Reviews of silent film releases on home video. Copyright © 1999-2026 by Carl Bennett and the Silent Era Company. All Rights Reserved.

Underground (1928)

This British drama, directed by Anthony Asquith, features Brian Aherne, Elissa Landi, Cyril McLaglen and Norah Baring.

The film is presented with a music score composed by Neil Brand and performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted and orchestrated by Timothy Brock, and an optional ambient music score composed and performed by Chris Watson, with sound effects. The two soundtracks take much different artistic approaches to accompaniment of the film with our preference being the lush Brand music.

Supplemental material includes the featurette Restoring Underground (2009) (9 minutes).

This is our recommended home video edition of the film for North American collectors.

This review was updated in 2026.

This Region A Blu-ray Disc edition is available directly from . . .

This all-region Blu-ray Disc / PAL DVD edition has been mastered from a digital restoration conducted in 2009 by the British Film Institute National Archive from their holdings of the incomplete 35mm nitrate camera negative and a 35mm fine-grain preservation print of the British release version struck in 1948, and a 1928 35mm French language nitrate release print held by Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique. The conflated scan has been cleaned through a combination of digital and analog wetgate technologies. A minimum of print flaws remain, the most apparent being exposure fluctuations with some very slight frame jitters.

The film is presented with a music score composed by Neil Brand and performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted and orchestrated by Timothy Brock, and an optional ambient music score composed and performed by Chris Watson, with sound effects. The two soundtracks take much different artistic approaches to accompaniment of the film with our preference being the lush Brand music.

Supplemental material includes previously unseen footage of Anthony Asquith as a child; The Premier and His Little Son (1909-12) (1 minute); A Trip on the Metropolitan Railway (1910) (13 minutes, DVD only); Scenes at Piccadilly Circus and Hyde Park Corner (1930-32) (6 minutes, DVD only); Seven More Stations (1948) (12 minutes, DVD only), a film about the expansion of the Central Line beyond Stratford; a documentary about the tube’s nightshift workers, Under Night Streets (1958) (20 minutes); the featurette Restoring Underground (2009) (9 minutes); and a 30-page illustrated booklet featuring film notes and new essays by Christian Wolmar and Neil Brand.

This is our recommended home video edition of the film for European collectors. North American collectors will need a region-free Blu-ray Disc player and/or a region-free PAL DVD player capable of outputting an NTSC-compatible signal to view this edition.

This review was updated in 2026.

This Region B Blu-ray Disc / Region 2 PAL DVD edition has been discontinued and is . . .

The film is presented with a music score composed by Neil Brand and performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted and orchestrated by Timothy Brock, and an optional ambient music score composed and performed by Chris Watson, with sound effects.

Supplemental material includes the featurette Restoring Underground (2009) (9 minutes).

This is our recommended DVD home video edition of the film for North American collectors.

This Region 1 NTSC DVD edition is available directly from . . .

The film is likely accompanied by a music score pirated from another company’s home video edition or a soundtrack compiled from preexisting music recordings.

Note that this company apparently has a history of pirating other home video editions or pirating files from Internet streaming sites to produce their products. Be aware that purchasing pirated home video editions does not benefit the original edition producers nor the composers whose music is often pirated as well.

This Region 0 NTSC DVD-R edition is available directly from . . .