Howard Da Silva was underused. He appears briefly in the first few minutes, then he doesn't reappear until the 70 minute mark (it's only a 91 minute movie). I also thought the scriptwriters delayed Marshall's appearance in the film unnecessarily-- and I get that they were establishing the relationship between Duryea and Storm-- but the murder plot really does not get underway until after this long prologue plays out. And the relationship between Duryea and Storm gets seriously backgrounded in the last third of the movie, so what was the point of introducing a romantic subplot only to drop it?
At times I thought the casting of Gar Moore as Marshall's son was off. Clearly, he was the film's weakest actor. I noticed he had done a series of films in Italy in the 40s before signing with Universal (where he undoubtedly met Duryea), and maybe his acting style was a bit unsteady because he was not used to working with these kinds of actors.
The film was obviously shot on a lower budget than most studio productions and its cheapness is evident in the newspaper office scenes which seem to have been shot in some warehouse. But the use of black and white film and lighting that cast shadows on the proceedings to add a level of depth worked to cleverly conceal the cheap looking sets. It helped tremendously when they filmed outdoors in the streets and at the cemetery, which seemed quite authentic.
What I loved most about THE UNDERWORLD STORY was its deliberately slow pacing. If this was a studio B film, the narrative would have been rushed and crammed into 60 minutes. But because they have stretched this out to an hour and a half, we get a lot of extra pauses and reflections and insights to the characters and their motivations. The dialogue was poor in some spots, but pros like Herbert Marshall and Howard Da Silva kept it interesting-- if not for the words they were uttering but for the reactions they were generating and the careful tense stares that seem to go so well with this kind of story.
At times I thought the casting of Gar Moore as Marshall's son was off. Clearly, he was the film's weakest actor. I noticed he had done a series of films in Italy in the 40s before signing with Universal (where he undoubtedly met Duryea), and maybe his acting style was a bit unsteady because he was not used to working with these kinds of actors.
The film was obviously shot on a lower budget than most studio productions and its cheapness is evident in the newspaper office scenes which seem to have been shot in some warehouse. But the use of black and white film and lighting that cast shadows on the proceedings to add a level of depth worked to cleverly conceal the cheap looking sets. It helped tremendously when they filmed outdoors in the streets and at the cemetery, which seemed quite authentic.
What I loved most about THE UNDERWORLD STORY was its deliberately slow pacing. If this was a studio B film, the narrative would have been rushed and crammed into 60 minutes. But because they have stretched this out to an hour and a half, we get a lot of extra pauses and reflections and insights to the characters and their motivations. The dialogue was poor in some spots, but pros like Herbert Marshall and Howard Da Silva kept it interesting-- if not for the words they were uttering but for the reactions they were generating and the careful tense stares that seem to go so well with this kind of story.