There has been a fifteen year gap between the "Musketeers of Pig Alley," which looked at inchoate juvenile delinquency and gangsterism in New York's slums, and "Underworld," which presents a complete culture of brutal dandies at war with each other.
That seems like it is both a long time between movies and too short a time for gangsterism to grow up as much as it did, and let me offer some explanations for both.
Firstly, there were likely other gangster movies during this time, and we have lost them. 80-90% of the films made during the silent era are gone through a combination of general neglect and the short-lived nitrate stock the films were printed on. A significant movie that followed this one is gone -- "Gang War" from 1929, which had a short cartoon paired with it, and the cartoon was none other than "Steamboat Willie," the first Mickey Mouse short. Steamboat Willie is still with us, but "Gang War" is long lost.
So there may have been a rash of films during the 20s that charted the rise of the gangster, which, thanks to Prohibition, had become a lucrative business. The Pig Alley gang felt like a holdover from the 19th century, with their battered suits and their petty crimes. "Underworld" feels like all the gangster films that would follow it, with Tommy guns, bejeweled molls, rivalries between gang bosses, and flashy suits.
But whatever came before that is now lost, I think we can credit the film's director for creating a look that we now associate with the mobster -- a sort of rough elegance, marked by dapper suits and big hats. "Underworld" was directed by Josef von Sternberg, who had a talent for glamorizing the demimonde, most famously with "The Blue Angel," the film that gave us Marlene Dietrich in a top hat.
All the character in "Underworld" have affectations of noir glamor. There is the mob boss, "Bull" Weed, played by George Bancroft as a brutish Irish lout in a fancy suit. He frequently hands out silver dollars as an affected gesture of magnanimity, but bends them with his bare hands before giving them up, like some circus strong man.
His girl is Evelyn Brent, a sulky brunette with bee-stung lips and evening gowns covered in feathers; as a result, nobody ever calls her anything other than Feathers. And there is Bull Weed's consigliere, to use a term borrowed from the Italian mob: He is a former drunk played by Clive Brook, and now named Rolls Royce.
Brook cleans up well -- he slicks his hair back and starts wearing tuxedos and a gangster hat so large it resembles something worn by the Pioneers, and Feathers immediately falls hard for him, which leads to complications.
In the meanwhile, Bull is having a minor spat with another crime boss, and if you're wondering if this is set in the world of Irish-American gangsters, wonder no more, as the other boss is named "Buck" Mulligan.
In a tradition that would be borrowed throughout the history of gangster films, Mulligan uses a flower shop as the front for his criminal enterprise, and he and Bull have a puckish rivalry. They like to get each other riled up, which isn't hard, as both have roiling temperaments, and any perceived slights will cause either to leap to their feat, hair suddenly wild, fists flailing, held back by friends. When Mulligan backs Feathers up against a wall at the end of an annual gangsters ball, things turn deadly.
The remainder of the film is a jail break and a spectacular, preposterous shootout with the cops, who surround Bull's apartment with military-style police vehicles and unload with every automatic weapon they can find, quite literally perforating the building as Bull fire back with a sub-machine gun.
As lensed by von Sternberg, even this looks great -- it may have been the first time anyone had filmed a man in a suit creating mayhem with a Tommy gun, which would become the iconic image of the 20s gangster.
And Bull was based on a real gangster, Chicago's Tommy O'Connor, who was born in County Limerick, Ireland and came to America to make trouble, shooting down a cop named O'Neil in the Windy City.
O'Connor was sentenced to hang but broke free of the courthouse. Nobody knows what happened to O'Connor after that -- he may have gone on to more robberies and at least one more murdered police officer. Director von Sternberg and the film's screenwriters (including Robert N. Lee, who would later write "Little Caesar") give their cinematic O'Connor a more final ending, and even a moment of grace at the end of the film. But they kept the essential brutality of the story, in which, in the underworld, a double-cross is a death sentence, and a cop is just a problem solved with a bullet.
