Underworld U.S.A.

Saturday is traditionally "Take Out the Trash" Day, even when the trash is pretty damn good, like this pulpy one by maverick director Sam Fuller.

Underworld U.S.A. (Samuel Fuller, 1961) A Saturday Evening Post serial about organized crime during the 1930's was the source material for this pot-boiler that had gotten Humphrey Bogart's interest as a project. But Bogart died of cancer in 1957, and Columbia still had the property on their hands.

 

By this time, the Hays Code was dying a deserved death and the mobsters and racketeers, that had been pretty much hush-hushed by the movies since they'd caused hissy-fits among the pearl-clutchers in the 1930's, were making their way back to the screens. Billy Wilder even used them in his comedy Some Like It Hot in 1959! So, with the Hays hand-cuffs taken off, Columbia looked to see if they could toss out their own mob movie, and they latched onto one of the movie's most exploitative fire-brands, Samuel Fuller, who took one look at the material and tossed out the time-frame. There were mobsters making a lot of coin NOW! And some of them gave off the stink of legitimacy, so why treat it as something as quaint and antiquated as a buggy-whip? Fuller was proposing a tale of the Mafia violently opposing a prostitute's union, but Columbia rejected the idea. The Hays Code may have been crippled and toothless, but you still couldn't go too far in pushing the plain-brown envelope.

Fuller's next idea was of a kid making his way through the ranks of organized crime to avenge the murder of his father which he witnessed when he was a punk kid of 14. He swears revenge, and growing older, he moves from rolling drunks to break-in and robbery. Oh. And the kid, named Tolly Devlin, goes from being played by David Kent to Cliff Robertson.

And with his meager lone-wolf means, he gets wind that one of the guys—the guy whose name he knows—Vic Farrar (Peter Brocco) is dying in prison. Tolly wants to help the old guy along, but how to get to a guy in in the joint? Never one to think too elaborately, Tolly decides to be just a little sloppy on a safe-job, gets caught in the act and winds up in the same prison with Farrar. He becomes a good enough trustee that he talks his way into being an assistant to the prison saw-bones and before long it's curtains for Vic Farrar, but not before he gets the names of the other guys who killed his father. Being a safe-cracker, the one thing Tolly has is patience.

One down. Three to go. Tolly's good behavior (despite his secret extra-curricular activities) gets him parole and, with a new suit, and new set of targets, he goes to the only home he has, the one owned by Sandy (Beatrice Kay), who used to run a gin-mill until she was bought out by a thug named Gela (Paul Dubov), who, under the guise of cleaning up the town of booze-halls has turned them into "coffee shops" serving java in the front...and heroin in the back. Sandy tells Tolly the whole sad story, and he recognizes the names Farrar mentioned of all the thugs who murdered his Dad: Gela, the dope king; Gunther (Gerald Milton) the crooked labor leader, and Smith (Allan Gruener), who runs prostitution. Now, he's got faces to the names—they all have respectable business fronts—and Sandy warns him that they're better protected than the President of the United States.

 Gela, Gunther, and Smith

Well, if you can't beat up, join 'em—that way you can mingle with the muscle protecting the mob. He breaks into Gela's main "coffee shop," "The Elite Espresso"—the one Sandy used to own—and cracks the combination of the safe he used to practice on when he was a kid. He's interrupted by one of Gela's gun-men, Gus (Richard Rust), who's using one of Smith's girls to make a heroin delivery. Her name's "Cuddles" (Dolores Dorn) and before the gunsel can follow orders and kill her for welching, Tolly clocks him over the head and he and the girl make a clean getaway with the key to the stash.

"Cuddles"

Tolly tells her he's a narcotics cop and gets her to show him where the "junk" is—so he'll "go easy" on her—then steals it so he can use it to get to Gela and takes her back to Sandy's place for safe-keeping. Despite Sandy's misgivings, he sets up a meeting with this Gus hoodlum to extort 50k from Gela to get his own drugs back. It's a meeting that doesn't start well at first, with Tolly getting a gun put to his temple, but it does get him in the same room with Gela, where he tells the dope king that he was trying to find the killers of his father, but spins a story that Farrar told him all those hoods died. Them he makes a big show of giving the heroin back for nothing...because Gela and his Dad were such good pals. Gela hires him as a bag man—supervised, of course—because Gela ruefully admits he's a sentimental slob.

