Underworld U.S.A.: Fuller's Revenge Machine

A boy of fourteen stands in an alley on New Year’s Eve. Above him, on a brick wall, four shadows are beating a man to death. He watches the shapes rather than the men, hears it rather than sees it, and when it is over he goes to the body, which is his father’s, and takes the dying man’s hand. Then he learns to draw. Not to draw well — to draw those four faces, over and over, for twenty years, from a memory he does not actually possess.

Underworld U.S.A. was written, produced and directed by Samuel Fuller at Columbia in 1961, and it is the coldest film he made. Fuller was working loosely from a series of Joseph Dineen articles about organised crime, and the picture arrived in the wake of the Kefauver hearings, when America had recently been told on television that the syndicate was a national business. What Fuller does with that premise is the opposite of exposé. He builds a revenge machine and then films it running until it destroys everything, including the man who built it.

Tolly Devlin does not want justice

The boy grows into Cliff Robertson, and Robertson’s performance is the reason the film is unbearable rather than merely brutal. Tolly Devlin is a small-time hoodlum who has been through reform school and prison and has organised every hour of his adult life around one project. He is not seeking justice. He is not seeking the truth. He has the names, eventually, and what he wants is to be present when each of the four stops breathing.

Robertson plays him with almost nothing on the surface. There is no brooding, no anguished monologue, none of the operatic self-pity the revenge picture normally requires. Tolly is polite, quiet, efficient and entirely hollow, and the horror of the performance is how ordinary he seems while doing arithmetic about murder. Fuller’s insight — which took American cinema another decade to catch up with — is that a man who has spent twenty years on a single purpose has no personality left to display. There is nothing in him except the task.

The women in his life register this before the audience does. Cuddles (Dolores Dorn), a syndicate girl he saves and who falls for him, spends the film trying to reach a man who is not at home, and Sandy (Beatrice Kay), the ageing barfly who raised him after his father died, keeps telling him that his father was a cheap crook who would not have wanted this. Both are right and neither matters. Fuller gives Tolly two women who love him and a mother figure who tells him the truth, and lets us watch them fail to make any impression whatsoever.

Why it works: the shadows, and what he never saw

The craft argument sits in that opening. Fuller stages the murder as shadows on a wall — the boy sees shapes, and so do we.

That decision runs the whole film. Tolly does not know what the four men look like. He was fourteen, it was dark, and he saw silhouettes. So his life’s project is founded on information he does not have, and everything he does afterwards is an attempt to acquire faces he could have been given by the police in an afternoon. Fuller never underlines this. He simply builds the picture on it, and the effect accumulates: a man has spent two decades in pursuit of an image he invented.

Hal Mohr photographed it in a hard, bright, unromantic black-and-white that gives the syndicate none of the shadow-glamour the genre had spent fifteen years perfecting. Fuller’s other structural stroke is his portrait of the organisation itself. The syndicate here is a corporation with a name, offices, letterheads, an executive who takes meetings by a swimming pool and worries about diversification. Its boss is a soft, fussy man in a bathrobe. Its killers are employees with performance concerns. Fuller had understood before almost anyone that the American gangster’s next costume was a business suit, and the film’s most chilling scenes are conference-room scenes, in which men in good tailoring discuss a murder as an operational decision and then talk about something else.

The famous sequence — and it is genuinely hard to watch, sixty-odd years on — involves the syndicate silencing a witness by having a hired man drive a car at a child. Fuller stages it with the same flat, unsentimental attention he gives everything, and it is the moment the picture’s thesis lands: this organisation is not a gang of monsters. It is a firm doing risk management, and a child is a variable.

The film’s actual position

Underworld U.S.A. is usually filed as a revenge thriller. It is closer to an autopsy of one.

Every element the genre uses to make revenge pleasurable, Fuller removes. Tolly is not wronged in a way the film asks you to feel; the father was a criminal, and Sandy says so repeatedly. Tolly is not competent in an admirable way; he succeeds by attaching himself to institutions — the syndicate on one side, the federal prosecutor Driscoll (Larry Gates) on the other — and letting them do the work while he steers. He is not redeemed by love. He is offered love, twice, and declines it in favour of the schedule.

