UNDERWORLD B
USA (80 mi) 1927
d: Josef von Sternberg
Heavily influenced by German Expressionism, using strong
contrasts between darkness and light, von Sternberg often transcended his
contemporaries in terms of sheer visual style, creating a visual lushness that
figures most prominently in establishing atmospheric mood, where nearly all his
films use mist, fog, and contrasts between shadows and light to set the tone
for his films, where he was such a master of lighting that he was the only
director of his day to earn membership in the American Society of
Cinematographers. Though born in Vienna
to humble origins, von Sternberg lived most of his childhood in New York City raised
by his Jewish Orthodox father Moses, a former soldier in the Austrian-Hungarian
army. After dropping out of high school,
having difficulty with the English language, he set out determined to learn on
his own, finding work repairing sprocket holes and cleaning movie prints at the
World Film Company in Fort Lee, New Jersey, where he rose to chief assistant to
the director general. He went on to help
make training films for the U.S. Army Signal Corps during World War I before
earning his first credit as an assistant director on THE MYSTERY OF THE YELLOW
RIBBON (1919), directed by Emile Chautard.
In 1923, he moved to Hollywood and was the assistant director on the
British film BY DIVINE RIGHT (1923), where he picked up the aristocratic title
of “von” in the listed credits at the suggestion of actor Elliott Dexter, before
gaining the notice of studio executives with the surprise success of his
independently produced directorial debut in THE SALVATION HUNTERS (1925), a starkly
poetic tale of poverty and depression that he made in three weeks for $4900, where
the grim naturalism was hissed at during its premiere before later being hailed
as a masterpiece by Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and Charlie Chaplin,
becoming a successful picture widely considered to be America’s first true
independent film. MGM refused to release
his next picture, THE EXQUISITE SINNER (1925), which was eventually lost, while
his third film THE SEA GULL (1926) was destroyed by producer Chaplin as a tax
write-off. Finding himself an assistant
director at Paramount, he was called in to help fix Frank Lloyd’s CHILDREN OF
DIVORCE (1927), reshooting about half the film in three days, mostly at night
when the actors were available, after which he was allowed to make UNDERWORLD,
with a script written by Ben Hecht.
Paramount then shelved the film, with Hecht asking to have his name
removed from the credits, before a New York theater needed a last minute movie to
screen, and the film created an instant sensation, exclusively by word of mouth,
where the theater had to stay open all night showing it. Often credited as the first Hollywood
gangster film, actor George Bancroft became a star, while Ben Hecht won an
Oscar.
Von Sternberg brought a distinctly European style to
American studios, blending German Expressionism with elaborately exotic
production design, creating sensuous images with a frank eroticism, becoming
something of a visual poet with an obsession for lighting and detail, known for
the slow pace of his films, with their long dissolves and strange narrative
twists, an aesthetic that evolved from the Silent era. He believed that the story didn’t matter, but
trusted instead the artificial aspects of cinema, preferring illusion to
reality, where he wanted control over all the elements, not just the
photography and editing, but every inflection and movement of the actors, working
closely with costume designers and set designers, providing his own sketches
before hearing their ideas, never designing sets, but introducing props to
“improve” them, where the peak of his creativity are his films from 1930 –
1935. In a book review of John Baxter’s Von Sternberg, Book
Review: Von Sternberg - WSJ.com, Scott Eyman from The Wall Street Journal describes von Sternberg:
He was a man who kept large,
aggressive dogs, who avoided direct eye contact, who presented his opinions as
incontrovertible fact and who treated everyone with unconcealed disdain or
contempt. On the set, he had a
blackboard; if crew members or actors wanted to talk to him, they had to write
their names on the blackboard, and he’d schedule an appointment. “The only way to succeed,” he once said, “is
to make people hate you. That way they
remember you.”
UNDERWORLD generated a series of Prohibition-era Hollywood
gangster films that followed, like Edward G. Robinson in LITTLE CAESAR (1930),
James Cagney in PUBLIC ENEMY (1931), and Paul Muni in SCARFACE (1932), films
that became synonymous with the myth of American individualism, featuring
outlaws who liked to flout authority, becoming sympathetic heroes struggling to
survive. But von Sternberg had little
interest in the behind-the-scenes world of organized crime, preferring to focus
instead on the particular characteristics of several of the characters, expressed
through a visual mastery of storytelling where he infuses wry humor in the
title card commentary of onscreen events.
As the audience is introduced to George Bancroft as bankrobber unparalleled
“Bull” Weed, the bank behind him explodes as the title card claims he’s taking
out a “personal loan.” Staring at him as
he steps out of the bank is none other than “Rolls Royce” Wensel (Clive Brook),
a man down on his luck who has hit the bottle, so Weed kidnaps him to guarantee
his silence. Wensel claims he might be a
drunk, but he’s not a squealer, promising to be “silent as a Rolls Royce.” Taken by his scrappy nature, Weed keeps him
on as his right-hand man, getting him cleaned up and off the sauce, buying him
some clothes, aided by his girlfriend Feathers (Evelyn Brent), who, you guessed
it, is always dressed in feathers. Wensel
never forgets her kindness while remaining loyal to his boss. This love triangle essentially forms the basis
of the story.
Evelyn Brent’s Feathers is an interesting prelude to the
later iconic works with Marlene Dietrich, who made seven films with von
Sternberg, including some of the most dazzling films of the era, where Dietrich
was his greatest model, someone he dressed in sequins and feathers and stunning
evening gowns, even a tuxedo, where in close up, with the right lighting, he
could create an image of ravishing beauty.
Brent, by contrast, is more subdued and the film more conventional, especially
at the outset, where it takes awhile for the young director to find his
patented style, yet Feathers likes what she sees in her cleaned-up project to
remake Wensel into a well-dressed gentleman, a lawyer when he’s not drunk, where
his calm reserve offers a contrast to the demented laughter heard from Weed,
yet in a typical von Sternberg theme, both feel guilty for succumbing to their
forbidden sexual desires. We can catch a
whiff of Dietrich’s masculine tone when a bored Feathers tells Wensel, “C’mon,
let’s drift.” The film is pre-Code and
has its share of erotically charged come-ons, but perhaps the central sequence
of the film is an all-night gangster’s ball, where one night a year all the
criminals declare a truce from one another and have a rollicking,
alcohol-driven affair, where they all buy votes to have their girls named Queen
of the Ball. It’s a rather grotesque
affair, edited with a montage of close ups showing inebriated individuals, each
uglier than the last, where emotional and physical violence erupt amid a storm
of confetti and streamers. Feathers
makes eyes for Wensel under the careful watch of Weed, but the one that gets
riled up is Weed’s arch enemy Buck Mulligan (Fred Kohler). Leave it to Ben Hecht to name a character
after the then-banned book Ulysses. Mulligan makes his move on Feathers once Weed
is collapsed drunk, but he’s awakened in time to catch him in the act of raping
Feathers, shooting him on the spot. Using
an economy of means, von Sternberg shows the arrest, sentencing, and jailing of
Weed in just a few short scenes, but he escapes before his execution, vowing to
get his revenge, where all he’s heard about while sitting in jail is how
Feathers and Rolls Royce have become an item.
The finale, however, the notorious chase sequence, has an interesting
existential tone about it which is unlike most gangster dramas. Nonetheless, this hard-boiled gangster drama
is an early indication of themes with a visual stylization that would
ultimately become film noir.
