UNDERWORLD U.S.A.

UNDERWORLD U.S.A (1961) is a classic example of genre auteur Samuel Fuller's punch-'em-inna-face style of filmmaking. Although UNDERWORLD falls a couple of years past the end of the first classic cycle of American films noir, it's a hardboiled, two-fisted crime story that is noir to the core. 

Cliff Robertson, playing strongly against type, stars as scar faced Tolly Devlin, who was witness as a youth to his father's beating death at the hands of four mobsters. Vowing revenge, Tolly is struck by a truck carrying radioactive materials. The accident blinds the boy but heightens his other senses...….wait, wrong origin story.

Tolly does indeed swear revenge, no matter how long it takes. He's taken in by Sandy (Beatrice Kay), an older woman who runs a bar and serves as a substitute mother figure for young Devlin. 

Devlin wants revenge so badly he commits a series of petty crimes in order to be arrested and sent to prison where he can get close to one of his father's killers. The killer dies in Tolly's arms, begging for mercy and forgiveness but not before giving up the identities of the other three mobsters. 

 When Tolly is released from prison, he joins the gang in which the remaining killers all serve as heads of different arenas of crime. Devlin is too smart to kill the men outright so he enlists Cuddles (Dolores Dorn), a prostitute who was an eyewitness to a killing executed by the head of the vice racket. Her testimony will put the hood behind bars, so that's two killers down. 

Devlin goes to a crime commission investigating the mob and offers to help investigator John Driscoll (Larry Gates) by setting up the remaining two mob lieutenants. 

After all four men have either been killed or brought to justice, Devlin's vendetta is over. He tells Cuddles that he will marry her and as soon as those words leave his lips, you know he's a doomed man. 

Driscoll pleads with Devlin to help him take down Earl Connors (Robert Emhardt), the kingpin of the destroyed mob. Devlin cares nothing about Connors. He's claimed his pound of flesh. But when he realizes that Connors poses a threat to his future happiness with Cuddles he goes after the man, a move that leads to a brilliantly orchestrated climactic sequence. 

Fuller wrote, produced and directed UNDERWORLD U.S.A. and his go-for-broke maverick style of filmmaking DNA is imprinted on every frame of film. Aided tremendously by cinematographer Hal Mohr (who does great closeups and well staged action scenes), Fuller and Robertson paint a portrait of a man consumed by revenge, who becomes bitter and increasingly sadistic and detached from the two women who desperately want to have peaceful, loving relationships with him. 

 

Fuller's hardboiled saga reverberates with echoes of Nietzsche: sometimes when you stare into the abyss too long, the abyss stares back. 

Highest recommendation.