The Films

of Edgar G. Ulmer

Edited by
Bernd Herzogenrath

T H E S C A R E C ROW P R E S S , I N C .
Lanham • Maryland • Toronto • Plymouth, UK
SCARECROW PRESS, INC.

Published in the United States of America

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The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
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Copyright © 2009 by Bernd Herzogenrath

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a

retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The films of Edgar G. Ulmer / Bernd Herzogenrath [editor].
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8108-6700-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8108-6736-9 (ebook)
1. Ulmer, Edgar G. (Edgar George), 1904–1972—Criticism and interpretation. I.
Herzogenrath, Bernd, 1964–.
PN1998.3.U46F55 2009
791.4302’32092—dc22 [B] 2008051365

 ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of

American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of
Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America.
To the Memory of Edgar G. Ulmer

***

For Arianné
For Olomouc
 Contents

Foreword vii
Arianné Ulmer Cipes
Foreword: Out of Nothing ix
Peter Bogdanovich
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction: Necessary Detours xv
Bernd Herzogenrath
1 Permanent Vacation: Home and Homelessness in the
Life and Work of Edgar G. Ulmer 1
Noah Isenberg
2 The Search for Community 21
John Belton
3 On the Graveyards of Europe: The Horror of Modernism
in The Black Cat 39
Herbert Schwaab
4 From Nine to Nine 53
D. J. Turner
5 Exile on 125th Street: African Americans,
Germans, and Jews in Moon over Harlem 61
Jonathan Skolnik
6 Forging the “New Jew”: Ulmer’s Yiddish Films 71
Vincent Brook

v
vi Contents

7 When You Get to the Fork, Take It: From Ulmer’s Yiddish
Cinema to Woody Allen 87
Miriam Strube
8 A World Destroyed by Gold: Shared Allegories of Capital
in Wagner’s Ring and Ulmer’s Isle of Forgotten Sins 109
Andrew Repasky McElhinney
9 Ulmer and the Noir Femme Fatale 125
Alena Smiešková
10 Detour’s Detour 137
David Kalat
11 Fantasy and Failure in Strange Illusion 159
Hugh S. Manon
12 The Naked Filmmaker 175
Bill Krohn
13 The Political and Ideological Subtexts of The Naked Dawn 193
Reynold Humphries
14 A Grave New World: Cast and Crew on the Making
of Beyond the Time Barrier 205
Robert Skotak
15 Invisibility and Insight: The Unerasable Trace of
The Amazing Transparent Man 245
Alec Charles
16 An Interview with Shirley Ulmer 265
Tom Weaver
17 Karloff, Lugosi, Browning, and Whale 289
Edgar G. Ulmer, translated from the French by
Bernd Herzengorath
Filmography 293
Name Index 313
Title Index 317
Subject Index 319
About the Contributors 321
 Foreword
Arianné Ulmer Cipes, the Edgar G. Ulmer Preservation Corp.

I was delighted to learn that Professor Bernd Herzogenrath was compiling

an anthology of works about my father for publication by Scarecrow Press.
He has and continues to have my full cooperation and authorization. More
than ten years ago, as my mother, Shirley Kassler Ulmer, began to decline
with age, we felt it essential to start the process of preserving the works of
Ulmer. We then established a nonprofit public benefit corporation, the Edgar
G. Ulmer Preservation Corporation.
Thanks to the hard work and dedication of many, especially Michael
Friend, Michael Pogorzelski, and Howard Prouty, we now have a large col-
lection of 35 mm and 16 mm prints and negatives at the Academy of Motion
Picture Arts and Sciences Film Archive in Hollywood, in addition to various
other worldwide archives. All paper, photographic, and family memoirs are
held at the Herrick Library of the academy. We presently have ongoing proj-
ects to preserve additional films. Hopefully, new interest stimulated by many
festivals will help raise the necessary funds from donors to achieve these
goals. In 2006 we coproduced with Mischief Films a documentary, Edgar G.
Ulmer—The Man Off-Screen (dir. Michael Palm), distributed by Kino Video/
DVD in the United States. I would also like to thank David Kalat of All Day
Entertainment, who has written many articles on Ulmer and distributed seven
DVDs of Ulmer productions.
Aside from the obvious preservation of the actual films, it is the written
materials, books and articles, that are truly precious. These guarantee that
future generations will know the details and facts regarding the films of
Edgar G. Ulmer. This year Bill Krohn, an undaunted pioneer in resurrecting
the works of Ulmer, published a definitive piece on The Naked Dawn in the

vii
viii Arianné Ulmer Cipes

French Revue Cinema 013 of Esthetic and History of Cinema, Spring 2007.
The British Film Institute published Noah Isenberg’s book Detour in 2008,
a detailed analysis of this iconic film. He is presently working on Perennial
Detour: The Cinema of Edgar G. Ulmer, the Ulmer family authorized biog-
raphy. Naturally, but for the limits of time and space, I would also thank each
of the many contributors to the written materials that have been created in
recent years.
I wish to express my profound gratitude to Professor Bernd Herzogenrath,
who has recently been the moving force for the collection of Ulmer aficiona-
dos throughout the world. His establishment of the Ulmerfest 2006 at Palacký
University in Olomouc, Czech Republic (Ulmer’s birthplace) made it possible
to finally gather these contributors.
It is my fondest desire that you both enjoy and be inspired by this book, as
you become more acquainted with the films of Edgar G. Ulmer.

“Talent Obliges”—Edgar G. Ulmer

 Foreword

Out of Nothing
Peter Bogdanovich

Edgar G. Ulmer had been a kind of legendary underground figure for years
when I decided to look him up early in 1970. He was recovering from a stroke
that had for a while deprived him of speech and the power in his legs, but he
had struggled back and by the time I met him he had only a slight limp and
minor difficulties with words. His recovery was as much a miracle against
heavy odds as some of his best pictures. And nobody had ever made good
pictures faster or for less money than Edgar Ulmer. What he could do with
nothing (occasionally in the script department as well) remains an object les-
son for those directors, myself included, who complain about tight budgets
and schedules. Edgar rarely had more than six days for a feature! That he
could also communicate a strong visual style and personality with the meager
means usually available to him is close to miraculous. But he did—and more
than once—making poverty-row classics like the ultimate one-dark-night-as-
I-was-driving picture, Detour, or that mystical Karloff-Lugosi thriller, The
Black Cat. These and the dense psychological melodramas Ruthless and The
Naked Dawn, as well as John Carradine’s Bluebeard, are just the first that
come to mind.
Though nearly seventy, he was anything but an invalid in mind or body,
was involved in several projects, was full of time and advice for students, and
was generous to me with his energy. He had humor and passion and a kind of
demonic charm. Of course, Hollywood exploited him—he was too quick, too
smart. If he could turn out quality as fast as he did, why give him more time?
Generally, the industry has always preferred “faster” to “better.” The acting

Kindly reprinted with permission from Peter Bogdanovich, Who the Devil Made It: Conversations
with Legendary Film Directors, New York: Ballantine Books, 1998, 558–604.

ix
x Peter Bogdanovich

and the execution may not always have been as brilliant as the basic concep-
tion, but often this was all Ulmer could get: with such grueling schedules, de-
grees of compromise are allowed. Edgar went from the Olympian heights of
picture making to the absolute lower depths. As assistant to the incomparable
German F. W. Murnau on his three most important and influential films—The
Last Laugh, Sunrise, and Tabu—Ulmer was there at the heart and soul of the
best that pictures can offer; thirty years later, when things were really rough,
Ulmer had to direct a Z-budget nudie. In 1929, he was closely involved as co-
director on a project (People on Sunday) that marked the debut in pictures for
Billy Wilder (writer), Fred Zinnemann (assistant photographer), and Eugen
Schüfftan (photographer); Robert Siodmak codirected. These four became
superstars while Ulmer always had to scrape by, often doing the most oddball,
fly-by-night movies—for a Yiddish organization, say, or a Ukrainian commit-
tee. Somehow Edgar seemed never to lose his excitement or enthusiasm, no
matter how lowly the work: he found ways to make things interesting; every-
thing that might be considered a hindrance by most was a challenging test for
him. Of course, he could experiment—no one really cared what he did if he
stayed within budget. Experimenting is what Ulmer loved; he took wild risks
all the time, and always landed on his feet.
We had three interview sessions—during which I met his beloved wife
and collaborator, Shirley Castle Ulmer, and their picture-wise daughter,
Arianné—and then my work on a film took me away for almost a year. We
had covered his early days in Germany and America and much of his career
into the late forties, leaving another couple of decades to go. We spoke sev-
eral times on the phone, but before we could meet again to finish our talks,
another stroke paralyzed him. He never walked nor spoke again, though he
could understand everything that was said to him, responding with a nod or
shake of his head. That must have only made it worse for such an active man.
I never saw him again. He died a year later.
The interviews did seem to be the only ones of any length that have sur-
vived. They were originally published in somewhat different form in Jonas
Mekas’s Film Culture in 1974; that version was reprinted in Todd McCarthy’s
excellent anthology, Kings of the Bs (1975), now out of print. Since his death,
Shirley Ulmer and I have conspired a couple of times to try to get new ver-
sions done of some of Edgar’s work; this year a remake is being planned of
one of his little-known Yiddish comedies, which I was approached to direct.
What I remember most about Edgar is his extraordinarily intense passion
for pictures and the process of making them. There was such exuberance and
joy in his telling of the most outrageous or difficult, loony or surreal aspects
of making pictures, especially ones with virtually no money and no profes-
sionals—like those amazing Ukrainian productions—that the good-natured
 Foreword xi

obsession he had with pictures was obvious. Did he have a tendency to ex-
aggerate—as some have accused him of? Don’t most people? Certainly the
movies are a fabulist’s paradise, because anything is possible. Didn’t Edgar
have to prove that with nearly every picture? Ulmer was a child of theater and
of the movies in their childhood, and he never lost his innocent wonder at the
challenge and magic of the medium.
 Acknowledgments

Thank you, Claudia, for all your love and support during all these years.
I would like to thank the good people at Scarecrow for this opportunity; plus
a big THANX! to Janna Wanagas for her great help.

I have dedicated this book to Olomouc, the Moravian town where Ulmer was
born, but what I really mean is that I dedicate this to my Olomouc friends
Jana Kynclová, Matthew Sweney, and Bob Hýsek, and to all the coffee-girls
of past, present, and future . . .

A sincere and heartfelt “Díky!” goes out to Andrea Konstankiewicz of Tara

Fuki. You know why.

xiii
 Introduction

Necessary Detours—Putting the Ulmer

Back into Ulmermouc
Bernd Herzogenrath

Edgar G. Ulmer was the “King of Poverty Row,” a director who the French
nouvelle vague regarded as an auteur, a filmmaker whose individual voice
and handwriting stands out, a maker of independent movies before that cat-
egory even existed. Undeservedly almost forgotten, Ulmer was rediscovered
in the 1950s by the French critics of Cahiers du cinéma and in the early 1970s
by some young American directors who were interested in the history of film,
the dimly-lit side streets of the Hollywood mainstream, and Ulmer’s particular
brand of filmmaking. As François Truffaut put it, watching Ulmer’s films,
“we see him behind every image and feel we know him intimately when the
lights go back on” (156).
But who was Edgar G. Ulmer? A confidence man? A genius? A jack of all
trades? The curious circumstance that Ulmer legend and Ulmer fact are some-
what conjoined twins that cannot be separated makes the issue of the Ulmer
identity an exciting question. Stefan Grissemann, in his excellent and much-
welcomed biography of Ulmer, often talks about Ulmer as a “phantom,” a
kind of “man who wasn’t there.”1
According to Ulmer himself, it all started in Vienna, the city of his birth
. . . and here, the legend already takes over . . .
Vienna—the mere mention of this city evokes ideas of culture and deca-
dence, contrasting images of high and low art, glamor and vice. That’s what
Ulmer might also have thought when he gave Vienna as his place of birth in
his interviews with Truffaut and Cahiers du cinéma. However, as cosmopoli-
tan as it may sound, it’s the stuff of legend, of a self-propelled legend, to be
sure. Edgar Georg Ulmer was the son of Henriette Ulmer, née Edels, from Vi-
enna, and Siegfried Ulmer, a Jewish socialist and wine merchant from Ivanov-

xv
xvi Bernd Herzogenrath

ice na Hané in the present-day Czech Republic. On September 17, 1904,

Ulmer was born in Olomouc (then Olmütz) in the Czech Republic—and not
in Vienna—because the Ulmer family was living there at the family property
of Siegfried Ulmer’s grandparents. Though he left Olomouc when he was still
young and was to work in Vienna (for example, with Max Reinhardt at the
Theater an der Josefstadt), Ulmer was not to return to Vienna until the 1950s,
as he was too scared to return to what he thought was a ruined city “probably
full of murderers,” as he put it in a private letter.
After years of communicating with officials and consulting archives in the
Czech Republic, I was able to locate Ulmer’s birthplace in Olomouc. Because
of his Jewish background, his family papers were not held in the Olomouc
City Archives but collected centrally in Prague. It was there, in the vaults
of the Národní Archiv (National Archives), that I finally struck paydirt and
discovered Ulmer’s birth certificate, with all the necessary details. It revealed
that Edgar G. Ulmer was born in Olmütz in “Resselgasse 1, Ort Neugasse.”
That was his address in 1904—today, the address reads “Resslova 1,” in the
part of town known as “Nová ulice.” If you go there today, you will find two
memorial plaques created by the Olomouc artist Bohumil Teplý—a large one

Figure I.1. Ulmer’s birth home in Olomouc, Czech Republic. Courtesy of Bernd Her-
zogenrath.
 Introduction xvii

commemorating the birth of Olomouc’s famous son, and a smaller one com-
memorating the discoverer, yours truly.2
Speaking of “Olomouc’s famous son”: In 2006, when the idea for this
memorial plaque was brought before the city council in Olomouc, the people
in charge first thought it was a hoax . . . a double hoax, even. They (1) had
never heard of Ulmer, and (2) wouldn’t believe that such a famous director
had been born in their small city. “Yes, Virginia, there is an Edgar G. Ulmer”
is one reaction that springs to mind. One also thinks of Freud’s famous “kettle
logic,” from his Interpretation of Dreams:

[A man was] charged by one of his neighbors with having given him back a
borrowed kettle in a damaged condition. The defendant asserted, first, that he
had given it back undamaged; secondly, that the kettle had a hole in it when he
borrowed it; and thirdly, that he had never borrowed the kettle from his neighbor
at all. (152–53)

It should be noted that Freud was born in Pr˙íjbor, North Moravia, not far from
Olomouc. Edmund Husserl also was born a stone’s throw away, in Proste˙jov.
Ludwig Wittgenstein attended military school in Olomouc. So Ulmer was in
illustrious company, and, far from being provincial, northern Moravia can be
considered the cradle of modernism.
This reaction on the part of the officials is also quite fitting, I argue, for a
man and artist whose life and work can be characterized by one word (which
also is the title of one of his most famous movies)—Detour. There was noth-
ing smooth about Ulmer’s life, ever. Nor was there anything smooth about
his art, which both in its totality and its individual contributions never forms
a Keatsean “well-wrought urn,” but is more of a postmodern pastiche, a no-
madic patchwork of non sequiturs—and it’s all the fresher and more enjoy-
able for that. Not an urn, but always a turn—a detour at every instant, darting
sideways on every level.
As Gilles Deleuze has stated in a commentary, not on filmmaking, but on
art and writing, “There are no straight lines . . . [Art] is the set of necessary de-
tours that are created in each case to reveal the life in things” (Essays Critical
and Clinical, 2, my emphasis). And in his Cinema books, which unfortunately
do not take notice of Ulmer, Deleuze comments on the important effect that
low-budget moviemaking had on the invention and creation of new cinematic
images. “Economic constraints undoubtedly gave rise to flashes of inspiration
and images dreamed up with a view to economy could have universal reper-
cussions” (162), Deleuze writes, and he concludes that “we can often see the
B movie as an active center of experimentation and creation” (163). True—and
in the case of Ulmer criticism, this should also put a stop to speculations about
what masterpieces Ulmer, the auteur, would have created if only he’d had
xviii Bernd Herzogenrath

the money. Perhaps Ulmer’s films are great because of these restrictions, not
despite them. In this way, Ulmer can be seen as the Silver Surfer, brilliantly
riding the waves of turbulence. Working on the edge of chaos, far from equi-
librium, far from Hollywood’s rich tables, he uses this turbulence as a source of
artistic creation. Ulmer may have been born with a plastic spoon in his mouth;
but with this plastic spoon, he could make magic.
This anthology attempts to shed some light on this magic, on the “Ulmer
touch,” and on these necessary detours that reveal the life in things.3 After
a head start with Peter Bogdanovich’s well-known “Out of Nothing,” the
introduction to his interviews with Ulmer (which is reprinted here from Who
The Devil Made It with the author’s kind permission), Noah Isenberg’s essay,
surveying a range of exemplary films directed by Ulmer, seeks to explore
the striking tendency in Ulmer to address the vexing question of home and
homelessness in his work, as well as in his personal writings. “Permanent
Vacation: Home and Homelessness in the Life and Work of Edgar G. Ulmer”
examines the tendency as a phenomenon related to a specific cultural-his-
torical moment and an individual career trajectory, while extrapolating from
the case of Ulmer larger conclusions with regard to the position of exiled
European artists and filmmakers in America. Isenberg mainly focuses on the
aesthetic dimensions of Ulmer’s films—some of them, such as The Black Cat
(1934) and Detour (1945), rather well known, others more of an independent
and underground nature—while Ulmer’s biography, a life marked by constant
displacement, figures with considerable prominence in his discussion.
Ulmer’s sustained engagement with American mass culture and European
art cinema is an engagement riddled with idiosyncrasy and contradiction, as
he frequently drew on elements of both traditions in depicting home (famil-
iarity, identification, belonging) and homelessness (rupture, disorientation,
despair). For Ulmer, the two poles tend to remain aesthetically interwoven—
inextricably bound up together in his life story—and in productive, if also
painful, dialogue with each other, rather than in simple binary opposition.
It is this constant feeling of “not belonging” that may have urged Ulmer
into exploring visions of shared traditions. In his chapter “The Search for
Community,” John Belton explores the utopian aspects of Ulmer’s Yiddish
films of the 1930s, distinguishing them from the director’s more dystopian
film noirs of the 1940s and 1950s. Drawing on Fredric Jameson’s distinctions
between works of mass and folk culture, the chapter argues that films such
as Green Fields, The Light Ahead, The Singing Blacksmith, and American
Matchmaker are products of an organic social group and share a common
language and references to a common cultural tradition. These (and other)
Yiddish films draw on and appeal to a traditional folklore and body of cultural
practices that provide a common heritage for this unique ethnic group. Just
 Introduction xix

