Sunday morning. Time for another annual festival tradition: a classic silent movie accompanied with live music performed by the Alloy Orchestra. I am always looking forward to this event. Just like the annual 3D screening this is also a rare opportunity to experience a piece of cinematic history close to how it must have been originally before recorded sound was added to the movies. I find the silent movie era especially interesting as a root of modern film-making. Many techniques and concepts in modern movies and documentaries have actually already been around for decades, even dating back to the 1920s and 1930s. In 1929 for example, one of my favorite silent films Kinoapparatom also known as Man with a Movie Camera laid the foundation for future documentaries like Koyaanisqatsi or Baraka that followed many years later.
I didn’t know about Underworld before and it took me a few minutes to get acclimated, but I soon got drawn into the course of the story and realized how significant this film really is for the genre of gangster movies. I couldn’t agree more with the festival guide summary quoted above.
Underworld was the precursor for movies like Scarface: it was shot from the gangster’s point of view and included many of the concepts used so often in the history of the genre: the lawyer closely collaborating with the gangster, the romantic triangle between the gangster, his girl and the lawyer, loyalty, jealousy, rivalry with other groups of gangsters, the gangster ball and its code, the overall helplessness of the police and their inability to get to him until much later during the climax of the story.
The first gangster movie was really well done, I enjoyed it very much. [imdb]
Josef von Sternberg is one of the seminal figures in American moviemaking. His casting of Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel elevated her to international superstardom, and the two maintained a close collaboration for several classic films thereafter. Before any of this, however, von Sternberg established himself as a force to be reckoned with which such silent classics as 1927′s Underworld.
Built on a script from legendary screenwriter Ben Hecht (he also wrote The Front Page and Scarface, and won the first Academy Award for “Best Writing” for his work here) Underworld crowned von Sternberg as the first king of the gangster film. Shot by legendary cinematographer Bill Glennon, who went on to make numerous films with John Ford and was a master of film noir, Underworld tells the story of a gangster, “Bull” Weed (George Bancroft), his lawyer, “Rolls Royce” (Clive Brook), and “Feathers,” the kingpin’s mistress (Evelyn Brent). It’s a love triangle, but when “Bull” shoots a man and is sentenced to die, he depends on his two friends to get him out.
Mildly regarded at the time it opened in 1927 (it “contains a good deal of sound drama,” wrote New York Times critic Mordaunt Hall), it gradually grew to be one of the biggest box office hits of the year, and inspired a slew of imitators. Indeed, a whole genre of moviemaking has been built on the artistic shoulders of Underworld. (Jed Dietz) (from the filmfest-guide)
