Underground

Anthony Asquith’s subterranean tale of love, jealousy and murder, accompanied by a new score by Neil Brand.

More than any other film from Britain’s silent canon, Underground (introducing itself as a ‘story of ordinary workaday people whose names are just Nell, Bill, Kate and Bert’) evokes the life of the ordinary Londoner with its scenes of the bustling Underground – the behaviour of the passengers is strikingly familiar – and the capital’s parks, double-decker buses, pubs and shabby bedsits.

From his own screenplay Asquith balances the light and dark sides of city life, aided by a superb cast of Brian Aherne and Elissa Landi as the nice young lovers and Norah Baring and Cyril McLaglen as their unhappy counterparts. The 26-year-old’s direction is assured, efficient and spare, with some remarkably cinematic flourishes, clearly inspired by contemporary German and Russian filmmaking but with a few tricks of his own, climaxing with a thrilling chase scene across the rooftops of the Lots Road power station. He was one of few in the British industry to match the audacity of Hitchcock.