“Underworld” at Silent Movie Mondays: Hecht Doesn’t Shoot Blanks

Anyone who responded to the poetry of Charles Mudede’s Police Beat can head down to the Paramount tonight at 7 p.m. for an ancient antecedent to the film based on crime reports, Ben Hecht’s Underworld, from 1927. The Trader Joe’s Silent Movie Mondays series is in the midst of a crime spree–this time, the excitement is in Chicago.

“A great city in the dead of night–streets lonely, moon-flooded–buildings empty as the cliff-dwellings of a forgotten age,” is how screenwriter Hecht, who picked up one of the first-ever Oscars for this screenplay, describes the landscape. Piqued, he’d asked to have his name taken off the credits because director Josef von Sternberg changed a scene without his agreement.

Hecht, who also wrote a little film called Scarface, modeled Bull Weed after a gangster he knew, but the movie became a tug-of-war between Hecht’s interests in how crime and coverage intersect and von Sternberg’s zeroing in on the love triangle between Weed, a down-and-outer he’s rescued, and Weed’s moll Feathers.

Paramount Pictures opened the movie in just one theater, thinking it was a dog, but it got word of mouth. “To call Underworld influential is too mild a phrase; later directors absolutely fleeced it,” notes Richard von Busack. See how many lifts you can spot.

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For more Ben Hecht, here’s an excerpt from his story “Clocks and Owl Cars.”

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