UNDERWORLD U.S.A. is another in-your-mug frontal assault from ever pugnacious, rarely reticent Samuel Fuller, who wrote, produced & directed this 1961 revenge repast, one which combines the best & less-best of his maverick style. A former big city crime reporter and WW2 combat vet, he favored stories revolving around crime or combat, usually with characters compromised to one degree or another by temperament or environment. The war sagas play better, the crime ventures leaning—or careening—into exploitation. Made on the cheap (maybe $1,000,000, it looks like less), this recipe rehash cooked up $2,500,000. That was 84th place in 1961, a year otherwise dominated by animated Dalmatians, angry Jets & Sharks and awesome cannons on an island in the Aegean. *

Robert Emhardt,1914-1994:  crook as capitalist, take yer pick

In 1929, teenage punk ‘Tolly Devlin’ witnesses his father’s pummeling death from a quartet of hoods. Growing into a prison-vetted theif (and 37-year-old Cliff Robertson) when 1960 rolls around Tolly, bent on vengeance, works his way into the nationwide crime syndicate run by venal-and-pleased-with-it ‘Earl Connors’ (Robert Emhardt), original leader of the thugs who murdered his old man. Tolly (thanks for the name, pop) is shifty enough to also use the cops who are investigating the mob, and plays both sides against the middle. Among those taking interest in the single-minded Devlin’s welfare are old friend and stand-in mama ‘Sandy’ (Beatrice Kay, 53) and ‘Cuddles’ (Dolores Dorn, 28), a hot-looking junkie/drunk/hooker with a heart–and not much of a brain.

Dolores Dorn, 1934-2019

Fuller directs with typical visual and thematic verve, and is mightily aided by the superior black & white lensing from cameraman Hal Mohr (151 credits over 40 years, all the way back to The Jazz Singer and before) and some dramatic scoring from Harry Sukman. Emhardt emanates corruption, and former vaudevillian & singer Kay (few films and TV shows) does well channeling 30s ‘broads’, and somehow making it work with a daft character who surrounds herself with a doll collection and dotes on a louse like Tully. Dorn gets a lot of camera favoritism, but her emoting is spotty; and who missed the continuity job when Cuddles’ doozy of a bruise & scar vanishes from one scene to the next? Robertson overdoes it, his expressive but excessive ‘acting’ not helped by hacking at a character not just unlikable, but is inconsistent and too-lucky by a factor of five. Performance flaws aren’t assisted by the pulp-soaked dialogue.

CUDDLES: “I never felt like this before.”  TOLLY: How do you feel?  CUDDLES: “Well, some women, when they kiss, blush. Some call the cops. Some swear, some bite. Some laugh, some cry. Me? I die, Tolly. I die inside when you kiss me.”   After such spoon-gag exchanges and crud Tolly treating Cuddles like a puddle, pseudo-ma Sandy lays into the meathead with tough-love: “Why don’t you take a good look at yourself. What do you see? A doctor? A scientist? A businessman? You see a scar-faced ex-con. A two-bit safecracker. A petty thief who don’t know when he really made the big time. Where do you come off to blast her? No matter what she’s been, what she’s done. She’s a giant! And you wanna know why? Well, I’ll tell ya. Because she sees something in you worth saving. If only one tenth of one percent of all the good in her could rub off on you, you’d be a giant, too. But you’re a midget! In your head, in your heart, in your whole makeup. You’re a midget!”

Richard Rust, 1938-1994

One cast member who makes a definite impression is 25-year-old Richard Rust. He scores as an ice-cold hit man, unmoved by jobs like using his be-finned dreadnought of a car (1960 Lincoln Landau sedan) to run down a little girl on a bike. After he smilingly gave her some gum!  Additional scenery chewing (and a lot of cigar-chomping) comes from Larry Gates, Paul Dubov, David Kent (Tolly as a teenager), Gerald Milton and Peter Brocco. 98 minutes.

* Though some of his movies were ‘hits’ due to grosses relative to their low-budgets (The Steel Helmet, Fixed Bayonets!), Fuller was never a big box office champ—the highest he came to mixing with the A-listers was 1954s rousing, bonkers Hell And High Water, which tagged spot #37, boosted by Richard Widmark, CinemaScope and fear of the newly wrought H-bomb. Our favorite Fuller flick, and probably his most restrained in tone, 1962’s Merrill’s Marauders, only reached 56th. Critics can’t say enough (as in too much) when extolling his punchy pessimism, idealizing the meaning of his methods with a lavish fawning that he’d snort at (and then maybe fire a shot from a .45 over their agog noggins), but his movies are always fun to watch, even when whatever he’s ‘saying’ sounds like a talking comic book.

Tip of the ivory-handled Colt to co-star Richard Rust, offbeat and effective doing cool-cruel justice to supporting bad guys in Comanche Station, Taras Bulba and Alvarez Kelly.