Sam Fuller and Fritz Lang: Audacious Auteurs of Noir

Twenty years after Samuel Fuller’s death, his complete oeuvre is becoming available on disc — one jolt at a time. The last of the remaining stragglers is the 1961 crime-syndicate classic, “Underworld U.S.A.,” out on Blu-ray from Twilight Time. It’s a movie of which the critic V.F. Perkins wrote, “every shot is a smack in the eye.”

Written, directed and produced by Fuller, “Underworld U.S.A.” initiated the luridly stylized, expertly crafted B-movies — blunt and punchy as a tabloid front page — that make up Fuller’s trilogy of despair. (The other two, “Shock Corridor,” from 1963, depicting America as a madhouse, and “The Naked Kiss,” from 1964, in which seemingly wholesome small-town America proves too corrupt for a retired prostitute, are available from Criterion.)

“Underworld U.S.A.” asserts that the business of America is crime, something Fuller reinforces with a statement in the film’s original trailer, included as an extra. The crime syndicate is a giant corporation operating a legitimate business blandly named National Projects and protected by dishonest public officials and by skillful public relations. Set in a world in which feds and crooks, both equally coldblooded, work in equivalent skyscraper offices, “Underworld U.S.A.” globalizesthe post-Kefauver Committee mob films of the 1950s. It’s not just a single town but the entire country that is threatened by this quasi-military, community-service-oriented entity.

The narrative arc owes something to “The Big Heat,” Fritz Lang’s 1953 film about an ex-cop who destroys a crime syndicate while avenging his wife’s death. The protagonist of Fuller’s world is not an FBI man but a safecracker, Tolly Devlin (Cliff Robertson), who is motivated by vengeance to bring down criminals who killed his father.

Opening with a tight close-up of the teenage Tolly’s eyes as he prepares to roll a drunk in a back alley, “Underworld U.S.A.” ends some 20 years later in the same alley. Robertson, given an early starring role, plays Tolly with an incredulous smirk. His fixed sneer is as stylized as a Kabuki mask in his love scenes with the vulnerable gang moll known as Cuddles (Dolores Dorn, bleached blond and poignantly frowzy).

The secondary characters are largely cartoons. Fuller cast a former vaudeville star, Beatrice Kay, as Tolly’s would-be guardian angel — a role that might have been written for Thelma Ritter, James Stewart’s no-nonsense nurse in “Rear Window.” Robert Emhardt’s boss of bosses is a rotund, weak-chinned geek out of the comic strip “Dick Tracy.” Richard Rust may not have been the first hit man to wear shades in preparation for a kill but he seems to have established the cliché years before director Don Siegel used it in “The Killers.”

“Underworld U.S.A.” is as economical as it is hyper dramatic. When it opened in neighborhood theaters on a double-bill with a lesser gangster film, “Mad Dog Coll,” New York Times reviewer Howard Thompson praised Fuller’s direction as “nimble, particularly in his use of close-ups.” The brutal action and allegorical mise-en-scène look forward to John Boorman’s alienated gangster-vigilante in the 1967 film “Point Blank,” even as Fuller’s harsh lighting gives the Columbia back lot the shadowy distortions of a German Expressionist woodcut.

In its stark visuals, “Underworld U.S.A.” harks back to Lang, a Fuller favorite, whose last two American movies, “Beyond a Reasonable Doubt” and “While the City Sleeps,” both released by RKO in 1956, are newly available on Blu-ray from Warner Archive. (Both are in the wide-screen format used for their European release.)

Neither is nearly as flavorsome or kinetic as “Underworld U.S.A.” although “While the City Sleeps,” in which a juvenile delinquent serial killer stalks Manhattan, does build to a rattling finale, and “Beyond a Reasonable Doubt,” about a man who lands himself on death row, has a powerful kicker.

“While the City Sleeps” and “Beyond a Reasonable Doubt” are urban crime stories with newspaper backgrounds, both starring a bored-looking Dana Andrews as a star journalist. (“While the City Sleeps” compensates with a strong supporting cast that includes Ida Lupino, George Sanders and Thomas Mitchell as exaggerated news-hound types, with Vincent Price as their paper’s ungainly, epicene owner.) Both movies feature familiar Lang characters, kin to the serial killer introduced in “M” and the trapped innocents of “You Only Live Once” and “Scarlet Street.”

“While the City Sleeps” updates “M” with references to the presumed malign influence of violent comic books and has a reporter use TV to taunt the so-called Lipstick Killer (absurdly played by John Barrymore Jr. wearing a leather jacket and motorcycle cap à la Marlon Brando in “The Wild One”).

“Beyond a Reasonable Doubt” pares down the “wrong man” premise of earlier films noir to have the Andrews character planting self-incriminating clues to an unsolved murder. Intending to expose the flaws in the criminal justice system, he winds up on death row when his carefully documented alibis go up in flames.

Visually barren and somewhat enervated, the movie nevertheless has a powerful sense of implacable fate — Lang’s not least. “Beyond a Reasonable Doubt” might have been named for his 1920 melodrama, “The Weary Death”; set in Weimar Berlin it could have been a gem.

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