Fuller’s position, stated in the structure rather than in dialogue, is that revenge is not a response to a crime. It is a career, chosen at fourteen, pursued with the diligence of an accountant, and it hollows a person out exactly as thoroughly as the organisation hollows out the men who work for it. Tolly and the syndicate are the same kind of enterprise. That is why he fits in so easily, and why the film’s parallel between the two never needs to be spoken.

The shelf

For the collector, the necessary Fuller sequence is this film with Pickup on South Street on one side and Shock Corridor on the other. Pickup has a stool pigeon with a soul and a hero who is saved, fractionally, by grief. This one has no equivalent. Two years later Fuller would send a reporter into an asylum in Shock Corridor and destroy him too, and the throughline is unmistakable — Fuller’s men choose an obsession and the obsession eats them.

Its ancestor is White Heat, where Cagney’s Cody Jarrett is likewise a man welded to a fixation he inherited from a parent, and where the gangster’s psychology had already begun curdling into pathology. Its immediate sibling is The Big Heat, Lang’s syndicate picture from eight years earlier, which asks the same question — what does a man have to become to hurt an organisation — and gives its avenger a wife to mourn and a decency to lose. Fuller starts where Lang ends, with a man who has nothing to lose and never did.

Its descendants are the whole cold revenge line: Point Blank, where Boorman turns the avenger into a ghost walking through a corporate syndicate that barely notices him, and the long tail of films in which the organisation is an office and the hero is a man with a grievance and no interior.

The verdict, with the mechanism below: Underworld U.S.A. is Fuller’s most rigorous film and his least likeable, and those two facts are the same fact. It denies the audience every consolation the revenge picture exists to provide, and it does so through a man who is technically the hero and is in practice a hole in the shape of a person. Robertson is remarkable, the corporate scenes are decades ahead of schedule, and the last shot is the bleakest thing in Fuller’s American work. It circulates in the Columbia noir sets and turns up in repertory as the fourth film of a Fuller day. Take the whole day.

Spoilers below

Tolly’s method is the film’s most cynical idea. He gets himself into prison deliberately in order to reach the first of the four men, who is dying there, and extracts the other three names from a man on his deathbed by pretending to be a friend. Then he plays both sides. He joins the syndicate as an employee, working his way close to the three surviving names — now senior men in the corporation — while simultaneously informing to Driscoll, the crusading federal prosecutor, who believes he is turning a witness. Fuller has him use the law and the mob as tools of equal standing, and treats the moral difference between them as a rounding error.

The killings arrive one at a time and Fuller gives none of them the satisfaction they are owed. The first man dies in prison of natural causes before Tolly can reach him, which is played as an administrative annoyance. Another Tolly arranges to be killed by the organisation itself, feeding information to the right man at the right moment, so that the syndicate executes its own executive; Tolly is not even present. The mechanism is elegant and the emotional payoff is zero, deliberately, because Fuller is showing you that the thing Tolly has wanted for twenty years does not arrive as a feeling.

Gus (Richard Rust), the syndicate’s smiling professional killer, is the film’s most memorable creation and the one who runs down the girl on her bicycle. His death is Tolly’s only piece of direct violence, and it happens in a swimming pool.

Cuddles begs him to stop after the third. He is close enough now to see the shape of a life afterwards, and Fuller lets that possibility hang in the air for about ninety seconds before Tolly walks away from it. He goes after the last man, Connors, the soft fussy boss in the bathrobe, and kills him.

And then Fuller closes the circle. Gus’s men have already put a bullet in Tolly, and he does not know how badly. He walks out of the building, wounded, past Cuddles, and makes it to the alley where his father died on New Year’s Eve twenty years earlier. He dies there, in the same spot, on the same ground, and Fuller’s last image is Tolly’s hand clenching into a fist as it stops moving — the identical gesture his father’s hand made when the boy took it. Nothing has been recovered. The syndicate will appoint a new executive by Monday. The machine ran perfectly and delivered a corpse in an alley, which is what it was built for.