Reviews of silent film releases on home video. Copyright © 1999-2024 by Carl Bennett and the Silent Era Company. All Rights Reserved.

Underworld (1927)

This sensational crime drama from Paramount, directed by Josef von Sternberg, stars George Bancroft, Evelyn Brent and Clive Brook, with support from Fred Kohler and Larry Semon.

Bancroft shines in his boisterous, star-making role as ‘Bull’ Weed, displaying the gamut from extreme mirth to explosive anger, and commanding the screen in each shot he appears in. Handsome Brook delivers a pleasing and subtly nuanced performance as ‘Rolls-Royce,’ which ably captures the audience’s sympathy in concert with Brent’s slightly more-approachable-than-her-usual-icy-self turn as gun moll ‘Feathers’ when she professes her love in a dam-busting outburst. Fred Kohler smoulders as the one-note villain (in a film about criminals — go figure) and Semon is wholly unnecessary as the occasional comic relief.

This Blu-ray Disc collection of three late silent era films directed by Josef von Sternberg features new, restored high-definition digital transfers of each of the films.

The film is presented with two optional musical scores: one full orchestral score by Robert Israel and an alternative music score by The Alloy Orchestra.

The collection’s supplemental material includes visual essays by UCLA film professor Janet Bergstrom and film scholar Tag Gallagher, a 1968 Swedish television interview with Sternberg, and a 96-page booklet featuring the original film treatment for Underworld by Ben Hecht, essays by film critic Geoffrey O’Brien, film scholar Anton Kaes, and author Luc Sante, and an excerpt on actor Emil Jannings from Sternberg’s autobiography, Fun in a Chinese Laundry.

This is our recommended home video edition of the film.

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This DVD-R edition has been mastered from a very-good 16mm reduction print. The full-frame video transfer is of higher quality than most small company DVD-R disc editions, with few signs of encoding compression (despite its low video bit rate) even in still frames. The source print is a bit contrasty, with dark, closed-up shadows, but otherwise features good picture detail and tonal range.

The presentation features what appears to be a custom music score tastefully performed on MIDI keyboards.

This edition was also distributed under the Vintage Film Buff company name and the two editions are identical otherwise. With the Criterion Collection editions noted above now being available (and this edition previously filled a need when it was the sole DVD edition available) we recommend the Criterion editions instead of this passable edition.

EMOVIEZ no longer sells home video products and this item is . . .