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And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it is true I have seen the gunman kill and go free to kill again.

—Carl Sandburg, Chicago

ONCE THE 1920 VOLSTEAD Act made it illegal to sell alcohol in the United States, criminals amalgamated into gangs to manufacture, smuggle, and distribute liquor. By 1927 they effectively ruled many cities, particularly Chicago, thumbing their noses at the forces of law and order—which, Ben Hecht wrote, “did not advance on the villains with drawn guns, but with their palms out, like bellboys.” Hecht came to Hollywood in 1927, encouraged by Herman Mankiewicz, who sent him a now-legendary telegram that concluded, “Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots…. Dont let this get around.” Once he arrived, “Manky” briefed Hecht on the “rules.” “In a novel,” wrote Hecht, “a hero can lay ten girls and marry a virgin for a finish. In a movie this is not allowed. The hero, as well as the heroine, has to be a virgin. The villain can lay anybody he wants, have as much fun as he wants, cheating and stealing, getting rich and whipping the servants. But you have to shoot him in the end.”¹

Gloomily pondering these clichés, Hecht had an idea. “The thing to do was to skip the heroes and heroines, and to write a movie containing only villains and bawds. I would not have to tell any lies then.” In public, Paramount crowed about the result, an eighteen-page treatment called Underworld. Privately, studio executives wondered what to do with a document—dismissed by von Sternberg as “some almost illegible notes”²—that was less film outline than a prose poem in imitation of Carl Sandburg, laureate of Hecht’s home city, Chicago. The first intertitle typified what Hecht conceded were its “moody Sandburgian sentences”: “A great city in the dead of night … streets lonely … moon clouded … buildings as empty as the cave dwellings of a forgotten age.”

Though Hecht and others called Underworld the first gangster film, the film has no real gangs. It ignores Prohibition and the $100 million-a-year bootlegging industry. The leading character, “Bull” Weed (George Bancroft), is, in Leo Goldsmith’s phrase, “a boisterous but loveable psychopath” who works alone, looting banks and jewelry stores as much for the pleasure of it as for profit. The eternal scofflaw, he even leaves a calling card in the form of a silver dollar, which he bends in half, a metaphor of his contempt for society. Weed would be at home in any era, from antiquity to the American frontier. His educated friend “Rolls Royce” compares him to “Attila, the Hun, at the gates of Rome,” and believes he was “born two thousand years too late.”

Afterward, Hecht took sole credit for Underworld, which he described as “grounded in the truth [that] nice people—the audience—loved criminals, [and] doted on reading about their love problems as well as their sadism…. There were no lies in it—except for a half-dozen sentimental touches introduced by its director, Joe von Sternberg.” In reality, various directors and writers struggled to find a film in Hecht’s outline, and failed. Schulberg initially assigned the treatment to Art Rosson, who was working on a script with Robert N. Lee when a young producer, Howard Hawks, suggested that von Sternberg might be useful in creating the visual impression of a great city in the dead of night. On January 6, 1927, the Los Angeles Times announced that von Sternberg would work on Underworld—not as director, but as cinematographer.

“So here’s what happened,” director Monte Brice told Kevin Brownlow. “They’re working on the script. Von Sternberg is hanging around; he’s going to be on the picture, but nothing has been decided. He’s sitting around reading a book that thick. It’s got nothing to do with a picture—it’s just a book. Every once in a while someone would come up and he’d lift his head and give them an answer. And it was usually a pretty good answer, to a problem that was going on over the other side of the room. All of a sudden this big switch. Art Rosson is out entirely, and von Sternberg is the director.”³

Rosson was out, according to Hawks, because “he went up to San Francisco … to go to the prison there, and unfortunately got tight, so they had to fire him.”⁴ Rosson’s drinking wasn’t unjustified, since his wife Lu had become Hawks’s lover. The teetotal von Sternberg inherited Underworld, with Henry Hathaway as his assistant. He took instant charge not only of directing but also of script, lighting, design, and even costumes; behavior that trampled Hollywood’s collaborative production style—“the genius of the system.”

Scorning Hecht’s poetic text, he ordered a new screenplay from Jules Furthman, who had recently joined Paramount. As the son of a Chicago judge, Furthman was at least as qualified as Hecht to write about crime in that city. Moreover, he had been composing screen stories since 1918 and had even directed three features in the early 1920s. He would go on to cowrite Mutiny on the Bounty, Only Angels Have Wings, and The Big Sleep, as well as almost every von Sternberg film. For Underworld, however, he ceded credit for the adaptation to his brother Charles, perhaps as a means of squeezing an additional payment out of Paramount. Lee shared screen credit for the work he did before Rosson’s departure.