as important is the fact that these works are produced and consumed within
this common social group; they are created by members of this community
for other members of that same community (rather than by one social group
for another, as is often the case with white-produced race films).
A completely dystopian vision (of a community as Satanist sect) drives
Ulmer’s The Black Cat (1934). As discussed by Herbert Schwaab in his chap-
ter “On the Graveyards of Europe: The Horror of Modernism in The Black
Cat,” this is a film which belongs to a cycle of classic horror films from the
beginning of the sound-film era. Among films such as Frankenstein, Dracula,
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and The Mummy, The Black Cat is unique for its
set design, which is strongly influenced by modernist architecture and art
deco. Whereas most horror films relied on an unspecific Englishness of old
“gothic” castles and ghost houses, Ulmer’s human monsters haunt a stylish
world of white walls with clear geometric lines and abstract and minimalist
ornaments. Making clear references to the traumatic experience of World War
I, especially in one scene in which the camera roams aimlessly and elegantly
through the vaults of a former fortress, the film could be read as a weird
reflection on modernism. It foreshadows cinematic techniques used in the
European art cinema decades later, for example the tracking shots in Alain
Resnais’ Hiroshima mon amour and La guerre est finie. Ulmer’s film seems
to blame modernism as the source of moral decay, the same way Pier Paolo
Pasolini blames abstract art as the source for cruelty and fascism in Salo,
another masterpiece of art cinema.
Schwaab focuses on the following questions: Is it possible to draw a line
from a preclassical Hollywood horror film to the postclassical modernism
of art film? And to what purposes is Ulmer using the modernist architecture
and stylistic devices such as tracking camera shots, expressionistic decor,
and synthetic editing in the style of Eisenstein? Schwaab argues that Ulmer’s
modernism and highly conscious use of style are ambiguous and allow for
no final statement on the meaning of the film. But this might also explain
why the film remains an object of incessant fascination for cinephiles and
film scholars. Its “failed” modernism, Schwaab claims, gives us beautiful
and significant moments, in which the cinematic devices such as the track-
ing camera are set free from the narration to leave a deep impression on the
film’s viewers.
D. J. Turner, in his chapter “From Nine to Nine,” presents the facts sur-
rounding the genesis, shooting, and eventual release in Great Britain of what
must now be the least known and least seen of all the films in Ulmer’s eclectic
oeuvre. It was made in Canada, set in Canada, and produced by a company
incorporated in Canada at the behest of a company (Universal) that had, ac-
cording to all accounts, blackballed Ulmer in Hollywood. Turner, apart from
xx Bernd Herzogenrath

locating and restoring the original nitrate negative, has established that the
print released in Britain was twelve minutes longer than the version now ex-
tant. He tries to extract some meaning from the muddled plot of this modest
thriller shot in just nine days and delivered for registration under the British
quota act just five weeks after the end of shooting. Turner has found records
of the London trade show that took place one week after registration. Those
present, according to the reviewer for Kinematograph Weekly, recognized the
continuity problems; he gave it a very poor notice, adding that the film “got
the bird” at the trade show. Thanks to his British schooling, Turner has con-
firmed that this term has a decidedly negative connotation and the film was
most likely met with hoots of derision.
Jonathan Skolnik, in his chapter “Exile on 125th Street: African Ameri-
cans, Germans, and Jews in Moon over Harlem,” presents Ulmer’s foray
into the world of black-cast filmmaking. Moon over Harlem, in this respect,
is unique among his “ethnic” productions of the 1930s. Skolnik gives new
information about the film’s genesis and reception, as well as a discussion of
archival evidence of Ulmer’s conflict with industry censors (the Hays office)
over the film. Skolnik interprets Moon over Harlem as being emblematic of
the complex identity of a German-Jewish refugee from Nazi racism in urban
America during the segregation era. Seen against the background of black/
Jewish tensions in Depression-era Harlem, Skolnik argues, Ulmer’s aesthetic
choices as a director take on new meaning.
Together with Moon Over Harlem, Ulmer’s four Yiddish films—Grine
Felder (Green Fields, 1937), Yankl der Shmid (Yankl the Blacksmith, 1938),
Di Klyatshe (The Light Ahead, 1939), and Amerikaner Shadkhn (American
Matchmaker, 1940)—constitute Ulmer’s “ethnic oeuvre,” which is generally
treated as an anomalous interlude in a career more noted for his canonical
film noirs. Ulmer’s checkered relationship to his Jewishness—marrying and
becoming an Episcopalian, remarrying a Jew and reconverting—also makes
him an unlikely candidate for spearheading a so-called “golden age” of Yid-
dish cinema. But Ulmer’s relationship to Hollywood, to his Jewishness, to his
Weimar-era background, and to his status as a European refugee in America
are precisely what make his Yiddish-language films so fascinating. Indeed, as
Vincent Brook argues in his chapter “Forging the ‘New Jew’: Ulmer’s Yid-
dish Films,” Ulmer’s “double exile—from mainstream American culture as
well as from his Austro-German homeland—coupled with his prodigal return
to Jewishness, made him an ideal conduit and catalyst for the Yiddish film
revival.”
The key thematic strand in Ulmer’s Yiddish films is the concept of the
“New Jew.” In Grine Felder and Yankl der Shmid, the concept is articulated
through a dialectical exchange between two Jewish archetypes, the yeshive
 Introduction xxi

bokher (religious-school student) and the musklyid (Muscle Jew). In Di Kly-

atshe and Amerikaner Shadkhn, the Old World shrayber (writer) and New
World matchmaker carry the torch for the New Jew. Each film proposes the
urgent need for forging a New Jew in the wake of the demise of eastern Euro-
pean Jewry. Taken as a body of work, the films indeed can be seen as a step-
ping-stone for his more famous films to come, but not merely due to Ulmer’s
growing aesthetic affinity for a darkly expressionist cinematic style. On a
more fundamental level, his Yiddish-language work bears witness to Ulmer’s
growing existential awareness of what it meant “to be or not to be” a Jew.
In his Oscar-winning Annie Hall (made in 1977), Woody Allen closes his
reflection on human relationships with the following joke: “A man complains
to his psychiatrist that his brother-in-law thinks he’s a chicken. When the doc-
tor suggests putting him in a mental institution, the man claims: ‘I would like
to but we need the eggs.’” This joke displays a paradox typical not only for the
“Jewish neurosis,” but also for the two movies that Miriam Strube analyzes in
her chapter “When You Get to the Fork, Take It: From Ulmer’s Yiddish Cin-
ema to Woody Allen.” Strube argues that in Ulmer’s fourth and final Yiddish
film, Amerikaner Shadkhn (made in 1940), some of Allen’s central themes are
anticipated: existential issues, such as questions of Jewish ambivalence and
feelings of differentness from and similarities to WASP society; intellectual
approaches to life; urban settings; neurotic insecurities and, in connection
with this, the interest in, but also suspicion of, Freudian psychoanalysis as a
means to a better understanding of human thinking and behavior; and, last but
not least, problematic gender relations.
Woody Allen is certainly the leading director who focuses on the figure of the
Jewish neurotic. However, as Strube shows, all the essentials of this figure can
already be found in Ulmer’s Amerikaner Shadkhn: the feeling of in-between-
ness, the absence of Judaism but presence of a Jewish sensibility, the humor,
the self-reflexivity, the troubled relationship to women, and the assimilation and
Americanization of Jewish identity into a non-Jewish lifestyle.
In his 1943 movie Isle of Forgotten Sins, Ulmer, along with composer-con-
ductor Leo Erdody, shapes a dreamy South Seas adventure into a meditation on
the universal philosophical themes developed in Richard Wagner’s four-part
music drama Der Ring des Nibelungen. (See chapter 8, “A World Destroyed
By Gold: Shared Allegories of Capital in Wagner’s Ring and Ulmer’s Isle of
Forgotten Sins,” in this book.) Ulmer expresses these concerns with liberal
quotations of Wagnerian leitmotifs woven into the movie’s almost constant
underscoring. Andrew Repasky McElhinney contextualizes Ulmer in a line
of theatrical geniuses beginning with Buchner and continuing with Brecht,
while exploring Wagner’s and Ulmer’s shared allegories of modern capital
(i.e., gold), where wealth can only be achieved by renouncing love/nature.
xxii Bernd Herzogenrath

From fatal allegories (and allegories of fate), we proceed to Ulmer’s clas-

sic film about fate—Detour. And woman proves to be most fatal here—the
femme fatale has been recognized as one of the iconic representations of the
qualities of the film noir. Based on the premise that the general characteristics
of the film noir are linked to the visual style, Alena Smiešková’s chapter on
“Ulmer and the Noir Femme Fatale” focuses on three dissimilar representa-
tions of the femme fatale in Ulmer’s films. Hedy Lamarr, Ann Savage, and
Barbara Payton portray the elusive and subversive women dislocated from
the traditional family definition. Smiešková’s chapter examines two aspects
of Ulmer’s films, the aesthetic and historical aspects. In terms of the aesthet-
ics, the argument goes back to the Kantian idea of the sublime, as it has been
reinterpreted by Jean-François Lyotard in connection with the unpresentable
and unrepresentable in contemporary art. Thus, she interprets Ulmer’s noir
femme fatale as a construct where physical presentations of beauty reflect
the abstract concepts that elude the figuration, such as evil, fate, and truth.
The chapter focuses on the visual and stylistic nuances that Ulmer employs
in order to find the physical figuration of the unpresentable—that is, lighting,
editing, camera angle, and rhetoric. It also examines the history of Ulmer’s
particular film-noir strategies in correspondence with the changing tradition
of American film after World War II. Strange Woman (1946), Detour (1945),
and Murder Is My Beat (1955) convey forbidden themes, where corrup-
tion and despair can be the norm. They thus represent an aberration from a
classical understanding of American character, and create familiar settings
populated by unfamiliar characters. The ephemeral qualities of noir femmes
fatales converge with the social context “in transition,” and their identities
foreground fluctuating identities on the borderline between the past and the
present. Both of these aspects contribute to the genuine poetics of Ulmer’s
films and anticipate the changing poetics of American film in general, for
example the revival of noir films in the ’80s and ’90s.
Ulmer has become increasingly recognized as an auteurist filmmaker: a
true artist schooled in German expressionism and a maverick exiled from
Hollywood because he couldn’t play nice, who set his mind to no-budget
marvels imbued with unique vision and a bleak worldview so consistent as
to be a fingerprint for the man himself. Here, they say, was a director with
a style recognizable even in the grubbiest of cheapies. And with “they say,”
David Kalat is referring to himself, as he is as much to blame as anyone for
allowing this myth to calcify.
In his chapter “Detour’s Detour,” Kalat focuses on one of Ulmer’s most
celebrated films, a legend among fans of film noir. “Noirest of the noir,” says
Jeff Ulmer. “May be the greatest achievement in B-movie making in history,”
says Jeffery Anderson. “Edgar G. Ulmer’s masterpiece,” says Glenn Erickson.
 Introduction xxiii

“His unquestioned masterpiece,” says Gary Morris. “No one who has seen it
has easily forgotten it,” adds Roger Ebert. Not bad for a 67-minute quickie
cobbled together in two weeks on a budget of just $25,000.
Detour tells the story of an embittered artist who struggles to make ends
meet and is forced to make compromises that gradually wear away his soul. A
wicked combination of poor decisions and cruel fate push the poor sap into a
spiral of self-destruction that is riveting to behold. Critics with an eye for such
things see it as a fable of Ulmer’s own life, somewhere between a personal
manifesto and a secret confession.
Of course, the story was not his. It was adapted from Martin Goldsmith’s
novel, and adapted by Goldsmith himself, at that. Other filmmakers would be
inspired by Ulmer’s film and reference it in their own work—none so ostenta-
tiously as Wade Williams, who took the son of Detour’s star and cast him in a
curious remake-cum-homage in 1992, using the same car that Ulmer used in
the original (which was Ulmer’s own car).
Thanks to these variant routes, detours all, Kalat claims, Detour offers an op-
portunity to retroactively “see” Ulmer’s contribution. By comparing the extant
film to the source novel by Martin Goldsmith and the Wade Williams cover
version, one can filter out Ulmer’s personality as it expressed itself through the
material. Where his choices differ from theirs, we can spot the outlines of his
shadow.
Hugh S. Manon’s chapter on “Fantasy and Failure in Strange Illusion” ad-
vances a psychoanalytic account of Ulmer’s 1945 film. Strange Illusion is a
major work in the Ulmer oeuvre, but a film about which very little substantial
work has been done. At times cartoonish, the “perfect crime” plot discovered
by the film’s young protagonist Paul Cartwright (Jimmy Lydon) can be under-
stood as a fantasy, as defined by French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan—not
a dream of satisfaction, but a framework of lack through which the subject
learns how to desire. Likening the film to David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive
(2001) and other contemporary films in which the audience fails to recognize
that the narrative is not objectively “real,” Manon argues that Strange Illusion
is most radical in neither confirming nor denying that the events on screen
actually occur. In a strong sense, then, the only objectively “real” portions of
the film are the two dream sequences that open and close the film; everything
else is, to a greater or lesser degree, a fantasy in which Paul grapples with his
identity as a being of desire.
The strongest indication the film provides concerning its status as fantasy,
according to Manon, comes in Ulmer’s various manipulations of film form—
stylistic flourishes that are at times stunning in their willingness to reveal
the cheapness of the film’s “Poverty Row” production. By foregrounding the
flaws inherent in-low budget production—for instance, the film’s out-of-kilter
xxiv Bernd Herzogenrath

use of rear-projection screens—Ulmer subtly suggests that what Paul sees is

not objective evidence concerning the guilt of the film’s alleged villain, but
rather a barrier to the attainment of his object of desire. It is only by imagin-
ing a brilliant criminal case, and then solving it, that Paul can align his desire
with that of his deceased father (a gifted criminologist), thus reconstituting
his world as a domain of insidious criminals and innocents in need of protec-
tion. Manon claims the final shot of the film makes it clear that Paul, having
passed through the fantasy, is now free to pursue his desire in the same sort
of heterosexual union that his father once enjoyed.
According to Bill Krohn, Ulmer’s films of the ’50s and ’60s are his most
personal and his least well known, for the same reason. The Yiddish films of
the ’30s have been preserved and studied by specialists in Yiddish cinema;
the Producers Releasing Corporation films of the ’40s are treasured by fans
of B cinema. But in these films and in The Black Cat, which carries on the
tradition of Universal horror, Ulmer is masked by the very cultural elements
that have drawn interest to the films for reasons extrinsic to him. In the ’50s,
however, Krohn claims in his chapter on “The Naked Filmmaker,” the mask
falls, so that we can get a clearer view of the filmmaker’s very own con-
cerns—religious (Gnosticism), cultural (the influence of Murnau), political
(the feminism of Babes in Bagdad and Loves of Three Queens), and formal
(the modernist inventions of Murder Is My Beat and Daughter of Dr. Jekyll).
Referring back to Belton’s account of an Ulmer in search of a community,
the issue of “solidarity” might also have been one of Ulmer’s “very own”
concerns in the ’50s. Reynold Humphries focuses on the question of solidar-
ity in his chapter on “The Political and Ideological Subtexts of The Naked
Dawn.” In this film from 1955, two Mexican bandits steal merchandise from
a train stationed in a border town. One is shot, and the other stumbles onto a
farm belonging to a young Mexican couple. Visibly attracted to the wife, the
bandit nevertheless chooses to undertake the social and moral education of
the husband. Having been paid for the merchandise, which he had stolen at
the request of a corrupt U.S. official, he steals the rest of the official’s money
when the latter tries to cheat him, then spends much of it lavishly during a
night that he and the husband spend in a cantina.
However, the husband, tired of poverty, considers that money must be saved
and not spent, and plans to kill the bandit in order to live better. His wife turns
against him and abandons him for the bandit. They turn back when the U.S.
official shows up and tries to kill the husband, and the bandit is killed saving
him. Husband and wife are reunited.
Summed up thus, The Naked Dawn sounds distinctly banal, yet it is not.
Instead, the script (by blacklisted writer Julian Zimet) is a most subtle and
thoughtful deconstruction of a whole panoply of clichés—thematic and narra-
 Introduction xxv

tive—which adds up to a denunciation of conservative values based on individ-

ualism (the bandit is a disappointed revolutionary), the fetishization of money
and property, and the submission of women (the loving husband orders his wife
around and beats her up). More than this is at stake, however. In its portrayal
of loyalty and betrayal (the bandit stands by his dying companion, whereas the
husband is ready to kill the bandit as he sleeps), The Naked Dawn, Humphries
argues, cunningly raises the question of solidarity during the hearings held in
Hollywood in 1951–1952 by the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
The script avoids suggesting that a fictional character is based on a real-life one.
Rather, it sketches in the conditions under which sticking by a friend on the one
hand, or knifing him in the back on the other hand, both came to be seen as
“natural” reactions to an extreme situation, depending on the values being de-
fended. The film comes down unambiguously on the side of loyalty, Humphries
claims, although the road to that conclusion is fraught with pitfalls.
Beyond the Time Barrier (1959) also presents another “sketching of con-
ditions,” another “test lab,” in Dr. Ulmer’s ’60s filmmaking. What happens
when an Air Force test pilot falls through a rabbit hole in time and finds
himself trapped in Ulmer’s strange web of deceit and design? When a film
threatens to take on an actual shape? Robert Skotak’s chapter “A Grave New
World: Cast and Crew on the Making of Beyond the Time Barrier” is an at-
tempt to explain exactly this.
Aside from William Cameron Menzies’s Things to Come (1936) and Invad-
ers from Mars (1953), few science fiction films aspired so overtly to exploit
design and scheme. This was more often the realm of horror cinema (e.g., The
Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Son of Frankenstein, Ulmer’s own Black Cat). Fewer
directors yet traded on dialogues between geometric structure and dramatic pat-
terns. Armed with a desperately inadequate $125,000 to stage this “spectacle
of the world of tomorrow” (so said the ads), and a mere ten days of shooting
far from Hollywood’s handy resources, Ulmer set out to impress style and sub-
stance on what might have otherwise quickly devolved into pure melodramatic
throwaway. Largely ignored, and seldom and incorrectly commented upon,
Beyond the Time Barrier is a film whose minor miracles pop up as a welcome
reprieve on an obstacle course of low-budget pitfalls. Skotak’s chapter is a
first (and first-class) insider look at this film. Recalled through chats with the
auteur’s on-set collaborators and observers, it is an attempt to lend insight to
Ulmer’s process of development and execution, to correct misinformation, and,
ultimately, to reveal his creative interplay with cast and crew.
Skotak’s chapter draws extensively on interviews he conducted between
1976 and 2008 with various Time Barrier alumni, such as Robert Clarke, Ari-
anné Ulmer Cipes, Shirley Ulmer, and Arthur Pierce, thus providing one of
the most extensive primary-source glimpses behind an Ulmer film to date.
xxvi Bernd Herzogenrath

