passive passion. Instead the plot driver is Mulligan’s overpowering envy for everything Bull Weed has, including his woman. What neither Bull nor Buck sees is dark horse Wensel coming up on the inside rail.
Without giving too much plot away, it’s a tale about Mulligan’s envy eventually getting the better of him, a rape attempt, a murder and one of the two gangsters in jail heading for the end of a rope.
With neither man around – one dead, one incarcerated – Feathers and Wensel have the opportunity to finesse their low-key billing and cooing or even possibly run away together. Instead they decide to save the imprisoned man, using the vehicle meant to collect his dead body after his execution as part of their plan. Yes, the car is a Trojan hearse!
This is Josef von Sternberg’s first proper directorial credit and there are Sternberg touches all over the place. The lighting is not as fabulous as it would be in the films he went on to make with Marlene Dietrich, but there are flashes of it here and there (Sternberg, an impossible perfectionist, just didn’t have the time to go all in). There’s also evidence of Sternberg’s eye for a crowded but immaculate frame. The party sequence, with spent streamers boot high, is a highlight for lovers of Sternberg’s penchant for beautifully choreographed and arranged mis-en-scènes.
He shot the movie in five weeks and as well as working at pace he moves the action along at a clip, short scenes and slick edits meaning there are no dull moments. No one at Paramount thought the film would be a hit, and that included Ben Hecht, who co-wrote it with Charles Furthman. Hecht went so far as to petition to have his name removed from the credits. It didn’t happen. Instead Hecht won an Oscar for his work, the first for an original screenplay. The film was wildly popular with audiences too, with one New York movie house running it continuously 24 hours a day to satisfy demand.
Silent movies are usually a hard sell in the post-silent era but this is a remarkably easy watch for something that’s actually got quite a serpentine plot. That’s down to Sternberg’s film-making skill – this is his “a star is born” moment.
I watched the restored Criterion version from 2010, part of the Three Silent Classic box set (along with The Last Command and The Docks of New York), and it does Von Sternberg and DP Bert Glennon proud (though Von Sternberg was really his own lighting man), especially in the occasional dives into out-and-out beauty lighting. The picture quality is very good, given the state of the original negative when Criterion got hold of it. Apparently Kino Lorber have another restoration on the way, a 4K scan of a 2020 HD Master by Paramount. Whether it improves on Criterion’s version remains to be seen. Let’s hope so. Von Sternberg was a master in most aspects of film-making, but his sumptuous visuals are a real standout and anything that improves them has got to be worth a look.
Underworld (part of the Three Silent Classics Von Sternberg box set) – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2023
