The Singing Blacksmith (1938), Ulmer's second Yiddish film, is a musical about a blacksmith living in an Eastern European Jewish village, known as a shtetl. Yankel is a drinker and womanizer, who falls in love and vows to change his ways. However, marriage and fatherhood don't keep him from being tempted back to his wayward habits.
Ulmer, a native of Czechoslovakia, who had worked in Vienna and Berlin before coming to the United States, was ethnically, but not religiously, Jewish. When he went to New York as a theatrical designer for Max Reinhardt in 1923, Yiddish theater was in its heyday. Ulmer saw several productions of the Jewish Art Theater during that first trip to the city, and was entranced. More than a decade later, with work slow in Hollywood, Ulmer went back to New York. Eventually, he was selected to direct the film version of one of the most successful Yiddish plays, Green Fields (1937), on the condition that the star of the original stage production, Jacob Ben-Ami, co-direct, since Ulmer didn't speak Yiddish. The film was a success, and the following year, Ulmer was allowed to direct The Singing Blacksmith on his own.
Moyshe Oysher, a leading singer/actor of the Yiddish stage, played the blacksmith. Oysher, the son and grandson of cantors, became a cantor himself, as well as an actor. Oysher's wife, Florence Weiss, also had a role in the film, as did fifteen-year old Herschel Bernardi, who would go on to become a well-known film, television, and theater actor in the 1950's and '60's.
By the time he made The Singing Blacksmith, Ulmer had become well-known for making films on a shoestring, but this film posed a particular challenge. He had to build the entire shtetl, and needed a rural area, without roads or visible utility poles. However, his minuscule budget did not allow for electric generators. So the location had to be near electricity where he could tap into existing power. As Ulmer told Peter Bogdanovich in an interview shortly before his death, he scouted locations with a staff consisting of "two boys and four old Jews," and found some suitable estates in Westchester County, New York, about an hour outside of New York City. But anti-Semitism was rampant in those prewar days, and the German-American Bund, which supported the ambitions of Nazi Germany, was powerful in the region. Ulmer claimed that as soon as the landowners heard that he wanted to make a Jewish film, they refused to allow it. In New Jersey, he finally found an ideal location - a Catholic monastery with extensive grounds. The monks not only agreed, but since all of them were bearded, offered themselves as extras in The Singing Blacksmith, playing bearded Jewish residents of the shtetl. Ulmer also claimed that next to the monastery was "...Camp Ziegfried, the camp of the (Nazi) Bund. And on the left side was a nudist camp! So that nothing should happen to the sets as we built them, the academicians and their pupils stood at night with guns, so the Bund couldn't do anything to our construction." (Bogdanovich noted in his introduction to the interview that Ulmer has been accused of having a tendency to exaggerate.) The Singing Blacksmith was a big hit, and "the entire Catholic clergy of New Jersey arrived in full regalia to see the picture," according to Ulmer.
Ulmer made two more Yiddish films. All four were made quickly, on tiny budgets - Green Fields cost eight thousand dollars, and was shot in five days, with a shooting ratio of less than two to one - and all four made handsome profits. Today, they provide an invaluable record of a vanished theatrical tradition and a look at Jewish life prior to World War II.
Director: Edgar G. Ulmer
Producer: Ludwig Landy, Roman Rebush
Screenplay: David Pinski
Cinematography: William Miller
Editor: Jack Kemp
Costume Design: Nathan Gaiptman
Music: Jacob Weinberg, Yasha Fishberg, Musical Director
Principal Cast: Moyshe Oysher (Yankel), Miriam Riselle (Tamara), Florence Weiss (Rivke), Anna Appel (Chaya Peshe), Ben-Zri Baratoff (Bendet), Herschel Bernardi (Yankel as a boy).
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by Margarita Landazuri