An Ulmer film of the ’60s, The Amazing Transparent Man might appear,
at first sight, to be the work of a director well past his prime, of an ailing tal-
ent which has seen better days and indeed better budgets. Yet, as Alec Charles
argues in “Invisibility and Insight: The Unerasable Trace of The Amazing
Transparent Man,” it is a film whose subject matter and style deconstruct such
superficial appearances, and, as such, it merits a further, and a deeper, look.
The Amazing Transparent Man was released in the same year that Alfred
Hitchcock’s Psycho was unleashed upon the world, and it shares with Hitch-
cock’s masterpiece not only a coincidence of setting and plotting, but also an
interest in similar cultural and psychological themes, an interest whose depth
and complexity perhaps seem at odds with its primary subject matter—the
tale of a criminal mastermind who plans to create an army of invisible men.
The film is able to exploit its budgetary disadvantages in ways which may
speak not so much of a cinematic naiveté as of a level of textual irony almost
reminiscent of the self-conscious dramatic devices of Bertolt Brecht. Further-
more, Charles claims, Ulmer’s film constructs itself around a web of filmic
and literary allusions which invoke, alongside references to the director’s own
earlier work, not only such classics of horror cinema and fiction as The Invis-
ible Man and Frankenstein, but also various versions of the myth of Faust.
Through its exploration of these different manifestations of the stereotypi-
cally insane and overreaching scientist, and of the psychological factors which
may motivate such figures, Ulmer’s film comes to address its central moral
concern: the subject of the Holocaust—and, specifically, how the Holocaust
performed by the Third Reich might be reenacted, two decades on, in the pro-
liferation and employment of weapons of mass destruction by the opposing
superpowers of the (then-contemporary) cold war. The Amazing Transparent
Man suggests that its central moral dilemma—the defining problem of its
period—can only be successfully resolved through reconciliation and forgive-
ness; and, while its message may appear dated, clumsy, and sentimental, its
sincerity and its urgency can hardly be dismissed. As a document of its times,
and as a moral and cultural meditation upon those times, The Amazing Trans-
parent Man may therefore be seen not only as a text of historical interest, but
also as one of ongoing and increasing relevance to a world facing continuing
questions over the control and use of such apocalyptic armaments.
This collection finishes with two “goodies,” or extras. First, there is Tom
Weaver’s interview with Shirley Ulmer, conducted in 1998, which reveals
many insights into “the Man.” Then there is Ulmer in his own words: in an
interview with Bernard Eisenschitz and Jean-Claude Romer for Midi-Minuit
Fantastique in 1965, Ulmer talks about some of his American heroes and in-
spirations—Tod Browning, James Whale, Bela Lugosi, and Boris Karloff. For
the first time, this document is available in an English translation.
 Introduction xxvii

For Truffaut, commenting on The Naked Dawn as one of those movies that
were important to him, Ulmer’s films “were made with joy; every shot shows
a love of cinema, and pleasure in working in it” (156). And it is time to return
the joy, the love that Ulmer’s work continues to give to us.
Ulmer was “a Ulysses of cinema, who wasn’t destined to return home, but
who, on his long voyage through various genres and film cultures, spanned
the entire spectrum: cool modernity alongside lascivious speculation, cheap
trash beside classic virtuosity,” the German film critic Bert Rebhandl writes
(as quoted in the press kit of Michael Palm’s wonderful documentary Edgar
G. Ulmer: The Man Off-Screen, Kino Video). Finally, Ulysses Ulmer has re-
turned home, has returned home to his place of birth.

“The lights go out, but the films continue . . .”

NOTES

1. For a detailed biography of Ulmer, see the meticulously researched book by

Stefan Grissemann.
2. The memorial plaque was unveiled in a small ceremony on occasion of the
Ulmerfest in Olomouc in 2006, a three-day conference which I organized as an almost
natural consequence of my discovery of Ulmer’s birthplace there. For info about the
Ulmerfest 2006, see www.uni-koeln.de/phil-fak/englisch/abteilungen/berressem/her-
zogenrath/ulmer/index.htm (last accessed 4 August 2008).
3. For another recent anthology on Ulmer, see Bernd Herzogenrath, ed., Edgar G.
Ulmer: Essays on the King of the Bs (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2009).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and B. Hab-
berjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).
———. Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New
York: Avon Books, 1980).
Grissemann, Stefan. Mann im Schatten: Der Filmemacher Edgar G. Ulmer (Vienna:
Paul Zsolnay Verlag, 2003).
Schwaab, Herbert. “On the Graveyards of Europe: The Horror of Modernism in The
Black Cat,” chapter 3 in the current book, The Films of Edgar G. Ulmer (Lanham,
Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2009).
Truffaut, François. “Edgar Ulmer: The Naked Dawn,” in The Films in My Life, trans.
Leonard Mayhew (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978), 155–56.
 1
Permanent Vacation

Home and Homelessness in

the Life and Work of Edgar G. Ulmer
Noah Isenberg

Dwelling, in the proper sense, is now impossible. The traditional resi-

dences we grew up in have grown intolerable; each trait of comfort in them
is paid for with a betrayal of knowledge, each vestige of shelter with the
musty pact of family interests. (Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia)

All I need is a brief glimpse, an opening in the midst of an incongruous

landscape, a glint of lights in the fog, the dialogue of two passersby meet-
ing in a crowd, and I think that, setting out from there, I will put together,
piece by piece, the perfect city, made of fragments mixed with the rest, of
instants separated by intervals . . . discontinuous in space and time, now
scattered, now more condensed. (Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities)

Writing in her preface to the catalog published in conjunction with the Edgar
G. Ulmer retrospective, held at the 1997 Edinburgh Film Festival, curator Lizzie
Francke observes how the Austrian-born director and so-called “wandering émi-
gré” once tellingly remarked, “There are no nationalities, the only home you have
is the motion picture set” (148). For Ulmer, who was born in 1904 in Olmütz
(Olomouc), in the provinces of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a multinational
designation which no longer existed by the time he was in his teens, the question

This chapter originally appeared in Sabine Eckmann and Lutz Koepnick, eds., Caught By Politics:
Hitler Exiles and American Visual Culture in the 1930s and 1940s (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2007), 175–94. I wish to express grateful acknowledgment to Palgrave Macmillan for permission to
reprint the essay.

1
2 Noah Isenberg

of home and nationality not only began, but also remained, an elusive one. He
personally witnessed the mass migrations prompted by two world wars—the first
landing him in foster care in Uppsala, Sweden, after his father’s death in Austrian
uniform in 1916, and the second sealing his fate to remain, at least temporarily,
among the many refugees from Hitler’s Europe who decamped from Berlin and
Vienna for Southern California in the 1930s and 1940s. And in his career of some
thirty-five years as a director, he returned to the basic theme of displacement with
a near-obsessive frequency. The lack of permanence or firm footing that might
link his subjects to a stable location—a city, a community, a nation—is something
Ulmer explores in his best-known works, including The Black Cat (1934), De-
tour (1945), and Ruthless (1948), as well as in his lesser-known films: his ethnic
pictures directed in and around New York City during the mid- to late 1930s; his
eleven-film cycle of B movies shot at Producers Releasing Corporation (PRC),
the Poverty Row studio where, from 1942 to 1946, Ulmer earned a reputation as
one of the pioneers of low-budget independent filmmaking; and his later films,
many of which were shot in Europe in the 1950s and 1960s, and all of which were
made outside the industry norms and standards of Hollywood.
Unlike the more illustrious career paths of his filmmaker contemporaries
Billy Wilder, Robert Siodmak, or Fred Zinnemann (all three of whom collabo-
rated with Ulmer on their legendary 1929 production of Menschen am Sonntag
[People on Sunday]), the trajectory of Ulmer’s film career never quite brought
him the recognition he undoubtedly sought. Instead, he often took on uncon-
ventional projects—both out of necessity and by choice—that kept him from
the spotlight of American and European cinema. As John Belton has argued,
“Ulmer occupies an unknown, uncharted, and apparently invisible space on the
margins of cinema history” (“Cinema Maudit” 150).1 In what follows, I wish
to examine the life and career path of Ulmer, in an effort to widen the scope of
analysis in the research on exiled artists and filmmakers. Despite Ulmer’s enig-
matic career, the story that emerges here is one that may shed further light onto
some of the received wisdom concerning German exiles and that may, in turn,
complicate our understanding not only of Ulmer but of the vicissitudes of exile
and émigré culture in general. Attempting to combine biographical sources with
formal film analysis, the structure of my examination will follow several of the
key detours that Ulmer’s life and career took.2 It will thus move among the cities
and sites, real and imagined, that he inhabited and reflected in his work.

II

Although Ulmer was born in the provinces, his family moved back to Vienna
soon after his birth. Like many artists before and after him, Ulmer felt the
 Permanent Vacation 3

need to claim Vienna as his true birthplace, and, in doing so, he declared a
profound attachment—emotional, cultural, and otherwise—to the much-her-
alded city. By the eve of the Great War, just as Ulmer was approaching his
tenth birthday, a catchy tune entitled “Wien, du Stadt meiner Träume” (“Vi-
enna, You are the City of My Dreams”), written by Rudolf Sieczynski, was
making the rounds in the Imperial capital and becoming a worldwide hit. Its
refrain goes as follows:

Wien, Wien, nur Du allein

Sollst stets die Stadt meiner Träume sein
Dort wo die alten Häuser stehn,
Dort wo die lieblichen Mädchen gehn . . .

(Vienna, Vienna, none but you,

Can be the city of my dreams come true
Here, where the dear old houses loom,
Where I for lovely young girls swoon) (cited in Morton 185–86)

As Ulmer’s first metropolitan experience, Vienna certainly attained the status

of “city of dreams,” and he continued to treat it as such long after he left it
behind, first for Sweden; then for Berlin, where he went in order to work on
Max Reinhardt’s stage productions; and, later still, for New York and Holly-
wood, whence he eventually returned to Europe. For Ulmer, the memories and
fantasies of Vienna were always recalled in a musical and aesthetic register.
Consider, for instance, the opening paragraphs of his incomplete novel Be-
yond the Boundary—an elliptical, highly fragmentary, and blatantly autobio-
graphical work—which he signed and dated “Hollywood, 1935”:

It is quiet in the large dark room. The dawn hasn’t broken yet. The presence of
sleeping humans is obvious. The window is open and past the snow-covered
ledge, streams in the cold winter air. It gets quite cold in Vienna in the winter.
The window looks out upon a back yard. Fore-shortened in perspective, one
feels the back wall of the other house alongside. And opposite that bleak back
wall, in “L” form runs a wing, housing the servant- and kitchen-quarters. Be-
yond that . . . the skyline of Vienna.
It’s futile to describe it. Listen to Schubert, Johan Strauss, to Mozart and
Hayden, and you will feel the strange substance of sentimentality, charm . . . the
Spanish court-ceremonial and the Wienerwald . . .The Danube. (Ulmer 1–2)

The novel follows its protagonist George (Ulmer’s middle name) through
the streets of the war-torn capital, from the breadlines to the brothels, and
chronicles George’s coming of age—the traumatic death of his father (the
work is dedicated to Siegfried Ulmer, “one of many thousands who died in
4 Noah Isenberg

the First World War”), his sexual awakening in adolescence at the hands of
a local prostitute, and the final departure from his maternal home. Although
the work is far from first-rate in terms of its overall literary quality, it does
offer something in the way of substance concerning Ulmer’s cultural sensi-
bility, a sensibility that would be translated—never completely, often only in
traces—in his cinematic output. Indeed the sounds of Vienna, not to mention
the “ghostlike” figures and “shadows” that populate Ulmer’s novel, would
continue to crop up in his aural and visual lexicon. As the German film critic
Frieda Grafe once put it in her reevaluation of Austrian film history, “Vienna
was a reservoir of dreams”; or, as she remarks further in the same essay,
“Austrian film history is a phantasm, because it is not tied to a fixed place;
its cinema is a kind of film without a specific space” (Grafe 227).
From the very beginning, film in Austria was necessarily international,
with well-trodden paths leading to Berlin, Paris, and, somewhat later, also
to Hollywood (see Sannwald). It should perhaps come as no surprise, then,
that the Viennese-born or, in Ulmer’s case, Viennese-trained film directors
were particularly adroit fabulists when it came to dreaming up their pasts
in the film world of Hollywood, the factory of dreams. Erich von Stroheim
would take on the self-avowed air of Prussian aristocracy, Billy Wilder the
identity of a former gigolo, and Ulmer (the persona, that is) a wunderkind
from Reinhardt’s renowned drama school; each of these roles, and there were
of course many more, would offer a new identity to the displaced émigré in
need of a quick makeover, especially one that might bring more work. “The
secret affinity that existed between Hollywood on one side and Vienna or
Paris on the other,” writes Thomas Elsaesser, “was that they were societies of
the spectacle, cities of make-believe and of the show. The decadence of the
Hapsburg monarchy was in some ways the pervasive sense of impersonation,
of pretending to be in possession of values and status that relied for credibility
not on substance but on convincing performance, on persuading others to take
an appearance for reality” (“Ethnicity” 112).
As was the case with most German and Austrian filmmakers of his gen-
eration, Ulmer learned much of his trade in the theater. And like these other
directors (F. W. Murnau, Otto Preminger, William Dieterle, et al.), he eventu-
ally made his way to Max Reinhardt. Even if his only official credit working
with the Reinhardt stage was as a set designer, together with Rochus Gliese,
for the acclaimed 1928 Berlin production of Ferdinand Bruckner’s Die Ver-
brecher (The Criminals; see Huesmann, and also Preminger), he clearly iden-
tified himself, both professionally and aesthetically, with the theater, and he
asserted his deep-seated ties to the great impresario. A calling card from the
1920s makes this assertion most apparent: it lists Ulmer’s title as Regissseur
(director) and Ausstattungschef (head of design) for the Reinhardt stage, and
 Permanent Vacation 5

also gives Vienna, Berlin, and New York as his cities of operation, an early
gesture toward the cosmopolitan identity he embraced until his death. When
Ulmer set sail for New York, in spring of 1924, the staging of Reinhardt’s
Das Mirakel (The Miracle) at New York’s Century Theatre was well under-
way. Ulmer himself claimed to have been involved in the stage design, and
he described his first trip to New York, at the age of nineteen, as one that had
been arranged by the Schildkrauts, the father-and-son acting duo Rudolf and
Joseph, with whom Ulmer had spent a formative phase of his late youth in
Vienna. Indeed, Rudolf Schildkraut, like Fritz Feld, was part of the original
cast of The Miracle that traveled to New York with the show. As his record
from Ellis Island indicates, Ulmer traveled on the SS President Roosevelt
and arrived in New York Harbor on 12 April 1924, almost four months after
the play’s premiere.3 It is, however, fully conceivable that Ulmer had a hand,
perhaps as one of the many designers or simply one of the roughly seven
hundred people said to have been enlisted, in the play’s highly successful ten-
month run. (Feld, a principal actor in the Reinhardt production, and a player
in several of Ulmer’s pictures, attests to this fact in his eulogy to Ulmer from
October 1972. See Young, and also Feld.)
In his extensive interview with Peter Bogdanovich, Ulmer comments on
his initial experiences in New York City: “When I came to New York the first
time, Reinhardt hired Schildkraut, who had worked for him in Europe, to play
in The Miracle. And I was taken down to Second Avenue, and met the Jewish
Art Theatre, which had some tremendous actors—Muni Weisenfreund [Paul
Muni], Jacob Adler, Maurice Schwartz—it was something which didn’t ex-
ist elsewhere in all of New York . . . It was a second Broadway down there”
(Bogdanovich 577–78). This early contact with the thriving Yiddish stage on
New York’s Lower East Side may have inspired Ulmer, over a decade later,
to direct the Yiddish films he completed in the late 1930s. His childhood
friend Joseph Schildkraut, who had already arrived in New York in August
1920, writes in his memoir, My Father and I: “My first impression of New
York was mixed, more confusing than exhilarating. The skyline, the harbor,
the piers, the crowd—all these were exactly as I had seen them in paintings
and photographs. Reality was merely copying art” (Schildkraut 114). It is
rather ironic that Schildkraut should find this relationship between art and
reality in the New World, when in numerous cases émigrés found themselves
engaged in the process of imitating reality—or what, in the New World, was
taken for reality—in their art, even an imagined reality of the Old World left
behind. Perhaps for Ulmer the main attraction of New York was the fact that
there were so many fellow émigrés in his midst, many of them artists, actors,
directors, and crew members, who drew on their pasts as a means of commu-
nicating with their new audience. In Ulmer’s case, it was often his European
6 Noah Isenberg

