The Underworld Story

Film noir rarely had anything nice to say about the newspaper industry, generally painting journalists and columnists as morally compromised narcissists, and that bias is only moderately tempered in Cy Endfield’s The Underworld Story. Dan Duryea plays big city reporter Mike Reese, who’s just been fired after one of his stories resulted in the murder of a state witness; when his tarnished reputation prevents him from finding work, he borrows $5,000 from gangster Carl Durham (Howard Da Silva) and becomes partners with Cathy Harris (Gale Storm) in a small-town newspaper called The Lakeville Sentinel where he immediately applies his aggressive reporting tactics. On day one, the daughter-in-law of newspaper magnate E.J. Stanton (Herbert Marshall) is found murdered and the police have reason to suspect the black maid (played by white woman Mary Andersen who needs dialogue to remind us that she’s a “Negro”), the suspicion fueled largely by the dead girl’s husband Clark (Gar Moore) whom we learn early on has his own motives. The Stantons will do everything possible to cover up the crime, including making a deal with Durham and his henchmen to eliminate Reese when his investigation digs too deep.