Jules Furthman, who became von Sternberg’s most consistent collaborator, never worked alone. He invariably came on board to adapt an existing novel or screen story or rescue an ailing script. Frank Capra called him “Hollywood’s most sought after story ‘doctor,’ … in demand not for his inventive originality, but for his encyclopedic memory of past authors and their story plots. Filmmakers would tell him their story hang-ups; nine times out of ten, without recourse to research, Furthman would say: ‘Oh, that plot was used by Shakespeare’—or Chekhov, De Maupassant, Sheridan, Goethe, Kipling, Stevenson, Conrad, Cooper, or one of a host of other authors.”⁵

Furthman lived in then-remote Culver City, where he had moved with his wife when neighbors complained about the cries of their mentally handicapped son. In a community that barely read and had little interest in art, he amassed a library of rare books and collections of coins, orchids, and art. He owned works by Picasso, Matisse, and Brancusi, and his seven greenhouses contained 48,000 orchid plants. When Furthman died in 1966, he was at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, researching a 1603 copy of Montaigne’s Essays with annotations he believed to be in the hand of Shakespeare. As for his contribution to Underworld, naming a criminal “Buck Mulligan” for a character in James Joyce’s Ulysses, still banned in the United States at the time, was surely a bibliophile’s private joke.

Hawks’s biographer Todd McCarthy calls Furthman “one of the nastiest, most cantankerous characters to carve out a place for himself in Hollywood. As the years went on, fewer and fewer employers would tolerate him, despite his undeniable talent.” Hawks, some of whose best films Furthman scripted, agreed that the writer was mean, bright, and short, adding, “He’d say ‘You stupid guy!’ to somebody who wasn’t as smart as him. He needed help [in writing a script], but when he got help he was awful good.”⁶ With Furthman’s abruptness went a contrasting servility, not unlike that displayed by von Sternberg when someone with a stronger personality called his bluff. Lauren Bacall described to Peter Bogdanovich how, in her starlet days, Hawks had sent Furthman to her as, in effect, a pimp, urging her to call the director for the purpose of arranging a sexual assignation. Furthman was also more than ready to do menial jobs for von Sternberg. Sam Ornitz, who wrote the story Furthman adapted as The Case of Lena Smith, dismissed him as the director’s “continuity man,” a tame scribe retained to turn grandiose conceptions into workable screenplays. Sam Lauren, who worked with Furthman on Blonde Venus, called him, for unclear reasons, “that racketeer” and claimed that he drank and gambled so heavily that Paramount ensured his continuing availability by advancing him money, keeping him permanently in debt. More likely, however, any such income went to feed his various collections.

Despite dismissing Furthman in his memoirs as “a friend whom I trained to become a prominent screenwriter,” von Sternberg appeared to enjoy Furthman’s company. They shared tastes in art and traveled together around the Caribbean in 1932. Furthman remained loyal to von Sternberg well into the 1950s, persuading Howard Hughes to let him direct Jet Pilot and Macao. The script for his last film as screenwriter, Hawks’s Rio Bravo, included two elements from Underworld—the act of money being thrown into a spittoon, and a heroine called “Feathers.” A tip of the hat to an old friend, or some provident recycling? We’ll never know.

Hecht, seeing his credit on Underworld watered down to “original story,” wired von Sternberg, “You poor ham[,] take my name off the film.” Paramount ignored him. And Hecht did not repudiate the film when it won the first Academy Award for Best Original Story. He never ceased to scorn the director, however, as just another intellectual wiseacre with a European accent. “There are thousands like that guy, playing chess on Avenue A,” he sneered. But von Sternberg understood cinema far better than Hecht, who, as a screenwriter, proved erratic. Although Schulberg signed him to a year’s contract at $300 a week, Hecht failed to produce a single filmable idea, and it wasn’t until the mid-1930s that he made a reputation with films such as Nothing Sacred. He always regarded movies as beneath his intelligence—a prejudice shared, as it happens, by von Sternberg.

Nobody has unraveled the various contributions to the screenplay of Underworld. If Hecht or even Furthman were the primary author, one would expect more authentic detail. Real Chicago gangsters lived in hotels, spent lavishly, and surrounded themselves with henchmen and whores. In contrast, Weed has a modest apartment and hangs out at a low-class basement bar, the improbably named Dreamland Café. His only companions are his mistress Feathers (Evelyn Brent), who, in one of von Sternberg’s many additions to the script, is always festooned in plumes, and “Slippy” Lewis (comic Larry Semon), a dapper and fastidious sidekick, presumably gay, who patronizes the café’s most incongruous fixture—a coin-operated perfume dispenser. The film correctly shows the weapon of choice for both criminals and police as the Thompson submachine gun, and Weed’s archenemy Buck Mulligan (Fred Kohler) runs a flower shop, like the real-life Dion O’Bannion, boss of the Chicago North Side mob, who was murdered in his own establishment by Johnny Torrio’s gang in 1922. Otherwise, it’s von Sternberg we see writ large in the characters and situations, some of which turn up in his later work.