training, the true extent of which he occasionally embellished, that linked him
to other émigrés working in the United States.
In 1926–1927, Ulmer joined forces with German-born Rochus Gliese in
set design at Fox studios, assisting F. W. Murnau, also a former Reinhardt pu-
pil, on his Hollywood debut, Sunrise. Ulmer, who was already in Hollywood
working in the art department at Universal and churning out two-reel westerns
on the side, considered Gliese “[his] partner, a fantastic designer and camera
builder” (Bogdanovich 568). Gliese, whose set design for Sunrise earned him
an Oscar nomination, had worked on several early German film productions,
including the second Golem film, Der Golem und die Tänzerin (The Golem
and the Dancer, 1917), which he directed. For Ulmer, the significance of
Sunrise, one of the greatest pictures Murnau ever made and, in Ulmer’s words,
“the only picture Murnau himself counted” (Bogdanovich 565), cannot be
underestimated. The film, which blends European and American styles from
the Straßenfilm to the early Hollywood melodrama, pits traditional life in the
provinces against the big city. The blissful harmony—or dreadful tedium—of
family life between man (George O’Brian) and woman (Janet Gaynor) in the
country is interrupted, much as in a classical horror film, by the intrusion
of an outsider, the Woman from the City (Margaret Livingston). Murnau
casts these two worlds in stark opposition, opening the film with a brilliant
montage (à la Ruttmann’s Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt) and having the
city woman lure away the man of the country, indulging him in fantasies of
urban decadence. In such scenes as the man and city woman imagining the
city, or the man and wife having their photo taken during their later visit to
the city, the film can be viewed, as Lucy Fischer asserts, “as a self-reflexive
text which, provisionally, identifies the cinema with the metropolitan” (40).
One might add to this equation the European city which seems to symbolize
the cosmopolitan sensibility par excellence, a sensibility Murnau frequently
incorporated into his work, as Ulmer did later.
In order to achieve this most effectively, Murnau had to rely on high-qual-
ity production design, much of it pioneered in Weimar Germany, as a means
of depicting the separate worlds. As Lotte Eisner remarks, “Gliese [and, by
extension, Ulmer working with him] had created every kind of landscape,
from fields and meadows, through an industrial area and the sparse gardens
of the suburbs to the city itself ” (180). The ostensible lessons that Ulmer
learned while working with Murnau—not merely in terms of design, but
also in terms of handling his characters and themes—would stick. One can
indeed see shades of Murnau in several of Ulmer’s subsequent films. As
late as 1955, in his Mexican Western shot in Technicolor, The Naked Dawn,
the rural-urban dialectic is played out again in a new light. The film is, ac-
cording to the trenchant interpretation by Belton, “a reworking of Murnau’s
 Permanent Vacation 7

Sunrise—Santiago, with the lure of money for the husband and tales of
exotic Vera Cruz for the wife, taking the part of Murnau’s Woman from the
City” (“Edgar G. Ulmer” 342). Not only does the film present a plausible
“reworking,” but it also picks up on several of Ulmer’s own stock themes:
the false promise of material wealth; the romantic wanderings of a lonely
hero; and the struggle to remain loyal to a more noble, if less profitable,
calling. In a critical moment, the film shows the husband (Eugene Iglesias)
falling prey to the venal impulses of a modern man, a man who is willing
to forsake his seemingly perfect home—and his beautiful wife (Betta St.
John)—for financial gain, thus contrasting him in striking terms with the
homeless renegade Santiago (Arthur Kennedy), who has no deep connec-
tion to the money he acquires and therefore does not allow himself to be
alienated by its material worth.
Just as Ulmer saw himself as belonging to the “Romantic” and “art-pos-
sessed” directors, as opposed to the “group [for] whom theatre and film was
a business” (Bogdanovich 566), so too his characters often confront the clash
between those higher pursuits—be they artistic, philosophical, or even theo-
logical—and base material concerns, between art and commerce. From the

Figure 1.1. Production still from The Naked Dawn (1955). Courtesy of Jerry Ohlinger’s
Movie Material Store, Inc.
8 Noah Isenberg

beginning of his American career to his final pictures made in Europe, this
dialectical tension remained palpable both on and off the set.

III

Ulmer’s American directorial debut, or, more precisely, his big-studio debut,
took place a good three decades before The Naked Dawn. The 1934 produc-
tion of The Black Cat lies at the heart of the famed Universal horror cycle,
which starts with Dracula and Frankenstein, both from 1931, and ends with
Son of Frankenstein (1939). The film offers a fascinating glimpse into the
world of an émigré filmmaker negotiating American financial and aesthetic
constraints. With Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff in leading roles—the first
of seven pictures in which they would star opposite each other—it is a film
that represents the rich interplay between European art cinema and the Hol-
lywood blockbuster, between reflections of exile and those of home. The
film opens with images of transit: a European railway station, packages and
luggage, train officials and passengers. Aboard the Orient Express is a new-
lywed, patently American couple, the mystery-thriller writer Peter Alison
(David Manners) and his young bride Joan (Jacqueline Wells), bound for a
luxury resort in the Carpathian mountains (a familiar destination for view-
ers of early German horror as the home of Murnau’s Nosferatu). The hon-
eymooners, shown affectionately in their cheery, brightly lit compartment,
soon face an intruder, Dr. Vitus Werdegast (Lugosi), who in fact does be-
come a guest, as his name—in German, literally “I shall be a guest”—tells
us. His jarring screen presence disrupts the harmonious moment shared by
the Alisons. Werdegast immediately finds himself enraptured by the sight
of Joan, which Ulmer captures in several revealing point-of-view shots—a
foreboding sign of what’s to come. (Lugosi’s role in The Black Cat was
very much colored by his memorable performance in Dracula.) The re-
mainder of the film pivots on two levels: the tale of the European returnee
(Werdegast), who accompanies his American guests to the original site of
his wartime trauma—the same location where former general and engineer
Hjalmar Poelzig (Karloff) has constructed his spectacular compound; and
the face-off between Werdegast and Poelzig, which includes a few notable
flourishes of gruesome sadism, bondage, and revenge along with the requi-
site American happy end.
In keeping with the American horror genre, The Black Cat adheres to the
boilerplate plotlines of murder and deception. Unlike its counterparts, how-
ever, it introduces two important elements to the genre: a score that showcases
European, largely German and Austrian, classical music (Brahms, Schubert,
 Permanent Vacation 9

Figure 1.2. Production still from The Black Cat (1934). Courtesy of Jerry Ohlinger’s
Movie Material Store, Inc.

and Beethoven); and a high-modernist aesthetic that informs the overall

design of the film. The clean lines, luminous interiors, and sleek, minimalist
decor all replicate the taste of 1920s Berlin, Vienna, Paris, and Amsterdam.
As Ulmer claims, somewhat boastfully, in his interview with Bogdanovich,
the film was “very much out of my Bauhaus period” (Bogdanovich 576).
Once again, in an effort to have his name associated with some of the most
venerable artistic figures, movements, and institutions, Ulmer’s inflated ap-
praisal should be considered a bold indicator of the highly self-conscious ap-
proach to making a film which would deliberately evoke the style of a period
in which Ulmer had little part. Jim Hoberman’s memorable phrase, riffing
on the famous title of Kracauer’s history of Weimar cinema, still rings true:
“From Caligari to Hitler in one lurid package” (“Low and Behold”).
On the set, Ulmer worked together with British-born designer Charles
Hall, producing what Donald Albrecht, in his book Designing Dreams:
Modern Architecture in the Movies, has pronounced an “architectural tour
de force” (100–101). Albrecht credits Ulmer with the construction of Poel-
zig’s elaborate compound, the space in which Ulmer’s implicit nod to his
former home, that is, to the European high-modernist aesthetic cultivated in
10 Noah Isenberg

his choice of design, comes into direct conflict with the homeless characters
that languish within it: Werdegast, the Alisons, even the preserved bodies
of former inhabitants. Despite the fact that the film’s supposed location
is far removed from an urban world, the highly stylized interiors suggest
something more out of the European metropolis than out of the provincial
hinterland.
Ulmer’s playful adaptation of early German cinematic style in The Black
Cat manifests itself in a variety of ways. His dramatic use of light and
shadow throughout the film evokes a hallmark, by now nearly clichéd, of
German expressionism. There are also narrative strategies that appear to be
holdovers from the silent era: for example, when Poelzig lies down in bed,
he reads the Rites of Lucifer (like Book of Vampires in Nosferatu—indeed,
the affinities with Nosferatu and, more broadly, with Murnau proliferate
throughout). However, some of Ulmer’s references to Weimar cinema re-
semble more of an inside joke among German and Austrian émigrés than
a genuine homage: in using the name Poelzig, and making the character an
engineer at that, it is impossible to miss the allusion to renowned German
architect Hans Poelzig, who designed the sets for Paul Wegener’s 1920
Golem film and who also built one of Berlin’s most celebrated theaters,
the Grosses Schauspielhaus. As for the sadistic personality of Poelzig,
Paul Mandell has argued that the figure was based on Fritz Lang, who was
widely considered to be a tyrannical director (see Mandell 36). The sets, Ul-
mer suggested to Bogdanovitch, were inspired by conversations with Gustav
Meyrink, the Prague novelist who wrote his own rendition of The Golem,
on which Wegener’s film of 1920 was partly based, and who had allegedly
considered writing a play set in a French military fortress from World War
I (Bogdanovich 576).
Although The Black Cat was by all counts a commercial success, ending
the year as Universal’s top-grossing picture of 1934, Ulmer’s days as a Hol-
lywood studio director were numbered. While working on the film, he met his
wife-to-be Shirley Castle (neé Kassler), a script supervisor and screenwriter,
who at the time was still married to studio boss Carl Laemmle’s nephew Max
Alexander. Their liaison immediately branded Ulmer persona non grata in the
powerful Laemmle’s domain, a stronghold that reached far into other studio
dynasties. In the words of Bill Krohn, Ulmer was “blackballed not for poli-
tics, but for love” (61). The rejection made Ulmer a different kind of “exile”
in Hollywood; unlike one by national policy, it was a banishment from a new
home and from the world in which he once saw great potential to flourish.
Ulmer and his wife became, in Shirley’s words, “Hollywood outcasts.”4 They
were soon forced to seek work elsewhere, in markets outside of Southern
California.
 Permanent Vacation 11

IV

After completing a B-class Western, Thunder over Texas (1934), and shooting a
cheap thriller in Montreal, From Nine to Nine (1936), Ulmer set up shop in New
York, where he would direct, among other projects, four feature-length Yiddish
pictures, ranging from the pastoral Grine Felder (Green Fields, 1937) and the
gloomy Fishke der Krumer (The Light Ahead, 1939) to his self-consciously
urbane Amerikaner Shadkhn (American Matchmaker, 1940). Almost a sequel
to The Light Ahead, which chronicles the dilemmas faced by a town’s two so-
cial pariahs who flee the world of the shtetl in search of a better life in the city,
American Matchmaker brings us directly to the world of the metropolis—not
Odessa, as in The Light Ahead, but New York—and introduces us to the dif-
ferent roles that Yiddish-speaking Jews occupy there. As Krohn has suggested,
American Matchmaker might indeed be viewed as a “comedy in which we see
what became of Fishke and Hodl’s descendents in the city” (64). The film’s pro-
tagonist Leo Fuchs, regarded at the time as the “Yiddish Fred Astaire,” plays the
upwardly mobile, highly successful, assimilated businessman Nat Silver, who
in the process of continuing to climb the social ladder of New York City in the
late 1930s takes on a career makeover (“human relations,” or what is sardoni-
cally called “human relishes”) and changes his name from Silver to Gold (see
Hoberman, Bridge of Light 317). The film opens inside a sumptuously designed
apartment on Central Park West—an address where Ulmer himself once lived
with his wife—where the bachelor party of Nat Silver is underway.
The elegant setting, lavish design, mannerism, and style of the opening
sequence conjure a milieu that is anything but specifically Jewish. The only
thing that marks the film as Jewish, as critics have observed, is the fact that
Yiddish is spoken; and even that is highly Americanized, and urbanized, with
continuous references to contemporary idiomatic phrases and expressions
evocative of street-savvy sophistication (see, e.g., Forman; Goldberg). “The
big city, as it’s portrayed,” asserts Stefan Grissemann, “is still more of a village
than a jungle, a very manageable small world in which the Jewish community,
almost as if there were no other religions or social groups in New York City,
effortlessly sticks together” (143). There are, however, running gags within the
story line of the film which explicitly address the issue of assimilation—for
example, the faux-English butler (Yudel Dubinsky) who insists on speaking
a Yiddishized British English, or the other characters’ constant use of Ameri-
can slang to pepper their speech. Moreover, the transformation of the film’s
protagonist, from “Silver” to “Gold,” as it were, entails a complete embrace
of secular, urban American culture. Hoberman calls attention to the fact that
this was the only one of the four Yiddish pictures Ulmer directed in which he
was also partly responsible for the script, which he cowrote with his wife and
12 Noah Isenberg

his Viennese cousin Gustav Heimo (né Horowitz), and that the film might be
seen as a personal response to the dilemmas of Jewish assimilation in an urban
setting, a dilemma with which Ulmer undoubtedly had some familiarity, hav-
ing grown up in Vienna during the first decades of the twentieth century. For
Hoberman, the character of Nat Gold represents the “bridge between the hap-
less Menakhem Mendl [the famed luftmentsh of Sholem Aleichem’s stories]
and the neurotic heroes of Woody Allen” (Bridge of Light 321).
In terms of Ulmer’s career development, the film fits into an extended
phase of directing pictures aimed at minority audiences. Around the same
time that he shot his Yiddish pictures, Ulmer was at work on a series of shorts
commissioned by the Brooklyn-based National Tuberculosis and Health As-
sociation, among them Let My People Live (1939), a plea for disease preven-
tion among African Americans filmed at the all-black Tuskegee Institute in
Alabama. During that year Ulmer and Shirley also teamed up again with
cousin Gustav, along with Shirley’s brother Fred (as assistant director) and her
father Peter (as associate producer), to make the musical drama Moon over
Harlem (1939). Catering to a target audience of African American cinemago-
ers, the film takes the viewer into the inner world of the famed neighborhood,
“black Manhattan,” as the film’s hero Bob (Carl Gough) calls it: a world of
gangsters and mob control—populated by characters from rival gangs, with
names like Dollar Bill and Wall Street—but also one of an aspiring middle
class, represented by Bob and his like-minded girlfriend Sue (Ozinetta Wil-
cox)—both of whom seek to overcome adversity and triumph in the city,
just as Nat Silver does in American Matchmaker. For them, it is less cultural
assimilation than class assimilation—certainly a fraught issue in Nat Silver’s
quest as well—that stands in the way of their dreams of success. They must
invent a new home in a hostile urban world beset by violence, poverty, and
other social maladies, a collective pursuit in which countless characters from
Ulmer’s film repertoire engage themselves. Finally, there is, on a less overt
level, a shared plight or an analogous state of exile from the dominant culture
that links the black characters on the screen to the displaced émigrés on the
set.5 This may indeed help to explain Ulmer’s choice of direction as well as his
input on the story. And it may give further meaning, albeit merely symbolic in
nature, to the general experience of homelessness, or estrangement from one’s
birthplace, as treated in Ulmer’s films.

