King of the Underworld

Old-fashioned gangster tropes, including a standard Bogart surrounded by dopey thugs in fedoras, permeate Lewis Seiler’s King of the Underworld, which borrows themes from The Petrified Forest (1936) and Undercover Doctor (1939) and delivers the proto-noir equivalent of comfort food spread across a fast-paced, story-packed 67 minutes. Bogart is gang leader Joe Gurney, whose gratitude to Dr. Niles Nelson (John Eldredge) for saving his friend’s life leads to Niles’ secret moonlighting as physician to Gurney’s gang for a large profit. Also a doctor, Nelson’s wife Carole (Kay Francis, whose star was falling and was on her way out at Warner Brothers) becomes suspicious and follows her husband one night to his rendezvous with Gurney’s gang, where they’re all surprised by a police raid in which Nelson is killed, Gurney escapes, and Carole is labeled a person of interest by the corrupt district attorney. While waiting for the medical board’s decision on her license to practice, a grieving Carole moves in with her aunt Josephine (Jessie Busley) in a small town called Wayne Center where she hopes to get in touch with Gurney through two of his men who are holed up in the local jail. Here’s where the rest of the action unfolds — and the film takes on a slight western flavor — as Gurney shows up to break out his boys now accompanied by an intellectual writer (James Stephenson) whom he picked up along the way and hired to write his autobiography, The Napoleon of Crime. Whew! For a short film, the plot is dense and maybe somewhat rushed, the final confrontation a blood bath during which all of Gurney’s men are blinded. King of the Underworld might have been forgettable without Bogart, whose character is quickly established as despicable after he shoots an innocent man in the back just after the opening credits, but it’s a satisfying watch, and Seiler even dabbles in early noir style (note, for example, the bright close-ups and low-key lighting of Carole’s interrogation scene).