So, Tolly's inside, trying to worm his way through the organization to find the weak spots. Cuddles tells him how she saw Smith kill a girl once and he decides to make a fast move to get one of his Dad's killers out of the way. He calls John Driscoll (Larry Gates) Chief Counsel for the Federal Crime Commission that is trying to take down the mob troika and their big boss Earl Connors (Robert Emhardt), who runs his own front with the generic name of National Projects. Driscoll gets a promise from Cuddles to testify against the guy, and suddenly there are two out of the way.

Newspaperman Fuller's way of disposing of the mob—banner headlines!!

What's going on here is writer-director Fuller's version of Yojimbo, Akira Kurosawa's samurai transfiguration of Dashiell Hammett's story "Red Harvest"—just as Yojimbo would be transported to the Western genre as A Fistful of Dollars—where a lone operative finagles his way into the confidences of rival gangs, and, in so doing, pits them against each other. Here he turns the mobsters into setting onto themselves because "there's no honor among thieves" but with the added wrinkle that he's also working for Driscoll—unbeknownst to the Mob—with a clandestine way of lighting fuses, playing everybody against each other...but leaving himself untouched. He's his own man, does things "my own way" and he's just manipulating both groups to get his revenge faster and more completely. It's a lovely distillation of Hammett, while coming out the same year as Kurosawa's version.

"Suckers..." he says

He'd done something like it with his Pickup on South Street, a movie so cynical about ideals that it even hacked off J. Edgar Hoover. Fuller who both wrote and directed Underworld U.S.A. always was a firebrand—he started his career as a newspaperman on a crime beat—and loved speaking truth to power and he has a cackling good time with "the Fed", Driscoll, in an exposition-dump scene that compares the mob to as respected an American institution as the U.S. Armed Forces with its ranks and divisions and chiefs of staff—"Top Brass" he calls them—doing The Godfather one better painting Organized Crime as American as Big Business Apple Pie and doing it ten years earlier.* 

But, Fuller isn't so radical that he can't choose sides among the riff-raff. His mobsters can lay no claim to being colorfully romantic as in The Godfather series and they're 180° from heroes. They're out trolling schools and using their recreational programs for getting kids addicted and girls into prostitution. At one point, the head-boss Connors, instead of addressing a recent screw-up, berates his heads that their numbers are down and he gives a pep-talk out of a nightmare: "There's 13 million kids between the ages of 10 and 15. Don't tell me the end of a needle has a conscience. Put more field men to work around the schools. We'll always be strong as long as we're tough."

It's over the top drama (Fuller is not a subtle man—the score's major motif is based on "Aud Lang Syne" as in "should auld acquaintance be forgot"), but also a little heart-pumping how much energy the film enjoys on a miniscule budget. And, although Fuller may cut-away from the violence, he does spare you the gory details, setting up mob-hits on the young daughters of snitches, setting a live guy on fire in his car, and a constant trail of broken people being exploited for money by guys in good suits. Fuller takes his outrage and takes it out on us, not holding back because he was never one for sugar-coating. But giving it to you straight and no chaser, except to make it entertaining and not a lecture.

I'm getting to the end of seeing everything in Fuller's lengthy career. And I gotta tell you, I'm going to miss the shocks and surprises.

* Funny enough, Fuller auditioned for the part of Hyman Roth in The Godfather Part II for Coppola before securing Lee Strasberg for the role.

The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid

The Great Northfield, Minnesota Raid (Philip Kaufman, 1972) Genre-busting western (following two years after the similarly revisionist Little Big Man) by Philip Kaufman back in his wild indie days about the splintering of the Younger-James Gang, due to their most notorious crime, the theft of Northfield's First National Bank, "the biggest bank west of the Mississippi." Starring Cliff Robertson and produced by Robertson's production company, the film was obviously massaged as a vehicle for Robertson, if not for the fact that Robert Duvall makes the most of the weirder, more psychotic role of Jesse James, cutting through his scenes like a murderously sharp scythe through prairie wheat. By comparison, Robertson has the more central, but goonier role of Cole Younger—distractedly visionary outlaw cursed with an eye toward "wonderments" and other bright objects that tended to throw him off-task.

