I am not a big fan of silent films. I generally will only watch them to see a certain star ("Wings" & "It" for Clara Bow & Gary Cooper comes to mind). My personal favorite genre are gangster films. It does not matter if you are talking about Cagney, Robinson & Bogart, right up through "American Gangster", there are less than a handful I did not like. Let me say, this movie is exceptional. It really has a lot of action (Spoilers: Particularly the final scenes with the machine guns), and it has characters that are sympathetic (Particularly Rolls-Royce and Feathers). But what really works best is Bancroft's playing of Bull Weed. Weed is extremely complex. Weed is a bad guy, but not evil like "Machine Gun" Butch Schmidt (Wallace Beery in "The Big House), Cody Jarrett, Rico Bandetto, Tony Camonte (Paul Muni's "Scarface") or Tony Montana. He has compassion for those less fortunate (Rolls-Royce, the kitten, particularly the guard he refused to kill, when he escaped (A real evil person would kill that guard)). An awesome film, well worth watching for gangster film fans.
Review of Underworld