Another narrative thread in which Ulmer seems to play out a kind of European-
American dialogue is the recurrent battle between art and consumerist mass
 Permanent Vacation 13

culture in his films. Never quite striking a preachy, didactic, or doctrinaire

tone, he frequently pits aesthetic compromise against material or professional
payoff. For instance, in his low-budget melodrama Jive Junction (1943), he
draws on the musical talent of émigré composer Leo Erdody—with whom
he collaborated on many occasions during the PRC years—to tell the story
of young Peter Crane (Dickie Moore), a classically trained pianist and self-
proclaimed “lover of music,” who finds himself drawn into the big-band jazz
scene at Clinton High School. Early on in the film, Ulmer has the viewer catch
precious glimpses of Peter listening to his father’s favorite composers (strictly
of the European variety, from Brahms to Schubert)—as we quickly learn,
Peter’s father, like Ulmer’s own father, has died on the battlefront—before he
heads down the path toward mainstream pop music played at juke joints like
Jive Junction. The underlying conflict of the film, then, is not merely musical,
but generational, especially when Peter has to turn to his former mentor at
the conservatory, the so-called “Maestro” (played by Viennese-born Frederick
Feher), to help procure instruments for the school band’s big performance
broadcast on live radio. The Maestro’s final words, as he accompanies Peter
to the performance, express both the ambivalence of the film’s story line and
that of its director: “It’s noisy . . . but beautiful . . . maybe.”
Ulmer’s preoccupation with jazz culture and a kind of urban social anxiety
carried on throughout the 1940s. Arguably his most famous film, Detour
(1945) is filtered through the pained, edgy noir voice-over of downtrodden
nightclub pianist Al Roberts (Tom Neal), a man whose dreams, musical and
otherwise, are ultimately shattered. Toward the beginning of the film, as Al
remembers his past while seated in a roadside diner somewhere in Nevada,
we witness him dismissing the encouragement of his singer girlfriend Sue
(Claudia Drake), who tells Al that he’ll make it to Carnegie Hall someday.
We soon discover that Sue is leaving behind her job, Al, and the New York
nightclub in which they work, to try her luck in Hollywood; she travels alone.
But as soon as Al gets an unexpected tip of $10, after playing a classical-jazz
medley (from Brahms to boogie-woogie), he immediately calls Sue and an-
nounces his plans to join her in Los Angeles.
The path from New York to Los Angeles, graphically shown in a series of
stock shots of telephone operators, traveling phone lines, and finally a map,
fuses with the melody of “I Can’t Believe You’re in Love with Me,” the same
song that first summons up Al’s memory at the diner and that links him and
Sue. Al’s desperation to get to Los Angeles (by “train, plane, bus, magic car-
pet . . . I’ll get there if I have to crawl, if I have to travel by pogo stick”) may
mirror in unexpected ways Ulmer’s own desire to make it in Hollywood, a
desire he expressed rather passionately in several letters from the early 1940s,
after having held out in New York for so long. However, the fact that Sue is
14 Noah Isenberg

working as a “hash slinger,” and has not broken into the trade, does not bode
well. As Ulmer once remarked, in his interview with Bogdanovich, “I did not
want to be ground up in the Hollywood hash machine” (592). In this case,
then, the big city (Los Angeles) possesses at least two very different sym-
bolic functions: it is a place of flight for those who are left homeless, where
Al—after he becomes implicated in murder on his fateful trek to the West
Coast—believes he’ll be able to find anonymity (“In a small town I might be
noticed, but in a city I should be safe enough”); it is, however, also a place
that can, and will, eventually drive people into the ground. Nearly the entire
film encompasses Al’s restless wanderings, his total lack of refuge, and the
frenetic pace that propels him through an inhospitable world.6
Just as Krohn claims that we might understand American Matchmaker as a
kind of postscript to The Light Ahead, so too we may consider Carnegie Hall
(1947)—or at least the rather corny story line of the film—a happy-end se-
quel to Detour. In other words, this is the story of what could have happened
to Al Roberts, had he made it to the big leagues. In the film, Tony Salerno
Jr. (William Prince) pursues a similar path to Al’s, moving freely in the world
of urban musical culture, from classical to jazz; but he, unlike Al, succeeds
in the end. He makes it in spite of the fact his mother, who works her way up
from janitor of Carnegie Hall (which, after all, is what Al, in his self-depre-
cating fit in Detour, tells Sue should be his proper role) to a high-level office
worker, castigates the turn from high to low art. As the American musicologist
Erik Ulman has recently noted, “it is tempting to read Ulmer’s own situation
into these films, as an artist who descended from Murnau and Reinhardt to
the depths of PRC, with Tony as a kind of wish fulfillment of finding artistic
validity . . . in commercial culture” (Ulman). Ulmer, for his part, was rather
dismissive of the story line of the film, and would have preferred to have
made a documentary—“to have the Hall speak,” as he put it—featuring the
same virtuoso performances (Artur Rubinstein, Jascha Heifitz, Bruno Walter,
Fritz Reiner, Artur Rodzinski) without the canned narrative. In his interview
with Bogdanovich, he asks: “What are you going to do after Rubinstein plays
Chopin?” (Bogdanovich 599).
To Ulmer, whose first passion—even before theater and cinema—was
music, Carnegie Hall represented a mythical place, a sacred shrine or Golden
Temple that embodied the best that an advanced metropolitan culture could
offer. (He makes passing reference to it, as the quintessential marker of suc-
cess, not only in Detour, but also in Her Sister’s Secret [1946], when the tod-
dler Billy is banging the keys on his toy piano and Bill Sr. quips, “Skipper,
we have a long way before Carnegie Hall.”) Like the name Max Reinhardt,
Carnegie Hall possessed household recognition; it was a name to be vener-
ated, one that carried enormous cultural cachet, and a name with which Ulmer
 Permanent Vacation 15

was all too happy to be associated. As he had done half a decade before, in
Jive Junction, Ulmer fashions the maestro as something of a savior, a figure
who transcends the prosaic concerns of everyday life and deals with things on
a higher plane. At numerous junctures in the film, Ulmer has the conductor
shot from an extreme low angle, thereby endowing his character with a larger-
than-life aura. Perhaps even more significant, in terms of Ulmer’s career tra-
jectory, Carnegie Hall represents another film in which he, as director, is able
to revisit a lost world—complete with the resonant chords of Old Vienna and
the luminaries who, not unlike Ulmer, migrated to the New World.

VI

Ulmer’s fellow Austrian émigré and screenwriter Salka Viertel notes in her
memoirs, The Kindness of Strangers, how she and presumably many others in
her shoes were hoping for the opportunity to retrace their steps to the world
they had left behind. “In those first years in California [in the early 1930s],”
she writes, “I don’t think I met anyone who had been born or raised there.
The actors and writers, especially those from the East, were transitory, having
come to make money and to get out as soon as possible. I also was count-
ing the days till our return to Europe” (143). After struggling to keep afloat
in Hollywood throughout much of the 1940s, Ulmer finally severed ties to
the American B studios—with his major four-year, eleven-film stint at PRC
having come to an unceremonious end in 1946—and made his way across
the Atlantic, where he eventually became involved in a variety of eclectic
productions. These began with I Pirati di Capri (Pirates of Capri, 1949), his
Italian swashbuckler starring Luis Hayward (a regular in Ulmer’s ensemble),
and led up to the Danziger Brothers’ Spanish production of Muchachas de
Bagdad (Babes in Bagdad, 1951); Ulmer’s garish Italian Technicolor fantasy
film L’Atlantide (Journey beneath the Desert, 1961); and his final picture,
Sette contro la morte (The Cavern, 1965), a gripping wartime drama shot in
the mountains of Italy and Yugoslavia. These churned-out movies have been
largely forgotten—some for good reason—by film history.
Grissemann has recently suggested that Ulmer’s career reached its “offi-
cial” apex in the years 1947–1948, after the release of Carnegie Hall, and that
essentially, with a few exceptions, his career went downhill from that moment
onward. “Assignments became ever more irregular,” Grissemann asserts,
“and he had to consider working outside of the country, overseas” (253–54).
He attributes this development to Ulmer’s reputation as a “cheap” director, a
filmmaker who plumbed the depths of Poverty Row, and to the fact that he
hadn’t worked at A-list studios since his first (and only) picture for Universal,
16 Noah Isenberg

The Black Cat, in 1934. After his relatively stable and successful run at PRC
in the early to middle 1940s, Ulmer was essentially left unmoored, stripped of
any residual ties to a studio, independent or otherwise. As Grissemann puts it,
in his pithy summation, “Independence can hurt.”
After pursuing several untenable ideas, including a remake of Leni
Riefenstahl’s Das blaue Licht (The Blue Light, 1932), and after the Ameri-
can B-picture industry had lost its steam, Ulmer found himself committed
to producer Victor Pahlen, in late summer 1948, on an Italian coproduction
Pirates of Capri. The Pahlen project brought him back to Europe, where he
initially hoped to thrive in a nascent industry away from Hollywood. What it
also did, however, was make him even more aware of his lack of success on
the other side of the Atlantic and his increasing alienation from that world. As
he writes on 13 October 1948 from Rome: “I am of course very lonesome,
they tell me life is very beautiful in Rome; I’d rather be home in King’s Road
[i.e., just above Sunset Boulevard, in Hollywood, where the Ulmers had a
house at the time].”7 Ulmer’s conception of home became complicated during
his years abroad; he may, at times, have thought of himself as a citizen of the
world, but he also encountered an acute and recurrent sense of homelessness
while living in Europe, signing a postcard mailed from Belgrade in 1956 as
the “Wandering Minstrel.”
Ironic as it may seem, Ulmer, who never managed to lay roots in Hol-
lywood, yearned even more for a second calling there after he returned to
Europe. During the early 1940s, before he began his stint at PRC, he had
expressed similar hopes of landing work at one of the big studios. In 1941,
in a letter to his wife Shirley dated 1 July on Hollywood Plaza Hotel sta-
tionery, Ulmer writes: “The prayer has worked. Sweetest I am so excited I
hardly can hold the pen in my hand. I just returned from Paramount. Sherle,
they have not forgotten. Sherle, I am as good as signed with Paramount.
Producer—director—good God! Sweets we are home again and on the way.”
He then proceeds to assert, repeating what the studio bosses have presumably
told him: “Well, Ulmer, I am sold on you 1,000% . . . You are going to be
one of the big men on the lot. Dearest, I hardly could keep from crying out.
So seven years [1934–1941] I had to suffer and starve. I nearly sold you out,
you, [the] picture business, my family, myself. Oh, I am so excited I hardly
can think.”8 In the last lines of the letter, Ulmer announces the two pictures
he hopes to shoot for Paramount: first, an idea called Beggar on Horseback,
based on the Broadway comedy, a parody of German expressionist drama,
written by George S. Kaufman; and second, a remake of The Blue Angel, star-
ring Veronica Lake. Neither of the two pictures ever panned out, and Ulmer’s
fantasy of becoming a redeemed and celebrated studio director at Paramount
remained just that: a fantasy.
 Permanent Vacation 17

After his return to Europe, several years later, these unfulfilled desires
resurfaced. As much as he tried to reinvent himself abroad—even taking on
the title of Dr. Ulmer during his brief tenure as a producer at the Munich-
based Eichberg Film Company in the 1950s—he often looked back to Hol-
lywood. For example, following the shoot of Pirates of Capri, Ulmer writes
from Rome that he keeps humming Cole Porter’s “Just biding my time.” And,
not long after, in a letter to Shirley from 4 May 1951, he spells out his pre-
dicament: “In plain English, I need a job in Hollywood pronto . . . I need a
job quick at home in Hollywood [emphasis added].”9 During this period of
intense disenchantment, Ulmer writes frequently to his agent, the Viennese-
born Ilse Lahn of the Paul Kohner Agency (known for representing a host
of émigré filmmakers, from Billy Wilder to Erich von Stroheim), urging her
to assist him in securing work in America. In a letter of 25 August 1951, he
writes to Lahn from Barcelona:

I cannot tell you how lonesome I am for Hollywood, and if it would be not be
for Shirley and Arianné [his daughter] I surely would have chucked the whole
think [sic] and be on my way home. I can only repeat again and again “You can
only make pictures in Hollywood and nowhere else.” By that I mean make them
and don’t work yourself into a state where everything borders on heart failure.
Undoubtedly we are spoiled. A sun ark [sic] becomes something awfully pre-
cious when you leave the shores of the U.S.A.10

Unlike 1930s émigré directors in Hollywood (e.g., Walter Reisch), who con-
jured up an “imaginary homeland” in their work, Ulmer’s personal writings
from the 1950s and 1960s seem to rely on the notion of a fantasy Hollywood,
a world which, when regarded from his stilted, desperate vantage point, is
stripped of all the imperfections he knew so well (see Elsaesser, Weimar
Cinema; Rushdie).
As several critics have noted, Ulmer’s films often feature characters without
a fixed abode, who are given to unexpected and frequent movement and who
experience a similar kind of transience to what Ulmer himself experienced
in his early and later years. French filmmaker Bertrand Tavernier has said of
Ulmer’s characters, “They are always wandering.”11 This is true of his figures
from the ethnic films of the 1930s and of Al Roberts from Detour, as well as
being true of similar kinds of uprooted and estranged characters from his later
work. As for Ulmer’s personal predicament during the 1950s, he goes so far
as to liken himself to “a dog in search of a place to find peace,” and his own
restlessness elicits deeper reflection both on and off the screen. In a letter of 5
October 1953, following yet another ill-fated project (this time Loves of Three
Queens [1954], starring Hedy Lamarr), he writes to Lahn from Rome:
18 Noah Isenberg

Just a quick note with real news. Sad! But news. Hedy unfortunately is com-
pletely out of hand and I am unable to cope with her. She refuses direction.
Therefore to avoid another “Babes in Bagdad” I have resigned from the picture.
I have finished “Genevieve,” but “Helene” and “Josephine” must be done by
somebody else. The little self-respect I still have I cannot and will not lose . . .
So I am at liberty and willing to make a picture from the first of November on.
But only in Hollywood. I’ve got my fill of wandering.12

Even though Shirley may have felt, as she formulated it in a letter to her
husband of 4 February 1961, that “home is where you are and where we are
working,”13 Ulmer himself did not seem, ultimately, to have shared this same
view. The constant movement, the near nomadism of his later years in Europe,
left him distraught and eager for just one final return—even if, in the end,
it meant that his filmmaking career would come to a close. Writing to his
agent from Paris in autumn 1961, he notes in a rueful key: “Shirley and I are
desperately lonely and very, very homesick. It has been a long haul in Europe
for both of us.”14 The romance of a wandering hero, while perhaps seductive
in film and in fiction, lost its allure over time. That is perhaps the true point
at which exile (the idea) and exile (the reality) part ways.

NOTES

1. See also Belton’s early study, Howard Hawks, Frank Borzage, Edgar G. Ulmer
(New York: A. S. Barnes, 1974).
2. For a more thorough exploration of this line of inquiry, see my “Perennial
Detour.”
3. The database available at www.ellisisland.org contains Ulmer’s passenger re-
cord from 12 April 1924, with his place of residence given as “Wein [sic], Austria”
and his ethnicity as “Austria Hebrew.”
4. See Tom Weaver’s interview with Shirley Ulmer in this volume. According to
Shirley Ulmer, “We were told that we’d never work in Hollywood again. He couldn’t
get a job—that’s why we went back to New York.”
5. On the greater significance of African American characters in the films of
exiled directors, see Kaes.
6. One can, indeed, read the film as a compelling allegory of exile. For further
analysis along these same lines, see my “Perennial Detour,” 15–19. See also my book-
length treatment of the film, Detour.
7. Unpublished letter of 13 October 1948, Edgar G. Ulmer to Ilse Lahn, Paul
Kohner Archive, Box 4.3-88/14-6 (EGU to PK 1948–1955), Berlin Filmmuseum.
8. Unpublished letter of 1 July 1941, Edgar G. Ulmer to Shirley Ulmer, Edgar
G. Ulmer Collection, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and
Sciences, Beverly Hills, Calif.
 Permanent Vacation 19

9. Unpublished letter of 4 May 1951, Edgar G. Ulmer to Shirley Ulmer, Edgar

G. Ulmer Collection, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and
Sciences, Beverly Hills, Calif.
10. Unpublished letter of 25 August 1951, Edgar G. Ulmer to Ilse Lahn, Paul Koh-
ner Archive, Box 4.3-88/14-6 (EGU to PK 1948–1955), Berlin Filmmuseum.
11. Bertrand Tavernier, unpublished interview by Michael Henry Wilson, 7 No-
vember 1997, Paris, 62.
12. Unpublished letter of 5 October 1953, Edgar G. Ulmer to Ilse Lahn, Paul Koh-
ner Archive, Box 4.3-88/14-6 (EGU to PK 1948–1955), Berlin Filmmuseum.
13. Unpublished letter of 4 February 1961, Shirley Ulmer to Edgar G. Ulmer, Ed-
gar G. Ulmer Collection, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts
and Sciences, Beverly Hills, Calif.
14. Unpublished letter of 5 October 1961, Edgar G. Ulmer to Ilse Lahn, Paul Koh-
ner Archive, Box 4.3-88/14-6 (EGU to PK 1948–1955), Berlin Filmmuseum.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Albrecht, Donald. Designing Dreams: Modern Architecture and the Movies (New
York: Harper and Row, 1986).
Belton, John. “Cinema Maudit,” in Retrospective (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Film Festi-
val, 1997), 149–50.
———. “Edgar G. Ulmer (1900[sic]–1972),” in American Directors, Vol. 1, ed.
Jean-Pierre Coursodon with Pierre Sauvage (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1983),
339–47.
Bogdanovich, Peter. “Edgar G. Ulmer: An Interview,” Film Culture 58–60 (1974),
reprinted in Who the Devil Made It: Conversations with Legendary Film Directors
(New York: Ballantine, 1998), 558–604.
Eisner, Lotte. Murnau (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973).
Elsaesser, Thomas. “Ethnicity, Authenticity, and Exile: A Counterfeit Trade? German
Filmmakers in Hollywood,” in Home, Exile, Homeland: Film, Media, and the Poli-
tics of Place, ed. Hamid Naficy (New York: Routledge, 1999), 97–123.
———. Weimar Cinema and After: Germany’s Historical Imaginary (New York:
Routledge, 2000).
Feld, Fritz. “In Memoriam of Edgar Ulmer” (unpublished ms), 3 October 1972.
Fischer, Lucy. Sunrise (London: BFI, 1998).
Forman, Betty Yetta. “From The American Shadchan [sic] to Annie Hall: The Life and
Legacy of Yiddish Film in America,” National Jewish Monthly, November 1977,
4–13.
Francke, Lizzie. “Edgar G. Ulmer,” in Retrospective (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Film
Festival, 1997), 148.
Goldberg, Judith N. Laughter through Tears: The Yiddish Cinema (Madison, NJ: Far-
leigh Dickinson University Press, 1982).
Grafe, Frieda. “Wiener Beiträge zu einer wahren Geschichte des Kinos,” in
Aufbruch ins Ungewisse: Österreichische Filmschaffende in der Emigration
20 Noah Isenberg

vor 1945, ed. Christian Cargnelli and Michael Omasta (Vienna: Wespennest,
1993), 227–43.
Grissemann, Stefan. Mann im Schatten: Der Filmemacher Edgar G. Ulmer (Vienna:
Zsolnay, 2003).
Hoberman, J. Bridge of Light: Yiddish Film between Two Worlds (New York: Museum
of Modern Art, 1991).
———. “Low and Behold,” Village Voice, 17 November 1998.
Huesmann, Heinrich. Welttheater Reinhardt (Munich: Prestel 1983).
Isenberg, Noah. Detour (London: BFI, 2008).
———. “Perennial Detour: The Cinema of Edgar G. Ulmer and the Experience of
Exile,” Cinema Journal 43, no. 2 (Winter 2004): 3–25.
Kaes, Anton. “A Stranger in the House: Fritz Lang’s Fury and the Cinema of Exile,”
New German Critique 89 (Spring–Summer 2003): 35–58.
Krohn, Bill. “King of the Bs,” Film Comment 19, no. 4 (July–August 1983): 60–64.
Mandell, Paul. “Edgar Ulmer and The Black Cat,” American Cinematographer, Oc-
tober 1984, 34–47.
Morton, Frederic. Thunder at Twilight: Vienna 1913/14 (New York: Da Capo, 2001).
Preminger, Otto. “An Interview,” in Max Reinhardt 1873–1973, ed. George Wellwarth
and Alfred Brooks (Binghamton, N.Y.: Max Reinhardt Archive, 1973), 109–11.
Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands (London: Granta Books, 1991).
Sannwald, Daniela. “Metropolis: Die Wien-Berlin-Achse im deutschen Film der 10er
und 20er Jahre,” Elektische Schatten: Beiträge zur Österreichischen Stummfilmge-
schichte, ed. Francesco Bono et al. (Vienna: Filmarchiv Austria, 1999), 139–48.
Schildkraut, Joseph. My Father and I (New York: Viking, 1959).
Ulman, Erik. “Edgar G. Ulmer,” Senses of Cinema, at www.sensesofcinema.com/con-
tents/directors/03/ulmer.html (accessed 3 March 2003).
Ulmer, Edgar G. “Beyond the Boundary” (unpublished ms).
Viertel, Salka. The Kindness of Strangers: A Theatrical Life; Vienna, Berlin, Holly-
wood (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969).
Young, Stark. “The Miracle,” New York Times, November 9, 1924.
 2
The Search for Community
John Belton

