Bull Weed (George Bancroft) offers Rolls Royce (Clive Brook) a new life in Josef von Sternberg’s UNDERWORLD
UNDERWORLD (Josef von Sternberg, 1927)
MoMA Film, Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Friday, January 1, 4:00
Series runs January 1-17
Tickets: $12, may be applied to museum admission within thirty days
212-708-9400
www.moma.org
Throughout the year, MoMA shows “Modern Matinees” at 1:30 on many weekday afternoons, treating visitors with an afternoon to spare to some amazing “deep cuts” from its vast cinema library. “Modern Matinees: The Film Library Grows” is its current series, celebrating the eightieth anniversary of the Department of Film and honoring the legacy of founding curator Iris Barry. It concludes December 31 with William A. Wellman’s classic gangster picture, The Public Enemy. But as a treat for those who can’t get away for a weekday afternoon screening, MoMA is now bringing back some of its favorites in “Modern ‘Matinees’: Fashionably Late,” presenting the films at more convenient times, including on holiday and weekend afternoons and weekday evenings. “Fashionably Late” begins January 1 at 4:00 with Josef von Sternberg’s 1927 silent black-and-white Underworld, which is generally considered the first modern gangster picture and was a major influence on such films as The Public Enemy and Mervyn LeRoy’s Little Caesar, the latter scheduled for January 1 at 7:00. Sternberg’s fourth film, Underworld is set in “a great city in the dead of night. . . . streets lonely, moon-flooded. . . . buildings empty as the cliff-dwellings of a forgotten age.” The opening shot is of a superimposed clock, emphasizing that it is two o’clock in the morning, a time when most are tucked safely in their bed at home. But not Bull Weed (George Bancroft), who has just pulled off a bank heist, only to be spotted by Rolls Royce (Clive Brook), a down-on-his-luck drunken bum. At Bull’s hangout, the Dreamland Café, his girl, Feathers (Evelyn Brent), enters, and a single strand from her extravagant getup floats down, the camera following it until it is grabbed by Rolls Royce, who is sweeping the floor. Bull’s main rival, Buck Mulligan (Fred Kohler), tries to get the attention of Feathers, upsetting his own moll, Meg (Helen Lynch). Walking out of the nightclub, Bull is greeted by an electronic billboard proclaiming, “The City Is Yours.” (Howard Hawks goes one better in his seminal 1932 film, Scarface, in which the title character, Antonio “Tony” Camonte, played by Paul Muni, is encouraged by an electronic sign that tells him, “The World Is Yours.”) Laughing, Bull playfully asks Feathers, “What’ll you have?” She scoffs at him, then Rolls Royce, a former lawyer, says, “Attila, the Hun, at the gates of Rome.” To which Bull replies, “Who’s Attila? The leader of some wop gang?” The stage has been set for the rest of the film, built around jealousy and envy as both Buck and Rolls Royce, who Bull decides to rehabilitate, fall hard for Feathers, but Bull is not about to just sit back and take it.
Bull Weed (George Bancroft) is protective of his moll, Feathers (Evelyn Brent), in classic gangster picture
Underworld is an expressionist noir melodrama that became the template for the gangster-film genre, launching many of the major tropes, from characterization to narrative development. It’s shot in shadowy glory by Bert Glennon (Lloyd’s of London, Rio Grande) from the dark streets to a glamorous annual armistice ball and a spectacular shootout finale. Journalist, novelist, and playwright Ben Hecht (Notorious, Wuthering Heights), who based Bull on real-life Chicago criminal “Terrible” Tommy O’Connor, won the Best Writing (Original Story) Academy Award at the first Oscars; Robert N. Lee wrote the screenplay, with the adaptation by Charles Furthmann and titles by George Marion Jr. Von Sternberg went on to make such classic sound films as The Blue Angel, Shanghai Express, Blonde Venus, and The Scarlett Empress with Marlene Dietrich. He directed only one full picture by himself after 1941, the 1953 Japanese war drama Anatahan; he died in Hollywood in 1969 at the age of seventy-five. “Modern ‘Matinees’: Fashionably Late” continues through January 17 with such diverse works as John Ford’s The Iron Horse, René Clair’s Un Chapeau de paille d’Italie (The Italian Straw Hat), William Dieterle’s The Life of Emile Zola, and John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon.