Edgar G. Ulmer -- The Man Off-Screen

Of all of the Hollywood directors whose careers and reputations were later saved and sanctified by the French critics of Cahiers du cinema - who decided the old workhorses were "auteurs," despite their travails working within the strict factory system - none were as mysterious as Edgar G. Ulmer. Even today, Ulmer is enough of a strange and elusive figure to have his critical reputation rest to some degree on the notion that there is still more to find out about him: more facts, more lies uncovered, more footage. Michael Palm's documentary Edgar G. Ulmer: The Man Off-Screen (2004) essentially nails down what makes the Ulmer cult click: the fringe-dwelling itinerancy, the atmospheric low-budget shadows, the sense of florid intensity behind every genre product, and the simple fact that Ulmer was such a liar that no one, not even his daughter, knows everything about his career for sure. The Ulmer we definitely know from his films, from the Bauhaus Gothic sublimity of The Black Cat (1934) to the magisterial uber-trash noir classic Detour (1945) to the hardscrabble sci-fi quickies of the '60s, was a cultured Austrian under crazy pressure, squeezing rough-hewn visual inventiveness into ridiculously brief shoots, jumping on the emotional peaks and leaving out the subtleties, working for anyone with a checkbook. Legend has it his rise at Universal in the '30s was cut off at the knees by a dalliance with a Laemmle heiress; true or not, after that Ulmer ranged far and wide, coming to New York when Hollywood cast him out to make "race" movies and Yiddish musicals, then industrial and educational films, then Poverty Row genre films, then nudist films and subnoirs and cut-rate epics in Europe (Ulmer may've made films in more languages than any other name director, including Hungarian, Italian, Yiddish and Ukrainian), and so on. Palm's entertaining film looks back via a pack of American and German Ulmer scholars, but also by way of ruminations by filmmakers Peter Bogdanovich, Joe Dante, John Landis, Wim Wenders and Roger Corman, as well as several surviving stars, from Detour's Ann Savage to cast members from Ulmer's late career, including John Saxon, Peter Marshall and William Schallert. Everyone understands the financial plight of Ulmer's trajectory, but none of them seems to totally grasp why his career seemed to fail in one way and succeed wildly in another. The deficit of verifiable facts adds to the muddle. To hear him tell it, in excerpted interviews with Bogdanovich made in the 1960s, Ulmer began his august career by working on, and being instrumental to, every major German Expressionist classic you can name, from The Golem (1920) to Metropolis (1927), "inventing production design" with F.W. Murnau and building "the first dolly!" on the set of The Last Laugh (1924). There's little or no evidence to support him on any of this, although his role in the murderers' row auteur-to-be ensemble behind Menschen am Sonntag (1930), alongside Fred Zinnemann, Robert Siodmak, Billy Wilder, and Eugen Schufftan, is undisputed. ("I arranged it!" he told Bogdanovich.) Plumbing the often whimsical calculus of auteurism is the tough task at hand, and one tougher than usual thanks to Ulmer - his great films are not great due to style or perfectly executed thematic grist, as you might decide about Alfred Hitchcock's or Howard Hawk's movies. In fact, they are great for antithetical reasons - the fascination of films like The Black Cat, Detour, Bluebeard (1944), The Strange Woman (1946), Ruthless (1948) and Murder Is My Beat (1955) is in their shameful, shadowy, abruptly edited alien-ness. To save money, it is pointed out, Ulmer would save all of a film's close-ups for the last day, and then just shoot them all against the same blank wall. Likewise, his films' preponderance of object close-ups break otherwise ordinary dramatic scenes into small, disconnected, atomized bits. Generally, Ulmer's compressed circumstances and impatient storytelling created disjunctures and strange gaps in style and motivational narrative, so that a typical Ulmer movie offers a glimpse into a human universe seemingly haunted by lostness, trauma and moral poison. French critic Luc Moullet wrote that Ulmer's career theme was "the great loneliness of man without God," an idea that could apply to a great many 20th century filmmakers and writers, but fits neatly upon much of Ulmer's work, filled as it is with broodings, tragic despair and plenty of weird behavioral ellipses. (Ulmer would've scoffed at the notion that his ramshackle filmography has a theme; to Bogdanovich he said he was "looking for absolution" regarding the shape of his oeuvre.) In a sense, and Palm's film approaches this conclusion, too, Ulmer is the Hollywood Golden Age's anti-auteur, the counter-charge to studio polish and glamor and soft-pedaled existential truths. Think of him as the rogue agent in the mix that helped keep the industrial system from being merely polished commerce and made sure it had room in its DNA for chaos, human ambivalence, stylistic short cuts, elusive fog instead of sets, confused people instead of actors, moments of dark doubt instead omniscient certainty. By Michael Atkinson