Cliff Robertson as Tolly Devlin in Underworld, U.S.A.. (1961-NR)
By George Anastasia, Glen Macnow
Underworld, U.S.A. is a piercing, unsentimental look at revenge, corruption and organized crime in American cities.
Ahh, but what might have been.
The film was shot during the last days of the Eisenhower Administration when Hollywood’s priggish self-censorship panel, the Production Code Administration (PCA), was still minding the morals of grown-up filmgoers.
Writer-director Samuel Fuller (The Big Red One) drafted a script that sounds, in hindsight, like a cross between American Gangster and Death Wish.
“If you have a story about gangs, you must show how they live and operate and how they use violence to terrify people,” he argued at the time. The same year that One Hundred and One Dalmatians was the nation’s top-grossing movie, Fuller believed that Americans were ready for a realistic film about an adult topic.
Perhaps Americans were, but the prudes governing the industry were not. For more than a year, Fuller cajoled and argued and compromised with the PCA. There were four script revisions and dozens of post-production edits.
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