Underworld U.S.A. (Samuel Fuller, 1961)

The title of Samuel Fuller’s Underworld, U.S.A. points to its major irony: this is an America where organized crime has reached its highest calling, operating out of a fancy office building with a rooftop swimming pool, hiding in all but plain sight behind legitimate tax-paying businesses and charitable endeavours and organized into reporting units, with a CEO who chides his lieutenants for under-performing numbers (unforgivable, when so many of the country’s 13 million children have yet to be converted into dope fiends). The organization’s single-mindedness swamps the resources of law enforcement (itself depicted here as either corrupt or else pathetically susceptible to manipulation), but it remains vulnerable to a dose of its own poison, delivered here in the form of Cliff Robertson’s Tolly Devlin, who as a teenager watched from the shadows as four men ganged up to kill his father, and now seeks to get revenge on the three survivors (all now high-ranking, if hardly impregnable, executives), by feigning loyalty and working his way up inside. The idea of family runs through the film in various perverse ways, from his hard-bitten quasi-mother figure whose doll collection is, it’s suggested, a compensation for her inability to have children; to Tolly’s contemptuous reaction when the forlorn “Cuddles” suggests he and she might get married; to a daughter calmly bearing witness to the unmasking of her police chief father’s corruption; to the astoundingly pitiless killing of a little girl as a means of putting pressure on her informant father. The movie mostly lacks the more grandly-conceived moments that so elevate Shock Corridor or The Naked Kiss, but its controlled relentlessness serves all the better to establish the challenge to societal optimism. It serves up a fantastic closing set-up though, of Tolly’s demise under a blood donor poster, and the final ultra-Fuller-ish close-up of his dead clenched fist.