The world is on the cusp of change—one of those "wonderments" is a steam-powered organ that proves to be both a blessing and a curse to the Younger-James Gang's ability to fight authority, rob banks, and line their pockets in the process. Jesse can't be bothered with "wonderments;" they get in the way of his "visions" for their exploits, which come upon him in nearly incomprehensible rants. Cole, however, always wonders how the outskirts of the Industrial Revolution can make their burgling business a little easier (he sports a brine-soaked leather vest to protect him from bullets).* Pretty soon, they'll move from banks to trains and the stakes will get that much higher. But for the moment, their targets are stationary, and their tactics not unknown to today's white-collar criminals.**

That it was also the beginning of the end for the gang, with Northfield's populace turning on the bandits during the course of the prolonged robbery, ending their "Robin Hood" reputations, and leaving a couple of the gang dead in the street, shot by civilians. The romance with the criminals would go on (so long as they were dead and not stealing town-folks' money anymore) in fictional pulps (and Cole Younger would survive and go on the lecture circuit...yes, really), but the West changed around them as so many of these "sunset" Westerns of the 70's were showing, making them legends...and you have to past your prime (or dead) to be that. Kaufman's take on it is intermittently fun, long on ideas, but short on entertainment.

* Jesse could be seen as the evangelical, and Cole the scientific , world-views. No wonder they broke up. Jesse died 2 1/2 weeks before Charles Darwin died.

** Before the raid, they prime the pump by encouraging stories of the bank's safety, driving up deposits to ensure they make away with a huge haul. They could work for Enron!

Brainstorm (1983)

Brainstorm (Douglas Trumbull, 1983) In this age of ever-present social media, it's hard to imagine that scientists and engineers and biologists might envision a life more intimate than what it already is. But they are, unlocking the secrets of the brain, leading to neural pathways controlling prosthetics. We're starting to see the markers in the brain for Alzheimer's, and hooking up devices to bring sight to the blind. New breakthroughs are becoming so matter-of-fact that the conversation wanders to the idea of sharing thoughts and experiences by direct link, which is considered semi-possible (even if you're not Elon Musk). And with exploration of virtual reality becoming more and more sophisticated, it is downright plausible.

But what will that do to us? Sensations, sights, sure. But what of sharing thoughts? As it is, the brain is one of the great secret places; what would happen if we should unlock that Pandora's Box, and we have no more place to hide? Would it make us better people, or worse. Would the safety of our Dr. Jekyll's stand the scrutiny of our hidden Mr. Hyde's.

Special effects wizard Douglas Trumbull, who directed Brainstorm, (one of the just two feature length films he made, the other being Silent Running, concentrating his energies on technological advancements) uses that as the basis for this film and somewhat sidetracks the implications of such a device for a direction that is for more ethereal and mind-blowing (and personal for the main character), while also giving him a chance to do a third act special effects tour de force.

Dr. Mike Brace (Christopher Walken) and his team of neuro-scientists under the leadership of Dr. Lillian Reynolds (Louise Fletcher) are working on the ultimate video machine. They plan to actually tap into the brain's higher functions to capture memories—initially, just sight and sound, but also, eventually, the other neuro-pathways, as well. Initial runs are pretty basic: rap the reflexes of a recording subject and the playback receiver kicks; a demonstration reel for corporate investors (the project manager and chief driving force is Alex Terson, played by Cliff Robertson) feels like a hyper-version of This is Cinerama.  

The transition screen into the playback mode

But, as the project becomes more sophisticated and the potential expanded, the power of the device becomes increasingly invasive—emotions are transferred, sensations communicated, not just in the reality of perception, but in the stored interpretation, as well. Nightmares can be communicated and transferred. Thus, hard-wired, they can experience another person's recorded memories, thoughts...even emotions...more real than real, with the exception that they're not yours.

For the investors, the value of the brain-scans is obvious—weaponize it. The military could find all sorts of uses for just such a technology (but how are you going to get enemy troops to put on the receivers, geniuses?)  Beyond training and communication and some invasive interrogation possibilities, the uses of such a device seem limited, fulfilling only the latter half of "the winning of hearts and minds."

The possibilities soon move beyond precipitous roller-coaster rides and flights over the Grand Canyon, as the scientists do their own beta-testing on themselves. For Brace, it renews his memories of the first blush of romance with his ignored-for-science wife, Karen (Wood, whose character's job is to streamline the helmet for consumerFahrvergnügen).

Everybody who's seen the film remembers this sequence,
but I'm including it to boost internet hits.

For another of the researchers, it's straight to sex (The "go-to" place for all new technology among civilians), causing him to suffer a breakdown when he splices an endless loop of "the little death" (Buddy, like they say in the ads, if it lasts more than four hours, call your doctor!), and in the ultimate trip, Reynolds, rather than dial 9-1-1, has the wherewithal to turn on the machine and record her death experiences while suffering a fatal heart attack.