In “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” Fredric Jameson describes

social life within late capitalism as “reified” and “atomized,” lacking the
cohesiveness of “authentic collective life” (140). The status of the individual
within mass culture is one of fragmentation and alienation. The individual is
cut adrift from traditional institutions such as community and family that once
provided a sense of one’s place within a larger collectivity. This alienation
constitutes one of the “fundamental social anxieties” (141) that lie at the heart
of mass culture. Jameson argues that these anxieties find expression in works
of mass culture but do so in such a way that they are ultimately managed or
repressed. Jameson’s examples, Jaws and The Godfather, repress social and
political anxieties “by the narrative construction of imaginary resolutions and
by the projection of an optical illusion of social harmony” (141).
As works of mass culture, noir films give a remarkably powerful expres-
sion of social, political, and sexual anxieties. If mainstream Hollywood
films manage or repress those anxieties, film noir exposes and exploits
them, with often only minimal management of them. Film noir emerges
as an exception to Jameson’s thesis—but an exception that nonetheless
proves the rule. One could argue, for example, that a film like Edgar G.
Ulmer’s Detour (1945) stages anxieties about marriage and the liberated,
new woman of postwar America. Sue’s reluctance to marry Al and her deci-
sion to pursue her career thousands of miles away pose initial threats that
he subsequently attempts to handle by hitchhiking across the country to join
her. But along the way, he encounters Sue’s opposite image (and, ironically,
his own mirror image) in the form of Vera, the film’s femme fatale. Vera
is so independent that she lacks any connection with the world around her.

21
22 John Belton

She has no family, friends, home, or profession. Sue’s reluctance to marry

is nightmarishly reversed with Vera, who forces Al to play the role of her
husband when they get to Los Angeles. The anxieties embodied in Vera are
resolved through her accidental death, a resolution familiar to film noir.
The threat that Al himself poses to the social order as homeless, nameless
outcast and criminal is, in turn, resolved with his arrest in the final scene.
Thus the film “contains” the anxieties it unleashes.
As Tag Gallagher has persuasively argued, all of Ulmer’s films are moral-
ity plays, focusing on the moral failures of their heroes and/or heroines, who
suffer for the choices they make or fail to make (2 of 29). In this sense, then,
Detour reaffirms the social order. As Robert Warshow notes of the gangster
film, the tragic fate of the gangster acts out and manages our fantasies. We,
like the gangster, desire to succeed and abhor failure. But individual suc-
cess—for the gangster, at least—inevitably culminates in death. The gangster
pays for success with his life. As Warshow writes,

This is our intolerable dilemma: that failure is a kind of death and success is evil
and dangerous, is—ultimately—impossible. The effect of the gangster film is to
embody this dilemma in the person of the gangster and resolve it by his death.
The dilemma is resolved because it is his death, not ours. We are safe for the
moment, we can acquiesce in our failure, we can choose to fail. (133)

We are reconciled to failure, to the ultimate unattainability of success. If the

gangster film explores the tragedy of success, Detour explores the tragedy
of failure in the form of a moral lesson, its characters serving as cautionary
exemplars to guide our own choices and behaviors. In this sense, even a bleak
film like Detour manages the “social and political anxieties and fantasies”
that Jameson finds in every “mass cultural text.”
Ulmer’s most critically celebrated films tend to be his “Hollywood” fea-
tures—The Black Cat (1934), Bluebeard (1944), Strange Illusion (1945), De-
tour (1945), The Strange Woman (1946), Ruthless (1948), The Naked Dawn
(1955), and The Cavern (1965). All of these films speak to the alienated state
of the individual in mass culture. It is true that none of these films projects the
utopian, “optical illusion of social harmony” that characterizes the mass cul-
tural texts described by Jameson. Indeed, Ulmer’s exposure and exploitation
of social and political anxieties might be viewed as politically progressive, as
critiques of late capitalist mass culture. His central characters are proletarian
tough guys, or maybe not-so-tough guys like Al Roberts in Detour. Roberts
spouts the tough-guy lingo and adopts the hard-boiled attitude of pulp fiction,
but he becomes so entangled in his cynical philosophy of life that he becomes
solipsistic to an extreme and lacks any sense of a concern for the social.
 The Search for Community 23

Like Vendig in Ruthless, Jenny Hager in The Strange Woman climbs out of
poverty on the backs of those around her, but she remains steadfastly sym-
pathetic to the poor, feeding and housing them, doctoring them when they
are sick, and attempting to close down the grog houses that condemn them
(like her father) to alcoholism and wasted lives. Even if there is a streak of
misogyny in her representation, Jenny is nonetheless seen as a product of a
social and cultural system in which men have all the money and power, and
she understands, even as a child, that the only way in which she can obtain this
power is through men. Vendig, on the other hand, is a study in class betrayal.
The Ruthless script, written by blacklisted writer Alvah Bessie, documents the
way in which capitalism has corrupted the film’s hero. A New York Times re-
view of the film noted that “the authors have built a financial pirate of titanic
proportions; a man so possessed by avarice and so cruelly cold and inhuman
that he assumes a degree of monstrousness unrelated to reality.” Mistaking a
radical critique of American capitalism for a failed attempt at “realism,” the
Times proved itself to be totally clueless as to the intentions of the film.
Exceptions to this rule serve largely to confirm it. The Count of Monte
Cristo and his wife, in the film which bears her name, struggle on behalf
of disenfranchised French workers against the corrupt aristocracy and the
bureaucracy that supports them. In The Pirates of Capri, Count Amalfi, chief
adviser to the Queen, subverts the interests of his own class and, in Gary
Morris’s words, leads a “proletarian revolt against an increasingly cruel Nea-
politan aristocracy” (2 of 5).
Gallagher likens Ulmer’s films to morality plays, tracing this aspect of
his work back to his Jesuit education as a child. If we understand Ulmer as
a secular moralist, rather than as a Jesuit-educated Jewish allegoricist, it’s
possible to see his films in terms of moral struggle. But the struggle is not a
struggle for the soul or for salvation, as it is in Murnau. Rather it’s a struggle
within the self, a struggle within the field of one’s contradictory desires, a
struggle against one’s weaknesses, a struggle with the essential nature of
one’s character. In other words, Ulmer’s morality plays are not religious; they
are behavioral. And the behaviors that drive them reflect the reification and
commodification of late capitalist mass culture. His central characters remain
victims of the individualistic desires, fantasies, and dreams generated by mass
culture. The Strange Woman would seem to be a morality play of the religious
sort. Its climax presents its heroine with her own self-image, described in
the words of a frontier evangelist preacher. Turning from a female sinner on
display at the front of the chapel to the good women of Bangor, the preacher
asks, “Which of you has taken a man from her sister?” as we watch Jenny,
who stole her husband from her best friend, squirm in her seat. Ulmer cuts
to a close-up of Jenny as the preacher denounces female lust. The preacher’s
24 John Belton

logic becomes more and more psychotic—beauty makes women evil; evil
will necessarily reveal itself; evil cannot propagate itself—there will be no
sons to mourn for you, the preacher says, looking at Jenny, who is unable
to bear children. “The lips of a strange woman drip honey and her mouth is
smoother than oil. But her end is as bitter as wormwood; sharp as a two-edged
sword.” The preacher’s sustained religious fanaticism emerges as a kind of
crazy truth—a staging of the heroine’s own conflicts over her prior behavior.
Though this “truth” is given religious form, it is a truth about the nature of
the heroine’s self-knowledge, not about the state of her soul.
In Detour, Roberts struggles with his knowledge of his own weaknesses—
thus the defensive mechanism of the tough-guy, hard-boiled facade. Sue, at
the Break o’ Dawn Club in New York, bolsters his self-image, promising that
his talent at the piano will get him into Carnegie Hall. “Yeah,” he replies, “as
a janitor.” Characteristically, he demolishes any idealized image of himself.
When Sue suddenly tells him that she’s decided to go alone to Los Angeles
to seek a career for herself, she tacitly acknowledges what we’ve sensed
already—that Al is a loser and that she’d be better off without him. And she
takes any positive self-image he might have with her. Al’s journey can be seen
as a last-ditch attempt to reconstruct his shattered self-image by reacquiring
Sue as his mirror. Minutes before Haskell dies, Roberts fantasizes Sue sing-
ing their song, “I Can’t Believe That You’re in Love with Me,” in the rearview
mirror of Haskell’s car. Though idealized in the mirror, Sue is or is about to
be behind him—she’s in the past, something he has left behind on his journey
to nowhere. He winds up with Vera instead. Vera is, of course, better matched
to Roberts than Sue ever was. Vera is a more accurate mirror for him. As
she tells him, “We’re both alike, both born in the same gutter.” Every bit as
tough and cynical as he is (if not more), Vera, dying slowly of consumption,
becomes Roberts’s true mirror, reflecting back the hopelessness and sense of
fatality that are essential to his nature.
If being with Sue was “a little like working in Heaven,” being with Vera
is clearly more like being in Hell. But it is a Hell of his own making, the
result of his own unconscious self-destructiveness. What else would you call
it when a man in a stolen car, wearing the clothes of a man he accidentally
killed and carrying over $750 of the dead man’s money, decides to pick up a
female hitchhiker? At any rate, Roberts gets to L.A.; but instead of marrying
Sue, he becomes trapped in a nightmarish inversion of that—he is forced into
a marriage of convenience with Vera, locked into a two-room honeymoon
apartment with her.
Roberts gets to Vera through Haskell. Haskell is Roberts’s physical double;
even Vera remarks that they look alike—enough for Roberts to take Haskell’s
place in her inheritance scheme, without arousing suspicion. The resemblance
 The Search for Community 25

gives concrete form to Roberts’s weakened self-image. He would rather be

somebody else, anybody else—even a womanizing, small-time bookie like
Haskell—than be himself. He would rather be dead than Al Roberts. So he be-
comes Haskell and leaves himself—in the form of Haskell’s body, now dressed
in Roberts’s clothes and bearing his ID—lying dead in a roadside ravine.
In this morality play, Roberts confronts mirrors of himself. They range
from Sue to Vera, and each is a bit truer to his own self-image. In killing Vera,
the last personification of his virtues and vices, he is left without any identity
whatsoever. His journey is, as one of my former students put it, “a story of
self-actualization.” He finally realizes the essential lack that has always been
at the core of his being.
The irony, for Roberts and other Ulmer characters, is that they can never
escape who they are. Roberts has become locked in a pattern of behavior that
he semi-realizes is self-destructive, but he is too weak to do anything other
than be carried by the momentum of his own inertia toward self-annihilation.
Roberts, Jenny, and others battle their inner weaknesses even as they resign
themselves to them. What is so hypnotic about the moral struggle that certain
characters in Ulmer films undergo is the oscillating movement that propels
them in an endless back-and-forth cycle between desire and doubt. An inabil-
ity to resolve this movement constitutes their moral dilemma.
What remains to be resolved in the portrait of Ulmer that I am presenting
here is the precise nature of the relationship between his social and moral
visions. The answer to this question lies, I think, in Jameson’s notion of the
alienation of the individual within late capitalism and the desire for that indi-
vidual to reclaim membership in an authentic, but no longer attainable, “folk”
community. It’s possible to understand Jenny Hager’s genuine dedication to
the poor in Strange Woman as a feature of her social alienation and an aspect
of her desire for community. Her alienation, however, is realized in bourgeois
terms—her quasi-psychotic quest for male power and the moral struggles
she undergoes in an attempt to find a place for herself within an oppressive,
patriarchal social structure.
Al Roberts, on the other hand, has no obvious commitment to the world
from which he comes and enjoys an alienation for which there is no hypo-
thetical solution. His goal is the restoration of an idealized past with Sue,
not with any preindustrialist, agrarian, folk community. His moral struggle
is clearly a product of his social alienation, but the film refuses to provide
an alternative social space with which he might identify. In Detour, there is
no possibility for a return to a precapitalist paradise. Its characters are con-
demned to live, or rather die, in a world where money rules. But even if it is
the only thing of value, it can’t buy what Roberts wants. It is only a piece of
paper, crawling with germs.
26 John Belton

To some extent, Ulmer’s last film, The Cavern, provides a solution to the
problem that has plagued his earlier characters. The film creates a commu-
nity of alienated characters, forcing the community to come into being by
sealing its characters off in a cave together. The film’s biblical overtones,
communicated through the General’s reading of “Genesis,” are accompanied
by a series of shots which show the various entrapped characters in their in-
dividual isolation, listening as a fragmented collective to the words he says
aloud. Mimicking the story of “Genesis” itself, the scene depicts the creation
of a new social and moral order. But this preindustrial, pastoral order is still
a prison of sorts. And it is undermined, like Poelzig’s house in The Black Cat,
with dynamite. The explosion of this world, set off by the very character who
read “Genesis” aloud, sends its surviving characters back out into the world
but also into a less-than-perfect social order, where one supposes that their
alienation will return with a vengeance.
In his essay, Jameson opposes “the mass cultural text” to what he refers to
as “popular . . . folk art of the past” (134). Folk art was “the ‘organic’ expres-
sion of . . . distinct social communities or castes” (134). If, as Jameson ac-
knowledges, modernist authors such as Gertrude Stein lack “a unified social
group with its own cultural specificity” and thus write for themselves and for
strangers rather than for an organic community, works of folk art enjoy an
authenticity that works of modernism or of mass culture do not. “The only
authentic cultural production today,” writes Jameson,

has seemed to be that which can draw on the collective experience of marginal
pockets of the social life of the world system: black literature and blues, British
working-class rock, women’s literature, gay literature, the roman quebecois, the
literature of the Third World; and this production is possible only to the degree
to which these forms of collective life or collective solidarity have not yet been
fully penetrated by the market and by the commodity system (140).

