Tue 9 Mar 2010
A Movie Review by Walter Albert: UNDERWORLD (1927)
Posted by Steve under Crime Films , Reviews , Silent films[4] Comments
UNDERWORLD. Paramount Pictures, 1927. George Bancroft, Evelyn Brent, Clive Brook, Fred Kohler, Helen Lynch, Larry Semon, Jerry Mandy. Based on a story by Ben Hecht, adapted by Charles Furthmann. Director: Josef von Sternberg, who replaced the fired and uncredited Arthur Rosson.
The relevation of Cinevent 1979 for me was the silent film classic, Underworld. George Bancroft plays a self-confident gangster lord with a beautiful mistress (Evelyn Brent) and an educated, alcoholic friend (Clive Brook) who try to smooth his rough edges and find themselves drawn to one another in the process.
The action is blunt and swift, but the genius of this film is in the direction of the actors (“My God, but they had faces then!”) and the superb playing of this unlikely trio, the kind of ensemble performance that also contributed greatly to the success of The Glass Key and all those other melodramas we doted on before television pulped the genre.
There’s a final shoot-out that makes similar scenes in 1930’s gangster films look like well-laundered exercises in politesse, and the old melodramatic device of the secret passage is revitalized and made a necessary and believable part of the action.
The camera work is remarkable (Sternberg was making great films long before he began to exploit Dietrich), with details that come from an older theatrical tradition that makes most recent melodramas look like uneducated exercises in bumbling.
The film was meant to be shown with blue and yellow filters (for night and interior scenes), but this obscured the. photographic detail to such an extent that the projectionist abandoned the attempt after about twenty minutes.
And anyone who thinks that silent films were primitive should be tied to a chair and forced to watch this and any number of other equally accomplished productions until he admits defeat.
Vol. 6, No. 2, March/April 1982.
March 9th, 2010 at 11:28 pm
Walter
I’ve wanted to see this one for some time. Nice to know it lives up to its reputation.
And your defense of silent cinema is not only right, but much needed. I know quite a few film students and most of them look horrified if you suggest they might learn something from silent cinema, and yet in many ways it was more sophisticated than some films today.
We are lucky that as much of silent cinema is available to us as we have, but so much is lost that it is always heartening to discover that a classic film such as this not only still exists, but is everything we have been told about it.
This one even features two familiar faces, Bancroft and Brook, who worked well into the talkie era. Brook, still going strong into 1963’s LIST OF ADRIAN MESSENGER. Not a bad run. Bancroft made his last film appearance in 1942 according to IMDb, but lived until 1956.
March 9th, 2010 at 11:31 pm
I had a class on von Sternberg at the UCLA film school around 1970. “Underworld” was a revelation (even moreso was “Scarlett Empress”).
My late father was the boom operator on “Crime And Punishment” and “The King Steps Out”.
Dad used to joke he knew Joseph von Sternberg in the Twenties (before sound came in) when von Sternberg “was just Joe Stern from Brooklyn”, before he directed “The Blue Angel”.
March 9th, 2010 at 11:45 pm
There are solid rumors that Criterion will be releasing both Underworld and The Docks of New York sometime in 2010.
See http://theplaylist.blogspot.com/2009/08/exclusive-criterion-collection-unveils.html for other items in the works, maybe!
March 10th, 2010 at 2:48 pm
I saw this back in college, with a brilliant scholar who took notes throughout. Wish I had those notes now. What I remember is that this silent movie is faster-moving than most of Von Sternberg’s talkies.