Underground

Introduced as a "story of ordinary workaday people," Anthony Asquith's Underground (1928) masterfully balances the light and dark sides of city life to evoke the daily existence of the average Londoner better than any other film from Britain's silent canon. It tells the story of an electrician (Cyril McLaglen) and an underground porter (Brian Aherne) who both fall in love with the same shop girl (Elissa Landi). Asquith (A Cottage on Dartmoor, Shooting Stars) is one of the supreme stylists of the British silent cinema, and Underground is a grand display of his expressionistic talents.