Jameson might well have included Yiddish literature and film in his list of
folk cultural texts. These works possess the necessary characteristics that
define them as the product of an organic social group—a common language
and references to a common cultural tradition. Much as Gaelic embodies as-
pects of Irish identity that elude Irish English, so Yiddish serves as source of
ethnic and cultural identity for Jews in opposition to more official, national
languages within which the Yiddish-speaking population lives, such as Rus-
sian, Polish, German, or English. At the same time, Yiddish literature (theater,
novels, short stories, poems, and oral works) and film draw on and appeal to
a traditional folklore and body of cultural practices that provide a common
heritage for this unique ethnic group. Just as important is the fact that these
works are produced and consumed within this common social group; they are
 The Search for Community 27

created by members of this community for other members of that same com-
munity (rather than by one social group for another, as is often the case with
white-produced race films; indeed, Ulmer’s race film, Moon over Harlem
[1939], lacks the ethnic authenticity of those directed by African American
filmmakers such as Oscar Micheaux or Spencer Williams). As Jameson sug-
gests, folk art involves “an aesthetic ‘contract’ between a cultural producer
and a certain homogeneous class or group public: they drew their vitality
from the social and collective status . . . of the situation of aesthetic produc-
tion and consumption” (136).
The group of Ulmer films discussed earlier—his “classics”—represent only
Ulmer’s most familiar work. Ulmer also directed four Yiddish films—Green
Fields (1937), The Singing Blacksmith (1938), The Light Ahead (1939), and
American Matchmaker (1940). Though Ulmer himself did not speak Yiddish
(Hoberman 247), he was Jewish and was an associate of members of the
Yiddish theater. In other words, though something of an outsider, he quickly
became involved with a cohesive group of writers, producers, actors, and
other members of the Jewish Art Theater on the Lower East Side of Manhat-
tan. Ulmer’s four Yiddish films reveal a radically different social vision—one
that illustrates Jameson’s argument about folk art. The notion of community
found in these films is diametrically opposed to that found in Ulmer’s film
noirs. The films depict a viable ethnic collectivity, ranging from entirely Jew-
ish communities in films set in the shtetl (The Singing Blacksmith, The Light
Ahead) and rural farmland (Green Fields), to primarily Jewish communities
in contemporary urban areas (American Matchmaker). Though the narratives
feature conflict among the films’ various characters, that conflict belies a
more profound sense of common purpose and community that ties the char-
acters together. Green Fields, based on a Yiddish play by Peretz Hirschbein
(who also wrote the screenplay), provides an excellent example of this.
The narrative trajectory of the film takes the central character, Levi Yitsk-
hok—a rabbinical student—from an urban yeshiva where he seems to have
lost his way (he falls asleep at his studies while his two colleagues study
through the night) to a rural farm where he becomes the houseguest of a Jew-
ish peasant family. The last scene of the film has him become part of the fam-
ily; in the last shot, he walks off into the distance with the farmer’s daughter,
Tsine, whose hand in marriage he has requested.
The script frames his journey as a search for truth. His fellow students note
that “some hidden force drives him to leave us.” Levi is vaguely dissatisfied
with his spiritual state. His colleagues describe him as “restless.” For them,
study leads to peace of mind, but not for Levi.
Elements of traditional folktales involving quests structure the film, as can
be seen in the film’s use of night and day scenes. The only night scene in the
28 John Belton

film occurs in the yeshiva at the start. The only time we see Levi asleep also
occurs in this scene. As he opens the door to leave on his journey, a shaft of
sunlight enters and shines on him; it’s a deliberate visual effect on Ulmer’s
part—it is even marked by a continuity error at the start of the shot, in that
the synchronization of the shaft of light and the opening of the door is imper-
fect. This light, of course, symbolizes the light of truth. The dialogue with the
other students makes this clear. They explain to him that he need not go out
into the world: “The light of truth is everywhere,” they insist. “You need not
search for it.” Levi replies, “The light of truth is everywhere. But one must
still search for it.” The search takes him from the all-male, urban, enclosed
world of the yeshiva to a world of nature. It takes him from a world of students
to one of family and community—the family of David-Noich and the com-
munity of this family and a neighboring family (Elkone, Gitl, and Sterna).
The journey is presented as a movement through nature. A medium close-
up of Levi walking is superimposed over a montage of shots of fields, mead-
ows, and fruit trees. Levi is initially detached from nature—the image of his
face is superimposed over shots of the landscape that technically exclude
him. This is the first of several montages of nature and farming. The montage
ends with Levi’s encounter with David-Noich’s youngest son, the boy Avrom-
Yankov, an encounter which begins Levi’s new course of instruction on farm-
ing, rural life, and nature.
The film begins with an emblematic shot of the communal harvesting of
a field of hay. (The film was released by a company called Collective Film
Producers and was codirected by Ulmer and Jacob Ben-Ami; J. Hoberman
describes the collective as having “progressive” politics, 247). In this shot
(which reappears later), a group of women rake hay in the foreground while
men lift hay with pitchforks onto a hay wagon in the background. It is to
this image that the film moves. The image evokes all the positive values of
community and nature. It looks back to a preindustrial, agrarian paradise
unspoiled by the forces of modernity.
This Edenic paradise is associated with the “true Jews” that Levi seeks.
Levi is presented as a wandering Jew in search of “true Jews.” In answer to
questions about his journey and where he is going, he explains, “I’ll stop
wherever I find true Jews.” When Avrom-Yankov points out where he and his
family live, Ulmer interjects another nature montage, dissolving from long
shots of trees in a grove and fruit trees in blossom to a medium-close shot of
a plow (followed by a pair of male feet) digging furrows in a field, and a pair
of women planting rows of potatoes in a plowed field.
The theme of “nature” is extended through notions of “naturalness.”
Though the two families of farmers are seen as having various cycles of
melodramatic interaction, peppered by quarrels and making up after quar-
 The Search for Community 29

rels, these cycles are presented as natural—as part of the everyday give and
take of communal life in rural areas. Thus the resolution of the separated
lovers plotline involving Hersh-ber and Sterna climaxes with Hersh-ber’s
emotional outbreak—actual anger at Elkone, Sterna’s father, for standing in
their way—to which Elkone responds positively, as if he has been waiting
for an open, demonstrative act of quarrelling so that they could set things
right. Levi is cast as a voyeuristic outsider to all this; he scrupulously avoids
any involvement in the families’ quarrels. His gestures differ dramatically
from those of the people around him. He seems disaffected and distant. He
almost never looks those he converses with directly in the eye, but constantly
looks off in a state of semi-self-absorption. His hands nervously stroke the
lapels of his coat jacket or play with buttons on his coat, illustrating his self-
containment. His progress through the film is from isolation and alienation
to contact and community, a progress that begins with his contact with the
boy, Avrom-Yankov, and culminates with his encounter with Tsine, who im-
modestly kisses him. As in a fairy tale, her kiss seems to awaken him from
his self-absorption and leads to his union with her. They walk off, hand in
hand, in the final shot—the most natural presentation of him in the film. Levi
has found his place within this community, an event signaled by the pastoral
nature of this final shot, which frames him and his bride-to-be through the
handles of a plow that rests in the foreground. Though the two families quar-
rel over social protocols (the proper behavior of their children, proprietorship
over Levi as honored houseguest), they recognize one another as “good Jews,”
assist one another at harvests, and oversee the marriage of their children to
one another, making two families one within an unseen but implicitly larger,
Jewish community of farmers.
The world in which Green Fields is set bears no temporal or spatial marks
that could identify it. Its world appears to be preindustrial, agrarian, and
possibly eastern European. We see a horse-drawn cart, a plow, a thatched-
roof cottage, simple peasant clothing, and bare feet. We see no automobiles,
tractors, electric lights, telephones, or other machinery of modernity. This is
the spatial and temporal landscape of the folk tale. The Singing Blacksmith
somewhat resembles this world, though it is set in a rural shtetl rather than
on a farm. The most sophisticated machinery that we can see consists of a
traditional blacksmith’s forge and the tools of his trade (a pair of bellows, an
anvil, a steel mallet). The world of the film is the space of the small village
in which it is set — the simple streets through which characters walk and the
cozy interiors (taverns, sewing rooms, parlors) in which they interact. Ulmer
populates this village with various tradesmen and working-class types—the
blacksmith, a cart driver, seamstresses, two matchmakers—as well as mem-
bers of the “better,” merchant class. In the very first scene, when Yankel is ap-
30 John Belton

prenticed to the old blacksmith, Yankel’s father, Simcha, explains that his son
had unreasonably wanted to “go to the gymnasium with the aristocrats” but
that he thought his son was better suited for manual labor. The film explores
class difference through the blacksmith Yankel’s marriage to the orphaned
daughter of a merchant, contrasting his energy, vitality, and sensuality to her
sensitive and somewhat sickly reserve. The matchmaker laughs at Yankel’s
insistence that she arrange a match between him and Tamara, the niece of the
wealthy Reb Aaron. Later, Yankel apologizes to Tamara, noting that her for-
mer friends no longer visit her because she married a lowly blacksmith. But
class difference is not the source of dramatic conflict. The class dynamics of
the shtetl seem to easily accommodate Yankel’s potentially transgressive mar-
riage. Rather, it is Yankel’s lack of seriousness in his attitude toward life that
emerges as the source of narrative disturbance. Yankel is initially presented as
cool and indifferent to those around him. When the blacksmith who trained
Yankel hands over his business to him and retires, he tells Yankel about his
life, his hopes, and his frustrations. He reminisces about his dead wife and
child. Yankel listens but eats while doing so and does not seem to care. After
the old man refers to his dead son buried in the village graveyard, Yankel
unemotionally notes that “we all end up there eventually.”
Yankel’s father asked the blacksmith to teach his son the trade of the smithy
but also to make him “virtuous.” The blacksmith agrees to the former but not
to the latter. Yankel’s chief virtues as an adult appear to reside in his delight
in leisure-time activities—in drinking, singing, dancing, and womanizing.
After a montage sequence in which Yankel’s apprenticeship as a blacksmith
is linked to the changing cycles of nature (tree branches heavy with ice and
snow followed by fruit trees in blossom), he inherits the smithy and is not
seen at work again until a scene shortly before he first sees Tamara, when
he sings the “Strike the Hammer” song. When a matchmaker tells Yankel he
should have a wife, he replies, “Why do I need stale bread when I can get
fresh rolls?” We have already seen Yankel taking girls to the woods, where he
seduces them, and flirting with Rivke, a girl promised in marriage to another.
The appearance of Tamara transforms Yankel from a self-indulgent, pleasure-
seeking wastrel into a “mensch.” He now has a goal—Tamara—which he
pursues doggedly. He drags the matchmaker with him to her house and forces
her to propose the match. He confesses to Tamara that, after meeting her, he
felt ashamed of himself, referring to his reputation as a womanizer.
As with Levi in Green Fields, Yankel moves from alienation to engagement
as he discovers the importance of family and community. Unlike Levi, Yankel
is introduced as a full-fledged member of this village. His father and the old
blacksmith engage in ritualistic bargaining as they negotiate the arrangement
for his apprenticeship, which they then celebrate with a drink. The black-
 The Search for Community 31

smith then gives the young Yankel his first drink, bringing him into the ritual.
Rituals associated with work give way to those associated with play. Musical
sequences show Yankel singing and dancing in spaces where the villagers
gather after work. But his relationship to this communal life of the village
is presented in terms of the pursuit of his own desires—his series of affairs
with young village women. The narrative’s central conflict hinges on Yankel’s
moral dilemma. His encounter with Tamara makes him realize the emptiness
of his existence. His marriage with her and the birth of his son emerge as
redemptive acts. But his past comes back to haunt him in the form of Rivke,
who leaves her husband and attempts to take Yankel away from his wife and
child. In one of the film’s most erotic moments, a drunken Yankel stokes the
fire in the forge as Rivke pumps the bellows. They kiss, and the fire flames
up. Having given in to temptation, Yankel is again ashamed of himself and
cannot face Tamara. He wanders the streets of the village and encounters the
lonely old blacksmith, who advises him to go back to his wife. As in Sunrise,
a film which seems to be a model for the melodramatic story of the husband,
wife, and other woman told here, Rivke is expelled and husband and wife are
reunited. The final shot of the film is the equivalent of Murnau’s sunrise—a
shot of the baby in its crib, the beginning of a new life in a world of new pos-
sibilities. Family and community are made whole again. Yankel has finally
become “virtuous” through the agency of his redemptive/forgiving wife and
the morally regenerative aura of his newborn son.
The quasi-utopian vision of life depicted in Green Fields is complicated
somewhat by the more complex and diverse representation of village life in
The Singing Blacksmith. In both films, the depiction of the Jewish community
is not without a certain ambivalence, traceable, no doubt, to the source materi-
als on which the films are based. The negative aspects (neighborly jealousy
and contention in Green Fields; class difference and moral flaws in Sing-
ing Blacksmith) are counterbalanced by the positive virtues of a family and
community that have withstood the trials and tribulations of life and found
happiness in one another. Critics have tended to view The Light Ahead as a
film that is highly critical of the Jewish community within which the story
is set. The town of Glupsk (literally “Foolstown”) is presented as provincial,
superstitious, and corrupt. “Glubsk is still firmly in the Middle Ages,” writes
Hoberman. “The life of the town is depicted as miserable and degrading,
religion shown to be self-serving and hypocritical—even the dietary laws
have been perverted by commerce” (302). Yet the character who occupies the
film’s moral center, bookseller Reb Mendele, understands these flaws within
the culture to be features that define Jewish life. For him the lives of Jews are
characterized by “all the calamities, adversities, hardships, curses, troubles,
afflictions, miseries, [and] disasters.” It is “always the same old story” that
32 John Belton

befalls his people. He continues, “every village has its rich, its paupers . . . its
wise men, scholars, fools, ignoramuses . . . its stirrers of pots, its leading citi-
zens . . . its innocent lambs and insolent ruffians.” Glupsk is such a village.
For David Desser, Yiddish culture is a “mélange of conflicting intellectual
and emotional ideas and ideals born of Jewish hope and pain in the cities and
shtetls of Eastern Europe, now gone forever” (40). From the vantage point of
the late 1930s and the imminent Nazi takeover of Poland (and as conveyed in
Desser’s 1990s perspective), there is an understandable nostalgia within Yid-
dish culture for even the negative aspects of Jewish life. In fact, Reb Mendele
repeatedly rhapsodizes about Jewish resilience, invoking “Jewish people . . .
with their eternal hope and belief in a better dawn.” It is his optimism about
the future that oversees the trials and tribulations of the film’s young hero
and heroine. In short, the film’s critique of community takes place within the
context of a larger optimism about its abilities to survive and improve.
If Singing Blacksmith invokes the narrative pattern of Sunrise, The Light
Ahead draws on that film’s universalized character types and its expression-
istic set design. Ulmer’s film resembles a folk tale in its broad strokes, in
its essentialization of its central characters—a poor, lame boy (Fishke) and
a poor, blind girl (Hodel) who are both orphans. The expressive stylization
of Murnau and Borzage (Street Angel, Seventh Heaven) is visible in the Ca-
ligariesque set design of the village, with its angled streets and stucco-faced
houses. The sets contribute to the somewhat gothic, fairy-tale quality of the
film’s urban spaces. This setting provides the backdrop for an unusual ro-
mantic melodrama in which lovers, unable to marry because of their poverty,
are subsequently forced to marry in observance of a bizarre cultural practice
designed to atone for the violation of religious protocols. The traditional mar-
riage that concludes the conventional fairly tale thus takes on a somber cast,
preliminary to a happier ending when the couple escapes this grim fate and
flees to a more promising future in another city.
The film’s hopefulness resides, in part, in its discursive strategies and rhe-
torical shifts. It appears to establish a series of thematic antinomies which it
then qualifies and rethinks. The narrow-minded, medieval, closed community
of Glupsk is opposed to the more open-minded, culturally progressive city
of Odessa. It is to Odessa that Fishke travels in the film’s opening scene, in
his flight from unhappiness in Glupsk. The past and tradition are opposed
to the present and modernization. Rural town is opposed to urban center.
City is contrasted with country; irrationality with rationality. Superstition
informs the beliefs and behaviors of the citizens of Glupsk, who blame the
outbreak of a cholera epidemic on the violation of the Sabbath by a group of
girls who have gone for a swim in the town’s polluted river. Though the town
desperately needs to embrace modern science in the form of doctors and a
 The Search for Community 33

hospital, it attempts to deal with the cholera epidemic through superstitious

ceremony—by marrying its two poorest citizens at nighttime in a graveyard.
The reworking of these antinomies begins in the very first scene, when
Mendele insists that Fishke should not go off alone (i.e., without Hodel) to
the larger, more modern metropolis of Odessa because he would be lonely in
the big anonymous city. Mendele reminds Fishke that he has a place within
the community in Glupsk. Even though the city is petty and corrupt, it none-
theless gives meaning and substance to his life. Yet at the end of the film,
Mendele engineers Fishke and Hodel’s departure to Odessa, where they can
establish themselves anew and escape their identities as Glupsk’s “cholera
bride and cholera groom.” An uncertain future becomes more promising than
the curse of the past, articulated in the language of disease (“cholera”).
Mendele oversees the film’s action with a benign optimism—combining
acceptance and forgiveness with a forward-looking belief that life can be
wonderful. This moral dynamic is conveyed in the opening scene, when a
potential argument swiftly turns into a friendly encounter between two men,
Mendele and Reb Alter, whose horse has eaten Mendele’s hay. From formerly
riding in separate carts, they now ride together. The natural setting—the
sequence is located at the edge of a clearing outside of town—frames the
encounter and encourages its peaceful resolution. Here, four of the film’s
social outcasts (Mendele, Alter, Isaak, and Fishke) form a little group of fel-
low Israelites within the peace and beauty of the pastoral landscape. Mendele
speaks of “Nature in all of its glory” and Ulmer pans away to reveal a verdant
meadow. Mendele breathes deeply and extols the quality of the air. He refers
to the countryside as “paradise.”
The town of Glupsk itself is set against this pastoral world as a space
of quarrels and misunderstandings, hypocrisy, and superstition, as well as
friendship and love. Hodel and Gitel are genuinely friends, as we see in their
first encounter in the street. Dropke, the old woman with whom Hodel lives,
seems initially somewhat mercenary and harsh in her relations with Hodel.
She encourages her to exploit her blindness by becoming a beggar, a sugges-
tion which Hodel adamantly refuses. But Dropke does seem to care about
Hodel’s fate, and, by the end of their argument, she seems genuinely sorry for
what she has said and for making Hodel cry.
Though the narrative tends to focus on the romantic couple and their vicissi-
tudes, it constantly digresses to portray the life of the community as well. This
is done through Mendele’s interactions with the town’s inhabitants. There’s a
scene with a rabbinical student who complains to his friend that there are only
six days in the week and that he has “no Thursday.” This is a reference to the
custom of esn teg or “eating days” and means that he has no host family to
invite him to dinner on Thursdays. Mendele listens to his tale and then offers
34 John Belton

