Hecht wrote, “did not advance on the villains with drawn guns, but with their palms out, like bellboys.” Hecht came to Hollywood in 1927, encouraged by Herman Mankiewicz, who sent him a now-legendary telegram that concluded, “Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots…. Dont let this get around.” Once he arrived, “Manky” briefed Hecht on the “rules.” “In a novel,” wrote Hecht, “a hero can lay ten girls and marry a virgin for a finish. In a movie this is not allowed. The hero, as well as the heroine, has to be a virgin. The villain can lay anybody he wants, have as much fun as he wants, cheating and stealing, getting rich and whipping the servants. But you have to shoot him in the end.”1
Gloomily pondering these clichés, Hecht had an idea. “The thing to do was to skip the heroes and heroines, and to write a movie containing only villains and bawds. I would not have to tell any lies then.” In public, Paramount crowed about the result, an eighteen-page treatment called Underworld. Privately, studio executives wondered what to do with a document—dismissed by von Sternberg as “some almost illegible notes”2—that was less film outline than a prose poem in imitation of Carl Sandburg, laureate of Hecht’s home city, Chicago. The first intertitle typified what Hecht conceded were its “moody Sandburgian sentences”: “A great city in the dead of night … streets lonely … moon clouded … buildings as empty as the cave dwellings of a forgotten age.”
Though Hecht and others called Underworld the first gangster film, the film has no real gangs. It ignores Prohibition and the $100 million-a-year bootlegging industry. The leading character, “Bull” Weed (George Bancroft), is, in Leo Goldsmith’s phrase, “a boisterous but loveable psychopath” who works alone, looting banks and jewelry stores as much for the pleasure of it as for profit. The eternal scofflaw, he even leaves a calling card in the form of a silver dollar, which he bends in half, a metaphor of his contempt for society. Weed would be at home in any era, from antiquity to the American frontier. His educated friend “Rolls Royce” compares him to “Attila, the Hun, at the gates of Rome,” and believes he was “born two thousand years too late.”
Afterward, Hecht took sole credit for Underworld, which he described as “grounded in the truth [that] nice people—the audience—loved criminals, [and] doted on reading about their love problems as well as their sadism…. There were no lies in it—except for a half-dozen sentimental touches introduced by its director, Joe von Sternberg.” In reality, various directors and writers struggled to find a film in Hecht’s outline, and failed. Schulberg initially assigned the treatment to Art Rosson, who was working on a script with Robert N. Lee when a young producer, Howard Hawks, suggested that von Sternberg might be useful in creating the visual impression of a great city in the dead of night. On January 6, 1927, the Los Angeles Times announced that von Sternberg would work on Underworld—not as director, but as cinematographer.
“So here’s what happened,” director Monte Brice told Kevin Brownlow. “They’re working on the script. Von Sternberg is hanging around; he’s going to be on the picture, but nothing has been decided. He’s sitting around reading a book that thick. It’s got nothing to do with a picture—it’s just a book. Every once in a while someone would come up and he’d lift his head and give them an answer. And it was usually a pretty good answer, to a problem that was going on over the other side of the room. All of a sudden this big switch. Art Rosson is out entirely, and von Sternberg is the director.”3
Rosson was out, according to Hawks, because “he went up to San Francisco … to go to the prison there, and unfortunately got tight, so they had to fire him.”4 Rosson’s drinking wasn’t unjustified, since his wife Lu had become Hawks’s lover. The teetotal von Sternberg inherited Underworld, with Henry Hathaway as his assistant. He took instant charge not only of directing but also of script, lighting, design, and even costumes; behavior that trampled Hollywood’s collaborative production style—“the genius of the system.”
Scorning Hecht’s poetic text, he ordered a new screenplay from Jules Furthman, who had recently joined Paramount. As the son of a Chicago judge, Furthman was at least as qualified as Hecht to write about crime in that city. Moreover, he had been composing screen stories since 1918 and had even directed three features in the early 1920s. He would go on to cowrite Mutiny on the Bounty, Only Angels Have Wings, and The Big Sleep, as well as almost every von Sternberg film. For Underworld, however, he ceded credit for the adaptation to his brother Charles, perhaps as a means of squeezing an additional payment out of Paramount. Lee shared screen credit for the work he did before Rosson’s departure.
Jules Furthman, who became von Sternberg’s most consistent collaborator, never worked alone. He invariably came on board to adapt an existing novel or screen story or rescue an ailing script. Frank Capra called him “Hollywood’s most sought after story ‘doctor,’ … in demand not for his inventive originality, but for his encyclopedic memory of past authors and their story plots. Filmmakers would tell him their story hang-ups; nine times out of ten, without recourse to research, Furthman would say: ‘Oh, that plot was used by Shakespeare’—or Chekhov, De Maupassant, Sheridan, Goethe, Kipling, Stevenson, Conrad, Cooper, or one of a host of other authors.”5
Furthman lived in then-remote Culver City, where he had moved with his wife when neighbors complained about the cries of their mentally handicapped son. In a community that barely read and had little interest in art, he amassed a library of rare books and collections of coins, orchids, and art. He owned works by Picasso, Matisse, and Brancusi, and his seven greenhouses contained 48,000 orchid plants. When Furthman died in 1966, he was at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, researching a 1603 copy of Montaigne’s Essays with annotations he believed to be in the hand of Shakespeare. As for his contribution to Underworld, naming a criminal “Buck Mulligan” for a character in James Joyce’s Ulysses, still banned in the United States at the time, was surely a bibliophile’s private joke.
Hawks’s biographer Todd McCarthy calls Furthman “one of the nastiest, most cantankerous characters to carve out a place for himself in Hollywood. As the years went on, fewer and fewer employers would tolerate him, despite his undeniable talent.” Hawks, some of whose best films Furthman scripted, agreed that the writer was mean, bright, and short, adding, “He’d say ‘You stupid guy!’ to somebody who wasn’t as smart as him. He needed help [in writing a script], but when he got help he was awful good.”6 With Furthman’s abruptness went a contrasting servility, not unlike that displayed by von Sternberg when someone with a stronger personality called his bluff. Lauren Bacall described to Peter Bogdanovich how, in her starlet days, Hawks had sent Furthman to her as, in effect, a pimp, urging her to call the director for the purpose of arranging a sexual assignation. Furthman was also more than ready to do menial jobs for von Sternberg. Sam Ornitz, who wrote the story Furthman adapted as The Case of Lena Smith, dismissed him as the director’s “continuity man,” a tame scribe retained to turn grandiose conceptions into workable screenplays. Sam Lauren, who worked with Furthman on Blonde Venus, called him, for unclear reasons, “that racketeer” and claimed that he drank and gambled so heavily that Paramount ensured his continuing availability by advancing him money, keeping him permanently in debt. More likely, however, any such income went to feed his various collections.
Despite dismissing Furthman in his memoirs as “a friend whom I trained to become a prominent screenwriter,” von Sternberg appeared to enjoy Furthman’s company. They shared tastes in art and traveled together around the Caribbean in 1932. Furthman remained loyal to von Sternberg well into the 1950s, persuading Howard Hughes to let him direct Jet Pilot and Macao. The script for his last film as screenwriter, Hawks’s Rio Bravo, included two elements from Underworld—the
