Vashirdfel Simply A Masterpiece

Moustroll Good movie but grossly overrated

Pacionsbo Absolutely Fantastic

Hadrina The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

SnoopyStyle Bull Weed is a boisterous gangster bank robber. His girlfriend is the flashy Feathers McCoy. His rival is Buck Mulligan. Wensel is a vagrant but he's no snitch. He's a Rolls Royce of silence. Bull gives Rolls Royce a thousand bucks and makes him a partner in crime. Using Rolls Royce's brains, Bull becomes even more successful. At a wild party, Buck attacks Feathers and an angry drunken Bull kills him. Bull is sent to prison. Feathers convinces Rolls Royce to run away with her but she changes her mind to break him out of prison.This is a great pre-Depression era gangster movie. It has the classic gangster style and characters. It's a silent movie that lays out the genre that would explode a few years later. This is one in a line of developments in the gangster genre.

David_Brown I am not a big fan of silent films. I generally will only watch them to see a certain star ("Wings" & "It" for Clara Bow & Gary Cooper comes to mind). My personal favorite genre are gangster films. It does not matter if you are talking about Cagney, Robinson & Bogart, right up through "American Gangster", there are less than a handful I did not like. Let me say, this movie is exceptional. It really has a lot of action (Spoilers: Particularly the final scenes with the machine guns), and it has characters that are sympathetic (Particularly Rolls-Royce and Feathers). But what really works best is Bancroft's playing of Bull Weed. Weed is extremely complex. Weed is a bad guy, but not evil like "Machine Gun" Butch Schmidt (Wallace Beery in "The Big House), Cody Jarrett, Rico Bandetto, Tony Camonte (Paul Muni's "Scarface") or Tony Montana. He has compassion for those less fortunate (Rolls-Royce, the kitten, particularly the guard he refused to kill, when he escaped (A real evil person would kill that guard)). An awesome film, well worth watching for gangster film fans.

secondtake Underworld (1927)A lot of people avoid silent films at all costs, and I understand that totally. Many of these films are stiff, and the plots are either sentimental or obvious. But there are many reasons to watch a good, or great, silent film. Sometimes the acting, whatever its expressive style, is really wonderful. Often the photography and editing is really terrific and sophisticated. And the stories can be fast, fresh, and even pertinent.And finally, the silent films easiest for the uninitiated to approach are at the very end of the silent era. That would be 1927. See Joan Crawford in The Unknown for the bizarre, or Murnau's Sunrise for eloquence, or consider this film, the first major film by the soon to be legendary Josef von Sternberg. The only thing that might put off some people is the exaggerated expressions in one of the three main characters, Bull Weed. But go with that flow and you'll see not only some more subtle acting, but a sweet, violent, complex plot interweave in just an hour or so (81 minutes, though there is an 87 minute version out there if you can find it, Netflix doesn't have it). The Criterion disc version is really clean (another reason to consider this as an intro silent films, since it isn't broken up or scratched to death)."Underworld" is filmed with visual complexity even though it lacks some of the virtuosic moving camera of Murnau. The sets are simple but convincing, and the shift in attention to the gangster side of the story, complete with guns and molls and the precursors (or pre-precursors) of film noir, is gripping. It's not as intense as the heyday of gangster films just four or five years later, but it has if anything more emotional sophistication. The story was written by the legendary Ben Hecht, which might explain some of its success.Von Sternberg you say? Well, he was a master at creating aura, and between him and Dietrich a whole new level of starmaking savvy was born. This, as a first film, and as a last minute replacement, was expected to flop, and was released in a single New York theater. Word spread, however, and it became a hit. You can see why. Great stuff.

MartinHafer 'Bull' Weed is a tough gangster whose girlfriend is 'Feathers'. One nit when Bull is pulling off a robbery, he meets up with a bum who sees him committing the crime. Inexplicably, instead of killing the witness, Bull christens the guy 'Rolls Royce' and decides to raise out of the gutter--eventually making him his #2 man in the gang.Everyone fears Bull--after all, he's a very tough customer. Well, ALMOST everyone one. A really, really stupid crook named 'Buck' is interested in Feathers and wants her for himself. And, when Buck makes his move and kidnaps Feathers, Bull kills him in a fit of rage. Bull is then sentenced to death (though because of the way the crime occurred, this seemed a bit excessive). While Bull is on death row, he gets word that Feathers and Rolls Royce are carrying on together. While it IS true that the pair have fallen in love, they do not act on it out of loyalty to Bull--but Bull is determined to kill them for supposedly betraying him. How all this is resolved is a bit of a disappointment. It's sad, actually, as up to this point it was a dandy little gangster film--and one that actually helped to launch the gangster film rage in the late 20s and early 30s.