Collections/August 2023

Rowland Brown’s 1930s Underworld

Though relatively overlooked today—perhaps because he directed only a handful of films in a career cut short in part by his propensity for getting violent with producers—writer-director Rowland Brown helmed some of the grittiest, most subversive and straight-up shocking films of the pre-Code era. Notorious for his rumored connections to gangsters such as Bugsy Siegel, Brown brought an insider’s view of the underworld to his brutal, anticapitalist crime dramas, infusing them with startling authenticity.

3 films — 0 on the Channel, 3 unavailable