The visceral tone of Underworld U.S.A. is established during the opening film titles, backed with a menacing score over static shots in a dilapidated back alley. The revenge plot incorporates an astute exposé of modern-day criminality, but the rudiments are basic. The young Tolly Devlin (David Kent) witnesses his father being beaten to death by four thugs in the same kind of alley that opened the film. Haunted by this memory and with orphanage and prison failing to sate his thirst for vengeance, he sets out as an adult on a relentless mission of retribution. In the meantime, the thugs who murdered his father have become leading figures in a powerful crime syndicate.
Sam Fuller was great with minor characters. Beatrice Kay as ‘Sandy’ eloquently captures that resigned fatefulness so distinctive of working-class characters in noir, who just know that things will take a turn for the worse. Dolores Dorn lends real pathos to ‘Cuddles’, a flaky young woman whose drinking habit has led her into a deadly situation with the crime syndicate––a situation she comprehends with a sober clarity belying her lush persona. Robert Emhardt as ‘Earl Connors’, the crime syndicate boss, is smarmy cold-blooded malevolence personified. But Richard Rust as ‘Gus Cottahee’ is perhaps most emblematic of Fuller’s directorial intentions. Gus initially appears unlikely: beyond the sharp suit his boyish looks are more suggestive of a surf movie bit-player. Yet, his performance expertly embodies the seemingly smooth business front of the crime syndicate and the barbaric underside of organised gangsterism.
Gus is first glimpsed when Tolly breaks into the crime syndicate premises and is disturbed by Gus and Cuddles entry. From Tolly’s hidden viewpoint we see Gus calling his boss, letting him know that Cuddles refused a drug pick-up. A hint of regret creases his face when he’s ordered to rub her out, but in a signature move, he dons his sunglasses––to the alarm of Cuddles––an action allowing him to inhabit a more ruthless character-mask. The wearing of the sunglasses “switches on the killer” explained Fuller. “Afterwards he takes them off and he’s a regular guy—good to his mother, pets his dog.” As Gus sets about beating Cuddles to death, we hear him mutter: “I’ll miss you”. But Tolly slips out of his hiding place, knocks Gus out and helps Cuddles escape.
In a turn of events, Gus inveigles himself within the syndicate. Tolly is tasked with giving him a tour of National Projects, the apparently legitimate front of the syndicate. The tour is interrupted when Gus is called to undertake another order. For just a moment a grimace of anguish ruffles his implacable demeanour, mirroring his reaction when ordered to kill Cuddles. He resumes his tour, recalling his time acting as a lifeguard to the underprivileged kids whom the crime syndicate once invited to their rooftop swimming pool as part of their charity front. “I liked that”, he recalls ruefully.
In the next scene Gus rolls up in his car and chats affably with Jenny, the daughter of Mencken, who betrayed the syndicate. Crouching down and using her first name as if he was an old friend of the family, a nice college boy chatting with a nice young girl, he asks for her father’s whereabouts while cajoling her with chewing gum. Jenny says he’s away and cycles off contentedly with her gum. Gus slips into a grocery store to let his boss know that Mencken can’t be found. He is ordered to kill Jenny instead. Gus turns to stone. Accompanied by a grim drum roll on the soundtrack, he exits the store, pausing briefly to don his murderous sunglasses. He enters his car and Fuller ratchets up the tension with a masterpiece of intercutting between the girl on her bike, increasingly petrified, Gus remorselessly chasing her down in the steadily accelerating car, and Jenny’s mother screaming with horror from the window of her house. The sequence ends with an elliptical shot worthy of Fritz Lang: the bicycle mangled and the girl sprawled out on the road dead.
Tolly later deceives Connors with the help of the police (Tolly is smarter and more motivated than both the syndicate and the police), falsifying police reports to suggest the syndicate thugs who killed his father are police informers. Connors takes the bait and calls Gus to take care of business. Gus knocks out Gunter, one of the thugs, at Connors’ office. Cut to a close up of Gunter trapped in an overturned car at night, streaming with sweat, desperate and utterly terrified, back to Gus, killer sunglasses on, dossing petrol and flinging a match. Gunter, burned alive and screaming with horror, was “barbecued” Tolly would later say. Gela, one of the other thugs, is then ruthlessly disposed of with two bullets at his home. With the unwitting assistance of Connors’ and Gus, Tolly has avenged the last of the men who killed his father.
In a subsequent scene, Gus brings Tolly a gun. He reminds Tolly of Mencken’s kid, Jenny. In a killer shot from Tolly’s perspective, Gus hands him a drink and gazing off into the distance matter-of-factly declares: “I ran her down”. Gus says that Connors wants to break Tolly in: “We’re going to wipe out Mencken, his wife and his other kid”. “Oh, and Cuddles. Mr Connors says she’s the broad that sang on Smith…she’ll get it like Gunter got it, like Gela got it. A man like Connors everyone goes”. Expressing the pitiless reality behind the syndicate’s polished facade, Gus urges Tolly: “If you show any professional ability tonight, Mr Connors may give you the crack to finish off Cuddles”. Fully grasping the unremitting savagery of the syndicate, Tolly knocks Gus out and flings him to the front of a police precinct with a note in his pocket: ‘CHECK THIS KILLER’S GUN WITH BULLETS IN GELA.’ A cop reading this note as Gus comes to consciousness is the last we see of him. Tolly kills Connors but is shot in the process and ends up dead in a backstreet lane, just like his father.
Gus is undoubtedly emblematic of Fuller’s vision of a more organised and corporate visual representation of mob violence in the early 1960s, but Rust’s implacable performance provides much more than just an index of the director’s intentions. The disconnect between his suave politeness and absolute ruthlessness is representative of the murderous violence behind the smooth façade of the syndicate, but the notes of torment ruffling his face when ordered to kill generate far more ambivalence than is typically associated with cold-blooded mobsters. It is this hint of trepidation, only extinguished by his sunglasses persona, that makes the performance so compelling.
Neil Gray.
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