Softwing Most undeservingly overhyped movie of all time??

Huievest Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

Hulkeasexo it is the rare 'crazy' movie that actually has something to say.

Jerrie It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

Bill Slocum Sam Fuller prized efficiency above all in his pictures. "Underworld U. S. A." exposes the flaw in that philosophy. It's so efficient, it dispenses with believable characters, a rooting interest, or realistic suspense.As a young teenager, Tolly Devlin watches his father killed by four hoods. He may be a hood himself, but he has a sense of honor where his old man is concerned, refusing to "fink" on the killers. He wants the pleasure of offing them himself."I'll get those punks my own way," he shouts while still a youngster played by David Kent.For the rest of this movie, that's exactly what happens. Tolly, now an adult played by Cliff Robertson, manages to infiltrate a nationwide syndicate in which three of the four killers are now crime czars respectively running drugs, unions, and prostitution. Simply by stealing a cartridge box full of drugs, he manages to fool the drug czar, Gela (Paul Dubov) by telling him who he is and that he wants to follow in his father's footsteps. Instead of giving him the same treatment he dished out on Pops, Gela puts Tolly to work for his organization."I wish my kid felt about me the way Tolly feels about his old man," Gela muses.Improbable coincidences abound in this silly, mono-dimensional revenge flick. Fuller was a great pulp director but his tendencies toward fish-slap subtlety and on-the-nose exposition are on violent display."It was a pretty tough break you had, being born in prison and your mother dying there...""My father told me why you collect these dolls. He said you can't have kids of your own..."The overall crime boss complains to Gela that he hasn't gotten more of the 13 million kids in the United States hooked on drugs: "Don't tell me the end of the needle has a conscience.""Underworld U. S. A." moves like Fuller was double-parked the whole time, yet at over 90 minutes still feels bloated. There's an aging woman who loves Tolly, a younger woman who does, too, but plans to act on it ("I want your kids"), and a D. A. who spends much of his screen time eating sandwiches and letting Tolly direct his investigation.It might have been more endurable if Robertson didn't play his role like an off-the-cuff Cagney, "a collection of tough-guy tics" as Jamie S. Rich notes in his Confessions of a Pop Fan blog. Or if there were any complications in Tolly's pursuit of his mission, like say the bad guys getting wise to him, or else him having second thoughts.The visuals are sometimes arresting, with moody lighting and off- beat editing. But the only thing that grabbed me was Richard Rust's performance as Gus, head torpedo for the syndicate. Even stuck with a particularly egregious quirk, the need to don sunglasses whenever he kills, Rust plays Gus like someone both dangerous and real, with some shadings around his villainy. He's my 1961 Doe Avedon Award winner for great performance in a bad movie.And this is a bad movie, never mind the Fuller apologists. He did make great movies like "Shock Corridor," decent if flawed ones like "Crimson Kimono," but also occasionally an all-out tom turkey like this, which serves to lay bare the mold he worked from but doesn't do much either for his reputation or for your enjoyment."Almost every shot hits you like a punch," Martin Scorsese enthuses in a DVD extra. Let's just say after a couple of viewings, I was glad to leave the ring to Sam and never looked back.

