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Synopsis: Tully is a young punk who sees his father beaten to death my syndicate hoodlums. After a stint in prison on a safecracking charge, he learns who gave the order and infiltrates the syndicate in order to bring it down. He falls for a girl who is an eyewitness to a murder committed by one of the bosses and hides her with his surrogate mother. He contacts, Driscoll, the FBI agent investigating things and begins to play all sides against each other. After he sees that his father's murderers are dead, he thinks he's done, but he isn't. When he is given an order to kill the girl he loves, he goes on one final rampage against the bosses....

Grit: Sam Fuller was busy examining the ugly underside of the American experience in the 1950's and 60's. In films like Pick Up on South Street, Shock Corridor, and The Naked Kiss, he painted a hardboiled picture of thugs, floozies, and madmen that ambush expectations. Underworld USA, a late period film noir, has some of the feel of these films--it is recognizable as the work of the same stylist--but it isn't nearly as subversive, except in one or two minor scenes. My favorite of these is the scene where 14 year old Tully rolls a drunk and flees the cops, only to get popped in the eye by another kid who steals his take. I'm also partial to the character of Cuddles, the eyewitness, who is a spiritual sister to the characters Constance Towers plays in Shock Corridor and The Naked Kiss. She is a loose woman, it seems, with an appetite for alcohol, but she has a certain dignity, too, and an inwardness that eludes similar film noir characters. The scene where she professes her hopes to Tully is touching.

Annihilation: One of the principal characteristics of film noir is the pervasive threat of personal annihilation. Most of the characters wander though this film with a death sentence of some variety hanging over them. Even incidental characters are rubbed out at a whim. This aspect of the film is especially manifest in two sequences that have little to do with the main storyline: in one, a police chief who has been corrupted by threats against his family takes his own life rather than testify and have his loved ones exterminated. In the other, a little girl who has the misfortune to be the daughter of a witness is run down by a syndicate hitman as she bicycles home. As soon as Tully tells Driscoll that he is going to get out, that he is going to marry Cuddles and make a life for himself, he is doomed. And sure enough, events conspire to snuff him out by the end of the film.

Maverick: Sam Fuller was the ultimate indie director. Even when he DID work for major studios, he worked on pictures that were small enough to afford him as much autonomy as he needed. The result is an unflinching, unsentimental look at the dark side of the American dream, at those the dream has left behind. Underworld USA contributes to this, and if it's not Fuller's most fully realized, most fully satisfying film, it remains an interesting portrait of the artist.