Northwest Film Forum

Underworld was the film that launched Josef von Sternberg's very successful career. Working for the first time at a major Hollywood studio, Sternberg exploited his mastery at visual texture, conjuring extravagant effects of light and shadow with translucence and opacity, while casting a lustrous and laded halo around Feathers - the moll who is the lynchpin in a cruel love triangle with George Bancroft's mobster heavy and an alcoholic former lawyer. The atmospheric and explosive Underworld is a forerunner of the hard-boiled gangster cycle of the thirties. The film was written by Ben Hecht and based from his reporter days in Chicago that gave him first-hand knowledge of the gangland setting. He later accepted an Oscar for the script.

Tickets available through Seattle Theatre Group