funkyfry Sam Fuller's ambitious "Underworld U.S.A." is a focused, driven little machine of a picture with Cliff Robertson as a man intent on avenging his father, who was murdered by 5 men who eventually became mafia kingpins. In order to do so, he must first spend time in the "big house" to get the info from the one perp he identified, and then insinuate himself into the organization to track down and destroy the others. What's notable to me in the film is the way that the positive/moral characters in the film are only vaguely given much room to actually wield moral authority. For example, Sandy (Beatrice Kay), the kindly tavern owner who more or less adopts Tolly Devlin (Robertson) after his father's murder, is characterized by gigantic posters of babies on her walls and creepy looking dolls stuffed throughout her house. The police are portrayed in a positive way, but they're also showed as dupes (Devlin easily abuses the D.A.'s trust for his own revenge) and perhaps overly zealous. The film repeats propaganda tropes about young people ("age 10 to 15" as the villain specifies) becoming hooked on drugs by the mafia, much in the same way Fuller's "Pickup on South Street" scared us with the ever-present commie threat to our way of life. There's a sense that the depiction of that menace is being undermined by the film's single-minded focus on the hero's equally single- minded mission.Robertson and the rest of the cast are solid, not necessarily remarkable... it's a weird film because in some ways it more closely resembles a film from the late 40s or early 50s, but in other ways it's ahead of its time. It's a bit closer to "Death Wish" or "Point Blank" in terms of how little credence or attention it gives to the idea of the hero actually "going straight" or doing anything other than follow a very linear path to a gruesome ending. As such, it fits into a pattern of other late 50s/early 60s films that reached back to 30s archetypes and tried to re-invent them in more brutally deterministic terms (Fuller's westerns from the period follow the trend as well). There are many truly memorable scenes here -- this one deserves to be seen by a lot more people.

Get_your_azz_to_Mars I've seen a number of Samuel Fuller's films and few of them, if any, have disappointed me, and this 1961 film 'Underworld USA' is no different. It has a tightly constructed, almost Hamlet-esque plot with echoes of Dashiell Hammett's novel 'Red Harvest' along with the straight-forward revenge thriller to give the viewer an absorbing, post-classical noir experience. The acting is fantastic, most especially by lead Cliff Robertson, who manages to create a snarling, snarky borderline unlikeable anti-hero compelling and fun to watch. The visuals, as with most Fuller films of this period, are oftentimes jarring with abrupt cutting, unusual angles, and evocative lighting. If you like the work of Samuel Fuller you're going to love this film.

sol1218 ***SPOILERS*** Director Samuel Fuller takes a crack at organized crime in this murder and revenge thriller involving young Tolly Devlin, David Ken & Cliff Robertson when he's all grown up, who was an eye witness to his father's murder.It's not that old man Devlin was an upstanding and law abiding citizen he was a mobster himself but what happened to him, beaten to death by four hoodlums, shouldn't have happened to a mad and rabid dog much less then to a human being. Young Tolly there and then made up his mind that he'll tack down his dad's killers and exact justice on them if that's the last thing he does!It took a while for Tolly to find his father's killers but a stint behind bars, for safe-cracking, brought unexpected results. Recognizing one of his father's killers Vic Farrar, Peter Brocco,in the prison hospital dying from cancer Tolly got him to confess his sins so he can die in peace and with a clean slate when he stands before his creator. With his last dying breath a repetitive Farrar reveal to Tolly those hoods who along with him murdered his old man. Tolly later finds out, through a newspaper headline, that the three other hoods who murdered his dad Gela Smith & Gunther, Paul Dubov Allan Gruener & Gerald Milton, are now the top men in the notorious Earl Connors, Robert Emhardt, crime syndicate.Using his girlfriend-and former hooker- Cuddles, Dolores Dorn, who's life he once saved Tolly gets in on the inside of the Connor's crime syndicate, by posing as a drug pusher, in order to get to those who murdered his father and make them pay dearly! Playing both sides against the middle Tolly works both with the Connor's Mob and the local D.A John Driscoll, Larry Gates, which turned out to be disastrous for him. ***SPOILERS*** Cliff Robertson had a real great time playing Tolly Devlin in the movie using, or copying off, the facial expressions as well as body language of the late great Paul Muni in his blockbuster 1932 gangster epic "Sacrface". Robertson, as well as director Fuller, also did his best to copy the legendary death scene by James Cagney in the 1939 gangland flick "The Roaring Twenties". Besides Cliff Robertson's convincing acting, as a borderline psycho, there's also Beatrice Kay as Tolly's adoptive mom Sandy. As much as Sandy tried she couldn't prevent Tolly from suffering his dad's fate which was preordain the moment he choose to step into his hoodlum father's shoes!