Fletcher's Reynolds shares an out-of-body experience.

That last tape becomes an obsession for Walken's Brace, risking everything to take that journey with the proviso that he has an "Off" switch for The White Light—a Cosmic Clapper if you will—while everybody else in the company (and seemingly the world) is trying to stop him. For the writers, it's a chance to create a redemptive character arc for Walken's driven Brace, to go beyond his own obsessive drive to complete the work and literally get inside somebody else's head to the Undiscovered Country. For director Trumbull the techie, it's an opportunity to pull out all the FX stops with journeys through memory bubbles, a Boschian vision of Hell, and a slit-scan trip down Heaven's main thoroughfare, complete with angelic Hosts.

Quite the show. But, in its attempts to present its Stairway to Heaven, the art design gets a little busy and too specific in its architecture, while making the actual journey a bit disorienting (for instance, was the trip through a simulated Hell necessary?). It's a bit too high-tech for its own good, as beautiful as it is, for a process that's as old as life itself and seems a little fussy in its side-tracks. Taken in context with the more teasing glimpse of the afterlife afforded by, say, Hereafter, it might be too much of a God Thing.

Presentation is of primary importance to the film, seeing how it is experimenting with themes and film formats—the dramatic scenes are shot a fairly normal (for the time) 35mm with an aspect ratio of 1.7 to 1 while the "machine-scan" segments are shot in Super-Panavision 70 with a widescreen aspect of 2.2 to 1.*  Usually films taking on that scheme of things, come off a little cutesy (see More American Graffiti), or have all the charm of a demonstration disc. But, in Brainstorm, the jarring transitions seem necessary, dramatically proper, and perfectly suited to what's happening on-screen.

As ambitious as all of this was, the film never found an audience. Brainstorm has always seemed snake-bit for one reason or another...and unfairly, I think. It is notorious for being Natalie Wood's last film, as she died in a midnight boating accident during the filming, an event that has always had an element of the unknowable about it. No one knows why she rowed away from her boat in the middle of the night, making it the subject of gossipy speculation, and thus, irrelevant to the film, even as it overshadows it. Some of her scenes went un-filmed, but the majority of her work made it to the finished movie, and there are no continuity bumps noticeable from her absence. But the event did cast a pall over the film, probably to its detriment, as Death is already one of the film's major players.

But there's another reason it's unlucky. It premiered at the dawn of home-video, and if ever there was a film that needed to be seen full-screen in a roadshow presentation, it is Brainstorm. I had the happy occasion to see it at a press preview where it was one of the attractions that would be demonstrating the wide screen glory of the new Grand Cinemas Alderwood, north of Seattle, which, bucking the then-trend of cracker-box multiplexes, were built large in scope and multi-channeled in sound to take advantage of the post-Star Wars spectaculars that were starting to flood theaters, after the previously timid response of the studios to large format fare. The Grand was the perfect place to see it large enough to encompass the full-width of the big-screen sections, but intimate enough to keep you from feeling cheated when the smaller format drama scenes took precedence.

And that was something home-video and cable screenings never could duplicate—the awesome transitions from the scenes of scientists and technicians toiling over the wires and ramifications of their brainwave recorder to the hyper-dimensionality of the gizmo's playback in action. For that is the crux around which the film and its unique formatting revolves. 

During the film's initial release on home-video (VHS and BETA), that format juggling was completely abandoned...AND, as was the practice of the time, the film was presented full-screen ("formatted to fit your television screen"), which completely nullified the work Trumbull did to separate the two realities. It wasn't until the advent of DVD's and the trend away from full-frame to widescreen format (the better to fit on your new widescreen television) that people finally saw what all the fuss was about. Further improvements were made when the film was "remastered"

 

For Trumbull, the experience of making the film under compromised conditions and the death of Natalie Wood during the filming (which delayed the completion of the film and its release two years later), left a personal mark—he has vowed to never make another Hollywood film again.

 
Douglas Trumbull died in 2022.

The machine's test-pattern.

* Trumbull originally wanted to shoot the "machine'scan" images in his patented "Showscan" format, which used 70mm film recorded at a speed of 60 frames per second, rather than the usual 24 fps. The film's distributor, M-G-M, probably considered the cost and logistical nightmare of supplying theaters with all new equipment and asked Trumbull to compromise, although his original conceit that the "scan" images look more realistic the dramatic scenes is still fairly-well communicated.