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Samuel Fuller was a man ahead of his time. making such films as pickup on south street, naked kiss, Shock Corridor, and this film. fuller works were tough as hell for there time. They also had a wonderful oddness about them. He seemed to take a simple clichéd story and make something wonderful and strange out of them.

Underworld USA is a story of revenge. Tolly Devlin A 14 year old boy witness his father beaten to death by four men. Tolly voles revenge. Fast forward 20 years later. Tolly is doing a five year bit and finds one of the men who did his dad In. the man is old and dying. But tolly git's the names from the dieing man of the other three thugs who killed his father . What ensues for the rest of the film is a interesting and creative story of revenge.

As always in Fuller work the woman play a important part. Beatrice Kay's plays sandy. She is a mother figure to Tolly. She is not able to have children so she Surrounds her self with baby dolls. The scenes with her and the dolls are great. They are bizarre and eerie but also heart breaking at the same time. Beatrice Kay plays sandy the ex hooker who falls for Tolly after he comes to her rescue.Cliff Robertson plays Tolly and gives a great performance.

Underworld USA is one of Fuller more underrated films. It was made after his classic pickup on south street and before his great later work of naked kiss and shock corridor. But while not as good as those films underworld USA is a great piece of noir and a most for any Fuller fan.

From its brisk opening, this dark and seamy underworld drama moves like a well-oiled machine, laying out and glorifying Cliff Robertson's revenge tactics to punish the men who killed his father.

Not unlike John Boorman's "Point Blank" which also featured an almost cyborg-natured Lee Marvin punishing the bigshot criminal overlords who did him wrong, here the pursuit is more humanized but suffers no slack as Robertson gives an extraordinary performance.

With a glinty-eyed, crooked smile and a gleeful look which seems to creep into his face as he torments his victims, Robertson suggests a little of Mel Gibson's instability in the first "Lethal Weapon", but without the looniness. His more understated moments are not only very realistic, but are the epitome of cool. Robertson can definitely smoke cigarettes better than anybody.

Fuller's direction is taut, featuring plenty of creative cinematography and a lot of sequences which are far more ahead of their time than the majority of crime films being made around 1961. As always, Fuller manages to tell his story with both hysteria and pathos. This is definitely a must-see for fans of Don Siegel's work or the crime films of Phil Karlson and Anthony Mann. "Underworld USA" could very well share a double bill with John Flynn's "The Outfit" as well. Superb stuff.

Written, directed and produced by Sam Fuller, this is a tough, straight-talking, no nonsense film noir. This is like a 1940s noir but it's 1961 instead. So, instead of the boxy cars, of the Forties you have long- finned late 1950s automobiles. Otherwise, it''s the same genre.

You get the same film noir photography: black-and-white with lots of nighttime shots and a lot of tough characters. I just wish they had at least really likable person to root for, but I didn't find any. The "hero," played well by Cliff Robertson, is a tough, revenge-obsessed guy and that's basically the storyline as he tracks down the hoods who beat up and killed his father.

Even though the rest of the cast doesn't have big names, many of the faces are familiar and all are good actors. This is an earlier "Point Blank" film seven years before that came out - same kind of story.

Of the women in here, I found Dolores Dorn the most interesting.

Writer/director Samuel Fuller is not personally attached to the material he presents in Underworld USA in the sense of it being autobiographical. But it is pretty likely, from listening to interviews with him and just from seeing his other work in the noir-esquire realm of motion pictures, that he knew at least the world these characters are in. Or at least he knows what kinds of emotions and what lies underneath certain aspects of lesser pulp fiction- and has a kind of journalistic sensibility that is all his own, telling it like it is from the mean streets of who-knows. It's got an assured eye working the gears, and it by-passes some usual clichés to get at some more interesting bits within some of the conventions. This is in the bones just a tale of revenge, but Fuller wants the little things and moments that make up such a tale, and how the characters can be more realized than might usually be. I liked, for example, early on when Tolly Devlin is 14 and makes a comment to his mother about something in the middle of their conversation- the mother doesn't say anything, but there's a quick, tight close-up of her face to catch the moment. It actually stuck with me longer than I expected, even as the main parts of the scene went along.

Another part that really, really impressed me was when Devlin (Cliff Robertson, not bad at all in a part that gets to stretch his skills somewhat), nearing the end of his prison term, and finally finds one of the men who beat his father to death when he saw when he was 14. The scene is very tense, but somehow very human too, as Tolly has to contend with a dying man that he has to kill with his own hands. Soon, Fuller gets the gears of the story going further, as he vows revenge against the others who committed the crime, making him pull an undercover act to infiltrate the mob to get close to them, particularly Earl Conners (Rober Emhardt, a plum role for him considering all of his TV parts). But he also falls for a woman, Cuddles, played by Dolores Day, and like Fuller's Crimson Kimono, the weight of the main thrust of what Tolly needs is balanced against what he could also have with his possible romantic interest, caught up in the emotional bog he's in.

I liked a lot how Robertson tapped well enough into the character to make him plausible, even sympathetic. He understands what Fuller is going for, a slightly more realistic- or more powerful kind of representation in the midst of the hard-boiled dialog and more complicated scenes- as he's playing a character who actually has a past, a childhood shown as shattered and made as the complete context that he has to contend with as an adult, despite women around him telling him otherwise. I still remember plenty of shots in the film too (not the gun-shots, the camera-work I mean), and this is after having seen the film months ago, and the driving musical score from Harry Sukman (a solid Fuller collaborator). That Fuller extracts a good deal of compelling entertainment out of a premise that seems pretty standard and even slight is remarkable, and ranks among the other fine superlative B-movies he was doing at the time.

Underworld U.S.A. (1961)

Sam Fuller's movies have an edgy, reckless quality to them, as if lacking propriety. Which is good. What Underworld U.S.A. lacks in subtlety it makes up for in surprise and a kind of sultry sizzle, something very different than more usual "romance" that other crime and noir movies have. There is some second rate acting throughout, but if you accept some of this as "style" and go with the flow, it's click along nicely. In fact, the lack of star power makes the film a hair more everyday, and therefor a hair more realistic in a good way. And the lead male going solo through much of it is first rate, Cliff Robertson.

Not that this is actually believable--it feels contrived all the way--but it has a modern interpersonal selfishness and sometimes cruelty that is fun to watch. The plot? Great enough. But the searing looks, the slaps, the brooding closeups. This is movie-making! Certainly an influence on Tarantino.

As a black and white crime film with a slightly low budget feel, this naturally comes labelled as a film noir. And there are some similarities. But it's also a crime drama, more directly, and it explores (and exploits) the violence of cops and robbers circa 1960. There a lot of unsavory types involved, and some crisp filming. If you like other Sam Fuller films, you'll like this one.