A wonderful example of his craft is the 1943 film Monsoon (aka Isle of Forgotten Sins). The film originated when the director discovered that 200 miniature trees -- created for John Ford's disaster drama The Hurricane (1937) -- were still stored in the prop vaults of the Goldwyn Studios.
"I knew I would persuade them to loan the miniatures for a picture," Ulmer told Peter Bogdanovich in a 1970 interview, "so I wrote Isle of Forgotten Sins."
A pastiche of Raoul Walsh's two-fisted male-bonding film What Price Glory (1926), combined with the Pacific exotica of Ford's The Long Voyage Home (1940), Monsoon follows the exploits of brawling seamen Mike Clancy (John Carradine) and Jack Burke (Frank Fenton) as they attempt to recover a sunken treasure. Enlisting the aid of Marge (Gale Sondergaard), the lead hostess (or perhaps madame) of a tropical nightclub called the "Isle of Forgotten Sins," they travel to the remote outpost of a rival sailor (Sidney Toler) who holds the key to the loot. Thus begins a series of criminal maneuvers, as the rivals attempt to outwit each other and sail away with the gold. But the intrigues are interrupted when the island is besieged by a colossal storm and the game of cat and mouse becomes a battle for survival. The mode of screenwriting in which Monsoon had been written -- building a script around a prop -- was unorthodox to the film industry at large, but hardly unusual for Ulmer. As a filmmaker operating within the low-end studios known as Poverty Row, he had cultivated a knack for seizing the day -- or the prop -- and quickly making a movie out of found objects.
In another reversal of the accepted process of making movies, he was also adept at writing films to fit their catchy titles. "At the beginning of the season, [asst. studio head Leon] Fromkess would sit down with me and [production head Sigmund] Neufeld...and we would invent 48 titles. We didn't have stories yet -- they had to be written to fit the cockeyed titles. I am convinced, when I look back, that all this was a challenge. I knew that nothing was impossible."
For someone like Ulmer, nothing was impossible, even under the extremely limited budgets at the Producers Releasing Corporation (PRC). He knew how to shoot a set so that its frayed edges didn't show. As a result, the catastrophic storm that befell a bunch of borrowed miniature palms looked quite convincing -- so convincing that Isle of Forgotten Sins was later retitled Monsoon to capitalize more on the natural disaster than erotic undertones that had at first been considered the film's primary selling point.
Undaunted by monetary constraints, Ulmer also conceived an elaborate underwater sequence for the film, in which a deep-sea diver explores the wreckage of a ship. The solution again was miniature, in this case a marionette rigged to function underwater (complete with tiny air bubbles). Brilliantly demonstrating his resourcefulness, Ulmer layered the scene with evocative music and brisk dialogue between the diver and his on-board comrade. In the end, one almost doesn't notice the clumsy puppetry, and the scene works, in spite of its technical crudity.
Around the time of Monsoon, the film's star suddenly became close friends of the Ulmer family. "Carradine was running away from his first wife, and she was going to put him in jail for lack of child support," remembers Edgar's daughter, Arianne Ulmer Cipes. "She was really after him, so he hid out in our house; he lived with us for about two months, until he got himself sorted out, made enough money -- I think it was on Bluebeard (1944) -- to pay off his ex-wife. Then he bought a house not even half a block down the hill."
Monsoon may have been written to fit a flock of miniature trees, circa 1943, but the idea of a South Seas drama had been floating in Ulmer's mind for some time. He called the film "a holdover I had left from the time I was with [F.W.] Murnau." Ulmer worked with Murnau during the filming of the romantic docudrama Tabu in 1931, and had collaborated on all of Murnau's American films, beginning with Sunrise in 1927.
It may seem odd that the "King of the B's" was a cohort of the highbrow Murnau, but Ulmer had schooled with some of the most gifted visualists in stage and screen history. After his theatrical education in Vienna, Ulmer spent three years working for theatrical genius Max Reinhardt. He later moved to film and contributed set designs to some of Fritz Lang's greatest works (including Die Nibelungen [1924] and Metropolis [1927]) at the Ufa Studios in Germany.
Director: Edgar G. Ulmer
Producer: Peter R. Van Duinen
Screenplay: Raymond L. Schrock, based on a story by Edgar G. Ulmer
Cinematography: Ira Morgan
Production Design: Fred Preble
Music: Erdody
Cast: John Carradine (Mike Clancy), Gale Sondergaard (Marge Willison), Sidney Toler (Carruthers), Frank Fenton (Jack Burke), Veda Ann Borg (Luana).
BW-82m.
by Bret Wood
