Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #21613 in VHS
• Released on: 1999-01-19
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Formats: Black & White, Color, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Number of tapes: 1
• Running time: 99 minutes

Amazon.com
As a teenager, Tolly Devlin sees several hoodlums beat his father to death in an alley. Some 20 years later, the killers have risen to the top of the underworld rackets, and Devlin, bent on revenge, sets out to kill each one of them. What could be a fairly routine crime/revenge drama is given the full Sam Fuller treatment. As Tolly, Cliff Robertson is one of Fuller's most shabby antiheroes, a cold, brutal automaton consumed with a single-minded hatred. He stops at nothing to get his pound of flesh, even strong-arming a man on his deathbed. He cooperates up to a point with a government agent, but only to see his own ends. Tolly rescues Cuddles (Dolores Dorn) from being roughed up and earns her gratitude, but he's too emotionally damaged for her to help him in the long run. The conflicts and strategies in Underworld U.S.A. play out like one of Fuller's war movies, with a protagonist declaring war on an entire organization while finding himself outside the legal means to defeat them. The movie is littered with ruined people and unsavory situations, with the syndicate heavily involved in the heroin trade. It may not have the narrative economy of some of Fuller's other movies, but Underworld, U.S.A. is still a prime example of his tabloid sensibilities and in-your-face storytelling. --Jerry Renshaw

Customer Reviews

Good 'Film Noir' Stuff
Written, directed and produced by Sam Fuller, this is a tough, straight-talking, no nonsense film noir. It's ike a 1940s noir but it's 1961 instead. So, instead of the boxy cars, of the Forties you have long- finned late 1950s automobiles. Otherwise, it''s the same genre.

You get the same great film noir photography with lots of nighttime shots and a lot of tough characters. I just wish they had at least one really likable person to root for, but I didn't find any. The "hero," played well by Cliff Robertson, is a tough, revenge-obsessed guy and that's basically the storyline as he tracks down the hoods who beat up and killed his father.

Even though the rest of the cast doesn't have big names, many of the faces are familiar and all are good actors. This is an earlier "Point Blank" film seven years before that came out - same kind of story.

Of the women in here, I found Dolores Dorn the most interesting.

Rip snorting revenge
Ok so here we have Underworld U.S.A., a fairly late entry into the world of Noirs being released in 1961 with Cliff Robertson in the lead role, no less. An impressionable youngster (age 14!) witnesses his crooked father's murder (in shadow). Why he and his mother-surrogate rush outdoors to see it only to confirm to one another that they mustn't admit what they had seen if they want to live is beyond me. I mean, if you live in this neighborhood wouldn't it be best to just remain inside? More to come on the charming absurdities of this movie. Anyway, the boy recognizes one of his father's assailants and the lengths he goes to for his revenge is how the story unfolds.
This movie attempts to show us how the underworld (drugs, prostitution, ganbling) is run just like corporate America. This is where the campy fun comes in...committee meeting where it's decided that they need to post more pushers near the schools because the teenage dope addict is the new wave of their business plan; calculations involving the number of teenaged girls available for capturing into their prostitution ring, etc. Absolutely hilarious. One of the assailants, now an underworld kingpin, hires our anti-hero without recognizing who he is, commenting in an aside that it's nice to see kids so dedicated to their fathers and he wished that his own son were so devoted! I say! Along for the ride are a number of charming segues, my favorites being the cut from an image of a dead child on the street to a dead turkey being pulled from a bag; the arson fire of a car (and a live adversary) to the crime kingpin lighting a cigarette and the final denoument of our anti-hero, stumbling and dying over a trash can that says "Keep our city clean" on it.
The movie has some pretty gruesome scenes (as described above) that are all played out by Gus (Richard Rust) who is truly a scary character and the most sobering thing about the movie. He looks like a bland, blonde angel but is truly a demented sicko along the lines of a Richard Widmark or Dan Durea character but without the cackling glee. What ever happened to this actor?
Anyway, it is of note that the main character in this movie, Tolly Devlin, is portrayed as an immature, emotionally childlike man. This is in contrast to preceeding noirs where the male characters are tough full grown mature males. Maybe this is the first in a long downward slide to the juvenile fodder we get today, aimed to please the 14-year old boy audience.
Anyway. Excellent photography, lovely fragile women, nasty bad guys and a plot driven by burning revenge. 4 stars.

Richard Rust's Shades
So here we have a characterization comparable to Richard Widmark's in Kiss of Death... and yet, obviously, Richard Rust did not receive the promotion one needs to be noticed! But I noticed. And when someone said to me, "Check out Cliff Robertson's white suit", I said, "I didn't even notice him, I was looking at Richard Rust..." Not that everyone else in this film wasn't good, but from the putting on of shades to the turning a zippo in his hand, from his coldness in killing a child to his creepiness in saying he likes lifeguarding for children, from his great profile to his screen presence...here's an ACTOR! As Sadakichi Hartmann said about himself, Richard Rust must have been too great to be noticed. But I saw him. Thank goodness!!