Somewhere in the recesses of this Blog, there is probably a previous note about Sam Fuller's Underworld USA. After about thirty minutes, I realized that I had seen the movie before -- I recognized a swimming pool on top of a building that a mob boss was using to front his criminal enterprises; the natatorium sponsored a swimming club for disadvantaged youth and hosted swim meets as the plump, vicious gangster spent his afternoons lounging around the pool with his henchmen. I didn't remember the rest of the movie until a startling sequence in its last five minutes, but I often focus on decor and locations and the exotic detail of the rooftop pool in a squat skyscraper with a sign over its entry: Normal Industries (or something of that sort) was memorable to me. I haven't consulted my previous entry, if it even exists -- forward! is my motto and I'm not interested in what I have done or written in the past.
Fuller's 1961 release is a complicated revenge story bound up by some peculiar (likely studio-imposed) parameters: apparently, officials, as late as 1961, frowned on plots in which the hero is allowed to escape scot-free (or even awarded) after committing crimes. In Underworld USA, the movie devises every possible contrivance to keep its hero, who is certainly murderous and violent, from actually killing anyone. Sure, he figures out ways to get bad guys killed but never, until the last sequence, delivers the coup de grace himself. This is a tricky proposition since the film involves a number of gruesome deaths. Tolly Devlin (played by Cliff Roberstson) is small-time, penny-ante thug. We see him rolling drunks when he is 14 on New Year's Eve. Fuller likes to begin his movies with flair and the opening sequence involving a staggering drunk, people singing Auld Lang Syne off-screen, and a savage beating enacted by shadows on a wall, is an impressive piece of filmmaking. But pretty soon, Fuller slips into the film's rhythm which is mostly overlit, interiors in which people talk to one another after the manner of TV series in the late fifties and early sixties. After rolling the drunk and snatching his wristwatch and wallet, young Tolly gets assaulted by another even more vicious hoodlum who tries to gouge out his eye with a broken bottle. This attack leaves Tolly scarred around his eye and, therefore, lets us identify him when he has grown up to be Cliff Robertson. The guy getting beaten to death in the alley is Tolly's old man, also a career criminal who is killed by four thugs. The plot of the movie is Tolly finding faces for the shadow figures pummeling his father. Tolly's eye wound is treated by a kindly old bar maid who is unable to have children of her own and, therefore, inhabits an apartment that is full of pictures of babies with its shelves laden with spooky-looking baby dolls. The bar maid runs a gin joint where criminals congregate. Twenty years pass while Tolly is in jail for various stupid property crimes. In prison, he finds one of the villains who killed his dad and, as the man is dying from blood cancer, extorts the identities of the other killers out of him: they are Gunther, Smith, and Gela. Released from the Big House, Tolly sets about hunting down the killers and exterminating them. This involves a complicated plot in which Tolly infiltrates the gang led by the effete fat man sitting next to the swimming pool in his bathrobe in the Normal Industries building. Tolly is in league with two helpers: one is Driscoll, the City prosecutor who was supposed to bring the killers of the senior Devlin to justice: apparently WWII intervened and Driscoll ended up in the infantry as an officer of the Big Red One, the unit in which Sam Fuller served in Italy and later France and Germany (where he participated in the liberation of a concentration camp). Driscoll has come out of the army and resumed his work in law enforcement , but he's now a United States federal lawyer, the boss of something called the Crime Committee. Tolly's other assistant is a whore with a complexion like vanilla ice-cream. She's working for the mob picking up drugs. (In the film, drug addiction is treated as an abhorrent horror and peddling dope is seen as worse than murder.) The prostitute, named Cuddles, is about to be beaten to death by one of the mobster's henchman but Devlin comes to her rescue and uses the relationship with the bad guy as his means of entering the mob in which Gela, Gunther, and Smith are leading capos. (The girl gets whacked viciously on her pale white cheek and Fuller lovingly dwells on the wound which becomes infected or something so that the prostitute becomes feverish, hallucinating with big beads of sweat on her brow.) Of course, Tolly will fall in love (reluctantly) with the whore and, after viciously insulting her for being a woman of ill-fame, even proposes to marry her. Tolly figures out ways to get the gangsters to kill one another -- mostly, this is accomplished by creating fake memoranda allegedly written by federal prosecutor Driscoll implicating the bad guys as finks. (In the movie's peculiar ethos being a fink is almost as bad as peddling dope.) Up to the last reel, Tolly pummels the bad guys but never kills one of them. But, then, he invades the moist environs of the swimming pool and attacks the fat guy. He drowns him so that the criminal's corpse floats in the pool like dead whale. On his way out of the mob headquarters, a wounded henchman guns down Tolly. Tolly, mortally wounded, then staggers around in a desolate, empty part of the city before dropping dead among garbage cans in an alley similar to the squalid location where the movie began. The reader will observe that the movie solves the problem of its hero killing a man by having Tolly promptly dispatched by the drowned gangster's bodyguard. The closing sequence in the empty and dark city is undeniably impressive and looks like it was staged by Orson Welles.
Fuller is didactic and there's an interesting lecture by Driscoll in the middle of the film in which the crusading DA, flanked by military regalia associated with the European campaign in World War Two (Big Red One memorabilia) describes organized crime in terms of generals, battalions and platoons. Fuller wrote the movie but his intent is a little obscure. Is he trying to imply that military honor and combat are really nothing more than an aspect of organized crime. (In one lurid line, a mobster says "we gotta get 'em between ten and fifteen. Send your boys out to the schoolyards to peddle dope and recruit the girls.") The movie is well-made but, curiously, seems too long. It's about 100 minutes long and would be better as a savage blast of hatred and violence about 80 minutes in duration. There seems to be 15 to 20 minutes too much stuff in this picture.
No comments:
Post a Comment