In this, Anthony Asquith's second feature film, two men compete for the affection of a beautiful shopgirl, their rivalry culminating in tragedy atop London's Battersea Power Station. Underground possesses the narrative self–assurance and visual sophistication of many late silent films, yet the fact that its director and writer was only twenty–six years old at the time makes the accomplishment remarkable. The film startled British audiences with its setting of a working–class love story in an ultramodern London landscape and its deeply shadowed, German-influenced lighting schemes.
Publication excerpt from In Still Moving: The Film and Media Collections of the Museum of Modern Art by Steven Higgins, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2006, p. 135.