Underworld‘s key relationship is the friendship between Bull Weed and disgraced, down-and-out attorney “Rolls Royce” Wensel (Clive Brook), with whom Weed almost collides as he bolts from a bank he has just looted. “The great Bull Weed closes another bank account,” jeers Wensel, and rather than leave a witness behind, Weed bundles him into his car. “You’d better keep quiet about this,” he threatens. “Don’t worry,” says Wensel, “I’m a Rolls Royce for silence,” and the amused Weed assigns him that nickname. They meet again in the Dreamland, where Wensel sweeps floors. Buck Mulligan tips him $10 but tosses it into a spittoon. As Wensel considers whether to retrieve it, Weed quixotically intervenes, adopts the derelict, and installs him in an old hideout. Cleaned up and sober, Wensel inevitably falls for Feathers.

Allocating Underworld to the untried von Sternberg came at a cost to the production. The budget dropped to that of a B movie, and the announced star, Austrian-born Jacob Krantz (renamed “Ricardo Cortez” to capitalize on the vogue for Rudolph Valentinoesque Latin lovers), abruptly left the cast. The man who eventually played Weed, burly, cheerful George Bancroft, had acted mainly in westerns and initially resisted the change in character, agreeing to take the part only if he could show a soft side to the brute. When director and star worked together again on The Docks of New York, two English visitors, Jan and Cora Gordon, noted that Bancroft “had his well-known rough and careless good-fellowship to maintain; his public demanded that of him. So, no matter what the character in the actual cast might be, he had to hold on to this rough good-fellowship to the last…. Hence the muted duel [between director and actor]. To be cast for such very sordid characters was trial enough, but to be forbidden to relieve that sordidness by the sweet pathos of a suggested innocence or by rude good nature might mean catastrophe.”⁷

The studio assigned Evelyn Brent, married to staff producer Bernie Fineman, to play Feathers McCoy. Von Sternberg auditioned Gary Cooper for Wensel, but, says Cooper, the director “decided that I didn’t look capable of carrying a gun and murdering people on the streets.” This was apparently a pretext not to cast Cooper, because Wensel does neither. Instead, von Sternberg chose Clive Brook, whom he had met in Britain. Brook had been in Hollywood since 1924 but was relatively new to Paramount. Some directors found him too stiff, but his reticence acted as a foil to Bancroft’s bluster. Larry Semon likewise was a cheap choice for the role of Slippy Lewis. The once-popular comic, bankrupt after some disastrous attempts at production and reduced to gag writing, hoped that drama would reverse his fortunes. It didn’t, and he died in 1928 under mysterious circumstances.

In the fantasy crime community of Underworld, the criminals call an annual truce for a ball at which their mistresses compete to be named queen. “You gotta go,” Weed tells Wensel, “Everyone with a jail record will be there!” The idea is as absurd as Brent and her plumes (extending, apparently, to feathers in her underwear), but carnivals are a von Sternberg signature, and he attacks this one with gusto. From the first moment, as Bull, Feathers, and Rolls plunge through the crowd at the ball, he fills the screen with movement and light. Black-suited men and brightly dressed women weave among the decorations; Rolls slumps over a drink, framed by dangling streamers, and looks around with distaste at the company he’s forced to keep. As an intertitle puts it, “Everywhere the night deepened in silence and rest. But here the brutal din of cheap music—booze—hate—lust—made a devil’s carnival.” To underline the point, von Sternberg barrages us with faces—drunken, depraved, mad.

Except for Weed, the characters of Underworld are drawn perfunctorily. Brent’s placid charm, mean rosebud mouth, and heavily made-up eyes give Feathers only a fraction of the mystery embodied in Marlene Dietrich. Clive Brook is even more wooden as Wensel than he is as “Doc” Harvey of Shanghai Express. Much that is interesting in their playing comes from the use of props: the ostrich plume that drifts down onto the unshaven Wensel when he first sees Feathers; the sexual byplay with books when they are left alone while Weed robs the jewelry store. The same is true of action scenes, in particular the aforementioned robbery, which takes place in a brisk montage: clock face shattered by a bullet, clerk backing away, gems snatched up, flower dropped to the carpet (incriminating an innocent Buck Mulligan). Then, as a crowd gathers, Weed arrogantly bends a silver dollar between his huge hands and drops it into the hat of a legless beggar, who looks up idly at this demonic apparition.