ignored him. And Hecht did not repudiate the film when it won the first Academy Award for Best Original Story. He never ceased to scorn the director, however, as just another intellectual wiseacre with a European accent. “There are thousands like that guy, playing chess on Avenue A,” he sneered. But von Sternberg understood cinema far better than Hecht, who, as a screenwriter, proved erratic. Although Schulberg signed him to a year’s contract at $300 a week, Hecht failed to produce a single filmable idea, and it wasn’t until the mid-1930s that he made a reputation with films such as Nothing Sacred. He always regarded movies as beneath his intelligence—a prejudice shared, as it happens, by von Sternberg.
Nobody has unraveled the various contributions to the screenplay of Underworld. If Hecht or even Furthman were the primary author, one would expect more authentic detail. Real Chicago gangsters lived in hotels, spent lavishly, and surrounded themselves with henchmen and whores. In contrast, Weed has a modest apartment and hangs out at a low-class basement bar, the improbably named Dreamland Café. His only companions are his mistress Feathers (Evelyn Brent), who, in one of von Sternberg’s many additions to the script, is always festooned in plumes, and “Slippy” Lewis (comic Larry Semon), a dapper and fastidious sidekick, presumably gay, who patronizes the café’s most incongruous fixture—a coin-operated perfume dispenser. The film correctly shows the weapon of choice for both criminals and police as the Thompson submachine gun, and Weed’s archenemy Buck Mulligan (Fred Kohler) runs a flower shop, like the real-life Dion O’Bannion, boss of the Chicago North Side mob, who was murdered in his own establishment by Johnny Torrio’s gang in 1922. Otherwise, it’s von Sternberg we see writ large in the characters and situations, some of which turn up in his later work.
Underworld‘s key relationship is the friendship between Bull Weed and disgraced, down-and-out attorney “Rolls Royce” Wensel (Clive Brook), with whom Weed almost collides as he bolts from a bank he has just looted. “The great Bull Weed closes another bank account,” jeers Wensel, and rather than leave a witness behind, Weed bundles him into his car. “You’d better keep quiet about this,” he threatens. “Don’t worry,” says Wensel, “I’m a Rolls Royce for silence,” and the amused Weed assigns him that nickname. They meet again in the Dreamland, where Wensel sweeps floors. Buck Mulligan tips him $10 but tosses it into a spittoon. As Wensel considers whether to retrieve it, Weed quixotically intervenes, adopts the derelict, and installs him in an old hideout. Cleaned up and sober, Wensel inevitably falls for Feathers.
Allocating Underworld to the untried von Sternberg came at a cost to the production. The budget dropped to that of a B movie, and the announced star, Austrian-born Jacob Krantz (renamed “Ricardo Cortez” to capitalize on the vogue for Rudolph Valentinoesque Latin lovers), abruptly left the cast. The man who eventually played Weed, burly, cheerful George Bancroft, had acted mainly in westerns and initially resisted the change in character, agreeing to take the part only if he could show a soft side to the brute. When director and star worked together again on The Docks of New York, two English visitors, Jan and Cora Gordon, noted that Bancroft “had his well-known rough and careless good-fellowship to maintain; his public demanded that of him. So, no matter what the character in the actual cast might be, he had to hold on to this rough good-fellowship to the last…. Hence the muted duel [between director and actor]. To be cast for such very sordid characters was trial enough, but to be forbidden to relieve that sordidness by the sweet pathos of a suggested innocence or by rude good nature might mean catastrophe.”7
The studio assigned Evelyn Brent, married to staff producer Bernie Fineman, to play Feathers McCoy. Von Sternberg auditioned Gary Cooper for Wensel, but, says Cooper, the director “decided that I didn’t look capable of carrying a gun and murdering people on the streets.” This was apparently a pretext not to cast Cooper, because Wensel does neither. Instead, von Sternberg chose Clive Brook, whom he had met in Britain. Brook had been in Hollywood since 1924 but was relatively new to Paramount. Some directors found him too stiff, but his reticence acted as a foil to Bancroft’s bluster. Larry Semon likewise was a cheap choice for the role of Slippy Lewis. The once-popular comic, bankrupt after some disastrous attempts at production and reduced to gag writing, hoped that drama would reverse his fortunes. It didn’t, and he died in 1928 under mysterious circumstances.
In the fantasy crime community of Underworld, the criminals call an annual truce for a ball at which their mistresses compete to be named queen. “You gotta go,” Weed tells Wensel, “Everyone with a jail record will be there!” The idea is as absurd as Brent and her plumes (extending, apparently, to feathers in her underwear), but carnivals are a von Sternberg signature, and he attacks this one with gusto. From the first moment, as Bull, Feathers, and Rolls plunge through the crowd at the ball, he fills the screen with movement and light. Black-suited men and brightly dressed women weave among the decorations; Rolls slumps over a drink, framed by dangling streamers, and looks around with distaste at the company he’s forced to keep. As an intertitle puts it, “Everywhere the night deepened in silence and rest. But here the brutal din of cheap music—booze—hate—lust—made a devil’s carnival.” To underline the point, von Sternberg barrages us with faces—drunken, depraved, mad.
Except for Weed, the characters of Underworld are drawn perfunctorily. Brent’s placid charm, mean rosebud mouth, and heavily made-up eyes give Feathers only a fraction of the mystery embodied in Marlene Dietrich. Clive Brook is even more wooden as Wensel than he is as “Doc” Harvey of Shanghai Express. Much that is interesting in their playing comes from the use of props: the ostrich plume that drifts down onto the unshaven Wensel when he first sees Feathers; the sexual byplay with books when they are left alone while Weed robs the jewelry store. The same is true of action scenes, in particular the aforementioned robbery, which takes place in a brisk montage: clock face shattered by a bullet, clerk backing away, gems snatched up, flower dropped to the carpet (incriminating an innocent Buck Mulligan). Then, as a crowd gathers, Weed arrogantly bends a silver dollar between his huge hands and drops it into the hat of a legless beggar, who looks up idly at this demonic apparition.
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