Underworld (1927).

Of course I romanticize the careers of screenwriters such as Kuang Ni, Ennio De Concini, and Ben Hecht, prodigious as they were, and it's nice that they each wrote films now considered classics, it's nice that they were successful, but who cares, they wrote and wrote, dozens and dozens of films, and the facet I most romanticize is my perception of them as full-time, professional daydreamers. They lived a continuous fantasy, yes, but also fantasies of their own design. They had projectors for minds, and their eyes were tunnels that led to the treasures of their skull-sized kingdoms; this I admire most.

I read Ben Hecht's treatment for Underworld before I watched the movie, figuring it would hardly spoil anything as he was "legendarily unhappy with Josef von Sternberg's revamping." It was my first unfiltered Hecht experience and it was great. Dreamy, hard-boiled prose, meaningful and expressive, written and constructed with intelligence and aplomb. This treatment, I believe the first Underworld treatment he wrote, and I believe he wrote a second with Art Rosson, is divided into twenty-one sequences. There's a letter insert in the twentieth. The story is of a criminal named Bull Weed (they all have adorable nicknames: Paper Collar Sam, Piano Joe, Slippy Lewis, etc.) who escapes from prison just before his scheduled hanging. Hecht was a Chicago journalist who specialized in prohibition era gangsterism and his emphasis is a kind of poetic realism - the final sequences bank on a motif of fate - and perhaps in its time Underworld was penetratingly real. The dramatic structure (it bounces between parallel searches and reactions to Weed's escape) is transparent and compounded with Hecht's writerly voice nothing, including the behaviors and emotions of the characters, strikes me today as particularly authentic.

So why was he legendarily unhappy with von Sternberg for adding "sentimental touches that falsified his story" is beyond me. Maybe it was more of a general thing that Hollywood kept doing to all stories and Hecht wasn't able to separate this precise incident for an objective evaluation. Josef von Sternberg's story is better told. Feathers has a much stronger presence. In Hecht's story her charm is toxic, while in von Sternberg's it's multi-dimensional, and her magnetism to competing love interests is better motivated, better explored. As for the different endings, I prefer the concept of willed destiny to inescapable fate, dramatically speaking. The truth is both Hecht's initial treatment and von Sternberg's film depend on a last-minute instance of altruism (the gravest sentiment? the most Hollywood, yes) from a character to bring the story to a close. Hecht gives it to a supporting character, von Sternberg gives it to the main character.

Underworld the 1927 Josef von Sternberg film begins with the same clock imagery used in Hecht's story but then opens on Bull Weed robbing a bank, and from there introduces Rolls Royce (Weasel in the story) and then Feathers, blossoming their love triangle as the story and characters grow too. The images of the film are so strong, may I say the film is less black and white and more lightning bolts and thunder clouds? As a true filmmaker von Sternberg is conscious of the connectedness of the major aspects of film; he weds photography, editing, and (in this film) story, creating a film that eighty-three years later retains its white-knuckledness. Perhaps a really great white-knuckler is always such, as this quality is achieved by fluidity and grace of cinematic design, elements incorruptible by time, founded on inalienable concepts of film theory.


Though timeless as a piece of art, one of the joys of Underworld is how grounded in the 1920s it is. Eternal human traits are expressed through social characters now vanished. The above party scene, saturated in streamers and populated by men in suits and women in gowns, evokes all the bygone romance of its time. As the character of Feathers embodies both romance and destruction, so too this party sequence features champagne happiness and backroom despair. The "devil's carnival" montage of faces is the type of playfulness and technical splendor sorely lacking in many contemporary films. I can't explain what the recurring cats in the film mean dramatically, but their inclusion adds to the sense of reality. Von Sternberg's not a filmmaker to erase cats from history, no, he pushes against the walls of drama, expanding them with his cinematic mastery and perceptive eye. The way he choreographs scenes (the famous jewelry store robbery), composes his photography, dresses his sets, and his dramatic use of lights, all bulge and breathe, pulse and quiver, encapsulating the beast of cinema for all to cherish and behold (if you don't mind me saying).