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Film

Magic on a shoestring

This article is more than 20 years old
Geoffrey Macnab on why movie directors could all learn a lesson from Edgar G Ulmer
Thu 5 Aug 2004 02.52 BST

Edgar G Ulmer was Hollywood's poverty row magician. As Peter Bogdanovich wrote: "Nobody has ever made good pictures faster or for less money". "What he could do with nothing remains an object lesson for those directors, myself included, who complain about tight budgets and schedules."

In his 40 years as a director, Ulmer made some of the most ingenious and disturbing B movies in Hollywood history. His best-known picture, Detour, was shot in less than a week for under $20,000 and yet boasts production design and lighting as inventive as anything found in the huge budget German silent era classics, on which he served his apprenticeship.

It's symptomatic of the neglect into which Ulmer has fallen in Britain that the only one of his films readily available on DVD is The Naked Venus (1958), a tiny budget tale about a French artist's model who joins an American nudist colony. It seems an unlikely assignment, but Arianne Cipes Ulmer, the director's daughter, explains: "My mother and father were both nudists. Part of the Germanic fresh air movement of their lifetime."

With its shots of naked Americans playing volleyball and creaky courtroom scenes in which the model makes a stirring plea on behalf of nudists everywhere, the film is a poor advertisement for its director's abilities: there are, for instance, few of his trademark lighting effects or elaborate tracking shots. But Naked Venus is an intriguing introduction to Ulmer's work.

Ulmer was born in 1904 in Moravia. His father, Siegfried Ulmer, served in the Austrian army during the first world war, and died when Edgar was 12. As an adolescent in war-ravaged Vienna, he experienced poverty and anti-semitism; but such was his precocious talent that he found a job as a stage designer for director Max Reinhardt. Before long he established himself in the German film industry of the 1920s, working as a production designer (a role he created) on The Golem, Metropolis and Sunrise.

The crowning glory of his first stint in Hollywood was The Black Cat (1934), a typical Ulmer mish-mash, combining gothic elements, incongruous romantic comedy and Bauhaus design. The film is genuinely scary, setting Bela Lugosi as a traumatised man returning home from the war against Boris Karloff as an architect with satanic leanings. Although The Black Cat was a notable box-office success, Ulmer was forced into exile when he fell in love with Shirley Castle. She was married to Max Alexander - Universal chief Carl Laemmle's nephew. Ulmer and Shirley eloped to New York during the depression, leaving their careers in tatters behind them. "He never reconciled with Laemmle. Nor did my mother with the entire Laemmle family," says Arianne.

Just when he was close to despair, Ulmer was hired to make a series of films for the booming Yiddish-language market. In the early 1940s, he was lured back to Hollywood to work for Producers' Releasing Corporation (PRC). Thus began his years on what was nicknamed "Poverty Row", making films in flea-pit studios on tiny budgets. Arianne says he didn't feel bitter about this: "Fame and money were not issues. He really only wanted to have the opportunity to work and express himself."

Perhaps Ulmer's masterpiece was Ruthless (1948), his "low-rent Citizen Kane" as it was dubbed. This is a quintessentially American tale about a kid from the wrong side of the tracks. Horace Woodruff Vendig (Zachary Scott) escapes his impoverished background, makes it rich, but ruins the lives of everybody with whom he comes into contact in the process. Told in flashback, it's a dark and depressing tale about the hollowness of success.

Though his background was as a designer, Ulmer worked brilliantly with actors, eliciting a pathetic but deeply moving performance from Sydney Greenstreet (the rotund, well-spoken villain from Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon) as the financier whom Vendig cuckolds, humiliates and bankrupts. In one scene, as Greenstreet realises that his wife is about to leave him, we see him staring in despair at his own reflection. In another, though broken and overweight, he makes a feeble attempt to throttle his tormentor.

For many, though, the quintessential Ulmer film remains Detour. He described it as a morality fable about "an absolute loser". Al Roberts (Tom Neal) is a New York pianist who hitchhikes across country for a reunion with his girlfriend. En route, Al takes a ride with Haskell, a bookie who dies unexpectedly. Al steals the car and the man's identity, but then he picks up Vera (Ann Savage), a young delinquent who knew Haskell. Convinced that Al killed him, she begins to blackmail him.

The film has the warped, nightmarish feel of a Kafka story. In fact it was adapted from a "very bad book" by Martin Goldsmith. Ulmer transformed the material, cutting large chunks of the original narrative. His casting was astute. Neal and Savage bring just the right measure of desperation, viciousness and vulnerability to their roles. (In a gruesome case of life imitating art, Neal was later charged with the murder of his wife.)

Detour alone would be enough to sustain Ulmer's reputation. By his own calculation, though, he made 127 other features. This month's season at the National Film Theatre includes only a fragment of his lifetime's work. His films reflected his protean imagination. "My father was a deeply sensitive European mind wounded by war," says Arianne. "He could laugh until the tears rolled down his cheeks and be so jovial or rage like bull or withdraw into his shell. Today we would have probably labelled him as manic-depressive. He was a workaholic but he had enormous capacity for joy, anger, humour and sensuality."

· The Edgar G Ulmer season is at the National Film Theatre, London SE1, until August 31. Box office: 020-7928 3232.

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