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.