Happy Birthday, Edgar G. Ulmer! Born today in 1904 as Edgar George Ulmer, this Jewish-Moravian, Austrian-American set designer and cult-classic film director; a supreme stylist of the B-film.
He mainly worked on Hollywood B movies and other low-budget productions, many of which were shot in a week and made on a minuscule budget.
As a young man, Ulmer lived in Vienna, Austria, where he worked as a stage actor and set designer while studying architecture and philosophy.
Ulmer later did set design for Austrian-born theatre and film director, intendant, and theatrical producer Max Reinhardt. Ulmer also later served his apprenticeship with German film director F. W. Murnau.
Ulmer came to Hollywood with Murnau in 1926 to assist him as an assistant art direction. This was for the 1927 American silent black and white romance/drama film 'Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans'. However, Ulmer went uncredited.
In a later interview with American director, writer, actor, producer, critic and film historian Peter Bogdanovich ('Targets', 'The Last Picture Show'), Ulmer also recalled making two-reel westerns in Hollywood around this time.
Ulmer claimed to have worked on German actor, writer and film director Paul Wegener's 1920 German silent black and white expressionist fantasy/independent horror film 'Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam' ('The Golem: How He Came into the World').
Ulmer also claimed to have worked on Fritz Lang's 1931 German black and white drama/mystery thriller/crime film 'M'. However, there is no evidence to support both of these said affirmations.
In the early 1930s, Ulmer co-conceived and directed the first film of which he is best known. This was the 1934 American pre-Code black and white horror/crime film 'The Black Cat'.
The film was based on Edgar Allan Poe's titular 1843 horror fiction short story, and the film was co-produced by American businessman Carl Laemmle Jr. He was the heir of Carl Laemmle, the founder of Universal Studios.
After a road accident in Hungary, the American honeymooners Peter (David Manners) and Joan (Julie Bishop) Alison, along with the enigmatic Dr Vitus Werdegast (Bela Lugosi) find refuge in the house of the famed architect Hjalmar Poelzig (Boris Karloff). However, he shares a dark past with the doctor.
The picture was the first of eight films (six of which were produced by Universal) to feature the two iconic actors.
It became Universal Pictures' biggest box office hit of the year, and was among the earlier features with an almost continuous music score.
'The Black Cat' helped to create and popularize the psychological horror subgenre, emphasizing on atmosphere, eerie sounds, the darker side of the human psyche, and emotions like fear and guilt to deliver its scares, something that was not used in the horror genre.
In the mid-1940s, Ulmer directed the second and final film of which he is best known. This was the 1945 American black and white noir/crime film 'Detour'.
From Poverty Row came a feature that, perhaps more than any other, epitomizes the dark fatalism at the heart of film noir.
Set in New York, piano player Al Roberts (Tom Neal) laments when his singer girlfriend, Sue Harvey (Claudia Drake), leaves for Hollywood. When Al gets some money, he decides to hitchhike out West to join her.
In Arizona, Al accepts a ride with bookie Charles Haskell Jr. (Edmund MacDonald). However, during a storm in a freak accident, Haskell Jr. is killed.
Frightened, Al assumes Haskell Jr's. identity and car, but soon comes upon the mysterious Vera (Ann Savage), who seems to know all about his true identity.
Working with no-name stars on a bargain-basement budget, B auteur Ulmer turned threadbare production values and seedy, low-rent atmosphere into indelible pulp poetry.
Long unavailable in a format in which its hard-boiled beauty could be fully appreciated, 'Detour' continues to haunt anew due to the film restorations of today.
The film also is in the public domain and is freely available from online sources.
The film was adapted from American screenwriter and novelist Martin Goldsmith's 1939 thriller crime fiction novel of the same name.
Today, Ulmer's 'Detour' is considered by many to be the epitome of a certain noir style that transcends its B-list origins.
Ulmer passed after a crippling stroke in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, California on September 30, 1972. He was 68. This was just thirteen days after his birthday.
Ulmer was later interred in the Hall of David Mausoleum in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Hollywood.
In 1992, 'Detour' was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
In his lifetime, Ulmer never achieved the celebrity of his fellow Austrian and German émigré directors―Billy Wilder, Otto Preminger, Fred Zinnemann, and Robert Siodmak―despite early work with Reinhardt and Murnau.
Despite this, Ulmer’s unconventional path was, in many ways, more typical than that of his more famous colleagues.
Ulmer spent most of his career as an itinerant filmmaker earning modest paychecks for films that have either been overlooked or forgotten
His career was spent on the margins of Hollywood. However, the little-known details of Ulmer’s personal life and wide-ranging, eclectic feature films aimed at minority audiences, (horror, sci-fi flicks and genre pictures) were made in the United States and abroad.
Ulmer's stylish and eccentric works eventually came to be appreciated by auteur theory-espousing film critics in the years following his retirement.
The twists and turns of his fortunes convey new understanding of low-budget filmmaking in the studio era and beyond.
He was one of the very few genuinely creative filmmakers who, for a time, chose the world of low-budget B-films over the more opulent milieu of mainstream, high-profile A-pictures.
Ulmer had been active from 1930–1964.
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