him money so that he can eat. Later, there’s a scene between Mendele and a
childless woman. Mendele is selling prayer books and she asks him if he has
any prayers for childless women. He offers her one and, unable to read herself,
she asks him to read it aloud, weeps a bit, and then walks off without buying
the prayer. Neither of these scenes advances the central narrative, but both
scenes give the film’s depiction of community texture and depth.
The opposition between nature and culture is not absolute but remains
important. Only by getting outside of the village are characters able to see its
values and its limitations. Mendele’s wisdom seems to derive not only from
his association with books but from his status as an outsider. His wandering
has put him in contact with the beauties of nature—with the world outside
of town. Nature within Glupsk has become polluted by the town; the filthy
river is the source of a cholera epidemic that literally plagues the commu-
nity. Similarly, the town has imposed a rigid, unnatural class structure that
discriminates against those at the bottom (Fishke and Hodel), relegating
them to an economic and social prison of sorts. The religious elders control
the community economically and socially. The town coffers contain 100,000
rubles, but the elders refuse to use these funds to build a hospital, preferring
to support prayer groups. The wife of the chief elder enforces social regula-
tions, denouncing the girls for bathing on the Sabbath and forcing Fishke and
Hodel to marry in the graveyard in order to assuage God’s wrath.
The folk aspects of the story lie in its attempts to depict the trials and
tribulations of the Jewish people in the figures of Fishke and Hodel. Fishke
and Hodel describe themselves as “cursed,” not only because of their physi-
cal afflictions but also because of the way in which events seem to frustrate
their hopes and desires for the future. Even their wish to one day marry has
a twisted and unwanted fulfillment. They are “cursed” as “the cholera bride
and cholera groom.” But within the larger darkness of the film, there is the
promise of a new day. The screenplay introduces metaphors from nature to
depict this hope. In one scene, Fishke describes to Hodel how the moon lights
up the night. In another, Gitel gives a flower to Hodel to touch. She describes
the flower and notes that its petals are closed at night but that they will open
up when the sun rises, adding that “people are that way too.” Again, Murnau’s
Sunrise would seem to be a source for these metaphors. At the end of the film,
Fishke and Hodel are driven to the clearing outside of town seen at the begin-
ning of the film. Mendele suggests that they will be cured of their lameness
and blindness in Odessa, and the couple walk off, hand in hand, up a hill into
the countryside. Those once cursed will find cures. Though the Jewish people
live in hardship, they will surely endure and ultimately triumph over it.
The central character of American Matchmaker is also “cursed.” Nat Sil-
ver has inherited his Uncle Shya’s bad luck with women. Each of Nat’s eight
 The Search for Community 35

engagements has been broken off at the last minute. So Nat does what his
uncle did—he becomes a matchmaker, or shadchen, and devotes himself to
making other people happy. In doing this, Nat establishes a bond of sorts
between his identity as a successful New York garment manufacturer and the
European past of his extended family. More important, he finds a new identity
for himself through a revival of Jewish tradition. He becomes a matchmaker.
But Nat is not quite a traditional matchmaker. He doesn’t wear a derby and a
raincoat like his matchmaking colleagues in the Bronx. He wears an elegant
tuxedo. The sign on his door does not read “Matchmaker,” or “Shadchen,”
but “Advisor in Human Relations.” (Morris, his comic sidekick and butler, is
unfamiliar with the Latinate term “relations” and asks what “human relishes”
are.) And he attempts to take matchmaking to a new level, introducing mod-
ern techniques such as psychological profiling. His staff includes a secretary,
a psychiatrist, a doctor, a lawyer, and a rabbi. As Morris quips, Nat uses all
sorts of “modern shadchenology” in his business. Nat becomes a vehicle for
staging the adaptation of traditional, Old World customs to the New World.
In many respects, American Matchmaker differs from Ulmer’s other Yid-
dish films—primarily in its spatial and temporal setting of 1940s New York
City. It begins with a montage of urban settings at night—bridges, skyscrap-
ers, automobiles—and takes us to Nat’s tastefully furnished apartment on
Central Park West, where a bachelor party is in progress (attended by Nat
and five of his manufacturer friends, all wearing tuxedos). Later in the film,
Ulmer inserts another montage of urban nightlife, featuring neon signs ad-
vertising consumer products (Chevrolet, Planters, Coca-Cola), movie-theater
marquees, a busy bar, and a crowded restaurant. This montage answers the
first and introduces Judith Aarons, who will become Nat’s love interest. Two
scenes later, we return to Nat’s apartment for the first time since he became
a matchmaker, and we see him dine at home with Judith. The lack created by
the last scene set in Nat’s apartment, when he agreed to break off his engage-
ment with Shirley (so that she and her childhood sweetheart could marry), is
liquidated in this scene when Nat tells Judith why he became a matchmaker
(his failures with women) and sets in motion a series of events that will lead to
their marriage. The logic of the narrative suggests that only by reestablishing
connections with folk traditions can modern Jews find true happiness.
What is also striking about the film in terms of Ulmer’s earlier Yiddish
films is the presence of English phrases and expressions among the Yid-
dish-language dialogue. Nat’s sister Elvie betrays her Americanization in her
dialogue, which is 50 percent English. At his bachelor party, Nat’s butler,
Morris, speaks English to the guests, who joke with him about his refusal to
speak Yiddish. The English-only dialogue is clearly an attempt to observe so-
cial propriety; in more intimate conversations with Nat and his maid, Morris
36 John Belton

speaks Yiddish (sprinkled with English words and phrases). As with the tradi-
tion of the matchmaker, which has been modernized, so the language of Yid-
dish has incorporated new, non-Yiddish expressions like “okay” and “nice.”
When Nat’s mother tells him about his uncle Shya, she says, “He thought
by helping others he might help himself.” She tells Nat that he resembles his
uncle in every way. Nat responds, “Incredible—but this is America, not Eu-
rope.” She answers, “Family characteristics know no boundaries. They travel
across oceans . . . over mountains.” This is the message of the film—cultural
traditions, like family characteristics, know no boundaries. They have mi-
grated with the Jewish people from Europe to the United States and have
found new vitality and energy in new, more modern forms.
Shortly after making American Matchmaker, his last Yiddish film, Ulmer
took a job in Los Angeles at Producers Releasing Corporation (PRC), rejoin-
ing his former colleague Seymour Nebenzal (producer of People on Sunday),
who had become an investor in the company. The heyday of Yiddish film in
Poland and the United States was over, and only a few Yiddish-language films
were ever made after 1945. Though PRC was only a marginal studio within
the larger production system of Hollywood, it still made films for a mass au-
dience. Like Gertrude Stein, Ulmer was relegated to making films “for him-
self ” and “for strangers.” His films were no longer produced and consumed
within an organic, ethnic collectivity. In the context of his career as a whole,
his four Yiddish films stand out for the optimism of their social vision. They
were inhabited by characters who shared a common language, culture, and
tradition unique to them as a people, within the multicultural mass publics
that dominated cultural production and consumption in the first half of the
twentieth century. These films provide a representation of a cohesive social
group that Ulmer’s subsequent films insistently yearn for, like an amnesiac
for a forgotten identity. They represent a social fantasy that speaks to the
deepest desires of the alienated individual in contemporary mass culture.
Author’s note: I want to thank Sharon Pucker Rivo of the National Center
for Jewish Film at Brandeis University for loaning me video copies of Green
Fields and The Light Ahead, and Jeffrey Shandler for his help with esn teg.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Desser, David. Review of Bridge of Light: Yiddish Film between Two Worlds, by J.
Hoberman, Film Quarterly 47, no. 1 (Autumn 1993): 40–42.
Gallagher, Tag. “All Lost in Wonder,” at www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/firstre-
lease/fr0301/tgafr12a.htm (accessed 30 October 2002).
Hoberman, J. Bridge of Light: Yiddish Film between Two Worlds (New York: Museum
of Modern Art, 1991).
 The Search for Community 37

Jameson, Fredric. “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” Social Text 1 (Winter
1979): 130–48.
Morris, Gary. “Unmistakably Ulmer: The Pirates of Capri on DVD,” at www.bright-
lights.com/32/piratesofcapri.html (accessed 30 October 2002).
T.M.P., New York Times, 4 September 1948.
Warshow, Robert. The Immediate Experience: Movies, Comics, Theatre and Other
Aspects of Popular Culture (New York: Doubleday, 1962).
 3
On the Graveyards of Europe

The Horror of Modernism in The Black Cat

Herbert Schwaab

In his last film Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, from 1975, Pier Paolo Paso-
lini claims that there is a connection between modern art and acts of violence
which take place in a modern version of a ghost house. The paintings of Leger,
Feininger, and the cubist artists look down with indifference on the victims
and their tormentors (Minas 65). The paintings become passive bystanders to
what happens inside a northern Italian palazzo in the last days of World War
II. Pasolini expresses his deep ambivalence about the emancipative power of
modern art. The visual style of this film emphasizes the condition of voyeur-
ism, as if Pasolini were questioning himself as a filmmaker at the sight of the
real horror of moral decay and fascism (66).
Ulmer’s The Black Cat, from 1934, belongs to a cycle of classic horror films
from the beginning of the sound-film era. Amongs films such as Frankenstein,
Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and The Mummy, The Black Cat is unique in
terms of its set design, which is strongly influenced by modernist architecture
and art deco. Whereas most horror films of the era rely on an unspecific Eng-
lishness showing old gothic castles and ghost houses, Ulmer’s human monsters
haunt a “new” and stylish world of white walls, with clear geometric lines and
abstract ornaments. The film is also unique in referring directly to the socio-
political reality in the aftermath of the First World War. The house is built on
the remnants of Fort Marmaros, next to a gigantic graveyard left behind by the
war in Hungary. Its destruction by the Russian army is the result of Hjalmar
Poelzig’s treachery in war. Poelzig, one of the film’s main characters, has re-
turned to the scene of the crime as the architect and owner of the house.
The film is very short and very strange: within its 65 minutes, it offers us
Satanism, extreme sadism, erratic characters, highly self-conscious dialogues

39
40 Herbert Schwaab

mocking themselves, a score of classical music (very often used contrapun-

tally), implausible actions, the celebration of a Black Mass, visual elegance,
the adaptation of German expressionism, and a camera set free from the
constraints of narration to move through the interiors of this house. Its het-
erogeneity and exaggerations sometimes lend the film a quality of campiness,
as Noah Isenberg has noticed (7). The excessiveness and unevenness in style,
narration, and acting turn the film into an irritating art object. It is for this
reason that the film remains a challenge and enigma for cinephiles and film
scholars. This is why one tends to “overread” the film, wanting to attribute
meaning to it. And this may offer an excuse for the fact that Pasolini’s film
came into my mind in relation to Ulmer’s film, and that I felt encouraged
to interpret the film as a weird reflection on modernism. Both are about the
horrors of modernism. However, Pasolini’s intellectual approach to filmmak-
ing sets him miles apart from Ulmer’s work in Hollywood cinema. The Black
Cat was the first (and for a long time the only) major work of a then-thirty-
year-old film director with artistic ambitions and some training in European
culture. Due to his untimely death, Salò has often been regarded as Pasolini’s
epitaph, a highly conceptual work resuming the long-lasting quarrel with
film, art theory, and culture undertaken by one of Italy’s most important intel-
lectual figures of the 1960s and 1970s. As Ulmer’s approach to filmmaking
lacks this theoretical depth, it is to be argued whether the film deserves to be
read as a reflection on the relationship between modernism and inhumanity.
The close examination of the relationship between Ulmer’s film and modern-
ism that follows here can be read as testing the limits of such projections onto
a film text.
To find an answer to the question of whether The Black Cat can be read
as a piece of intellectual cinema, let us first have a look at the film’s content:
On their honeymoon through eastern Europe, Peter and Joan Alison meet the
mysterious Dr. Vitus Werdegast, Hungary’s most famous psychiatrist, played
by Bela Lugosi. Following a road accident, the three become uninvited guests
of a man who happens to be Werdegast’s rival, Hjalmar Poelzig. Werdegast
wants to take revenge on Poelzig, who eighteen years earlier, during World
War I, not only betrayed his own troops and sold them to the Russians—which
led to Werdegast’s fifteen-year imprisonment in Kurgal—but also took his be-
loved wife from him. A well-known architect (named after real-life Austrian
architect Hans Poelzig), Poelzig has returned to the battleground and has built
a modern home on a hill next to Europe’s biggest graveyard. The house is
built on top of the basement of the former fortress. This enables a particular
structure, which John Belton refers to as a demonic inversion of the surface
logic and clarity of Poelzig’s house, lying beneath it (154). Poelzig receives
his guests, including his rival, with some reservations, but he soon plans to
 On the Graveyards of Europe 41

use Joan Alison, who rests to recover from the accident, for a Black Mass—
because Poelzig is a Satanist as well as a modernist. In the ensuing events
“the house becomes a new battleground, the space in which the two European
‘monsters’ vie for power and control over their American prey” (Isenberg 6).
Peter Alison is held captive in the cellar. At the same time, devil worshippers
from all over the country gather to celebrate a Satanist ritual, with Werdegast
interfering in the last moment to rescue Joan. Werdegast, having discovered
the night before that Poelzig had not only married his daughter but had also
killed her, plans to take revenge by skinning him alive. But before finishing
his business, he is accidentally shot by Peter. In the moment of his own death,
he lets the American couple escape and pushes a red button that causes the
still-mined building to explode. The film ends with Peter and Joan taking a
train to Vienna.
Art is indeed a subject, not only of Ulmer’s film, but also of many read-
ings of The Black Cat. In his own words, in the famous interview with
Peter Bogdanovich, Ulmer labels the film as a horror picture in the style
of Caligari, a film “very much out of my Bauhaus period” (575–76 ). Bill
Krohn stresses the references to Murnau’s Nosferatu, making us aware of its
sources in romanticism: “the myths of Expressionism are made new by being
married to the private mythology of Poe, with Karloff playing the doomed
artist figure—a fusion of American and European strains of Romantic ex-
tremism” (61). That Poelzig is an artist who, in Werdegast’s words, built his
“masterpiece of construction on top of the masterpiece of destruction” is one
of the few clear references to the character created by Karloff, whose perfor-
mance gives Poelzig an air of dandyism. Every spoken word and every little
gesture is delivered with the highest restraint. Karloff moves his body like
a robot and talks as if he were reciting poetry. One could add that Poelzig’s
attitude is the consequence of repression, the product of a sublimation of
the horrors of war and the crimes he committed: Satanism and aestheticism
could be seen as a relapse into the inhumanities suffered during the war.
But we could also regard his “perverted” modernism as the prime source of
his evilness.
The film remains ambivalent about this, and this ambivalence is possibly
grounded in Ulmer’s in-betweenness, his being lost between two worlds,
which, according to Isenberg, becomes apparent in this film:

The Black Cat offers a fascinating glimpse into the world of an émigré film-
maker negotiating American financial and aesthetic constraints . . . the film rep-
resents the rich interplay between European art cinema and Hollywood camp,
between the undistinguished horrors of war and their psychosexual counterparts,
between reflections of exile and those of home. (5)
42 Herbert Schwaab

In this sense, Poelzig becomes some kind of alter ego of Ulmer, as he creates
an aesthetic realm in which all the conflicts between old and new, tradition
and modernity, come literally to the surface in his stylish mannerism. The
house stands in for a void of modernism, its ambition to end all old and to
begin anew, to leave everything behind. Contradicting the modernist project
to bring enlightenment to its purpose and to overcome human limitation,
Poelzig’s debased modernism creates monstrosities. The film is at the heart
of the ambivalence of modernism. It is some kind of horror-film version
of Adorno and Horkheimer’s groundbreaking study Dialectic of Enlighten-
ment. Written ten years later under similar conditions of exile, Dialectic of
Enlightenment is based on comparable premises about the contradictions of
civilization, modernity, mass culture, freedom, and totalitarianism, and the
differences between Europe and America.1
But not only is Ulmer stuck between two worlds, The Black Cat itself is the
product of a period of transition in film history and style. The film belongs
to the cinema before the code, and before Hollywood established its classical
mode of sound-film narration, which was to become the norm of all cinematic
storytelling. Following film scholar Richard Maltby, the Production Code (or
Hays Code), a system of self-censorship which was introduced in 1934, was
helpful in creating a style and a mode of narration that avoided being too of-
fensive or attracting only a small part of the audience. Hollywood’s principal
product—entertainment—had to be accessible to all (446). The Black Cat has,
in fact, some kind of ‘raw sensationalism’ (Isenberg 8) that Hollywood cinema
preferred not to display in the years following. This led to the decline of the
horror-film genre in the late 1930s. The films became excluded from the ranks
of A movies, and most of the major studios stopped producing them.
The code helped to define the visual style and the forms of narration in
classical Hollywood cinema (Maltby 448). Classical Hollywood cinema
began to create the norm against whose background European modernism
began to take shape in the late 1950s. But sound films made before 1934, and
I count The Black Cat among them, do have glimpses of modernism because
they were falling out of the system of classical storytelling. None of the films
of the early 1930s was truly subversive. The good had to win and the bad had
to be punished in the end. However, the films were often more surrealistic,2
they dealt with more daring subjects and social critique (the Warner Brothers’
gangster films),3 and they offered more violence.4 The Black Cat shares its
“uniqueness” with many other films, and many of the film’s peculiarities have
to be credited to the specific conditions of a period of transition.
The stylistic and narrative digressions of The Black Cat and other films of
this period stimulate the imagination of cinephilia in a similar way to Ulmer’s
B movies of the 1940s and 1950s. As some kind of outsider cinema, the films
 On the Graveyards of Europe 43

do not wholly belong to the classical Hollywood cinema, and they tend to of-
fer digressions. At the same time, readings of Ulmer’s films which are based
on the concepts of auteur theory, for example Belton’s,5 are eager to evoke
the homogeneity of style and narration, and the logic of Ulmer’s aesthetic
decisions. Ulmer himself supported this view, for example by referring to his
films as “morality plays” (Moullet and Tarvernier 10), claiming intellectual
depth for his films. But as by-products of specific historical and aesthetic
conditions, the films don’t really allow such readings. The films’ lack of clo-
sure is one of the main reasons why they are so well loved. Cinephilia is based
on the capacity to imagine things. The love for a film, especially in horror and
B movies, is a love for moments; it can even be satisfied by still photographs.
Before there were DVDs, cinephiles all over the world had nothing to look at
but still photographs printed in film books, but they developed a capacity to
fill in the gigantic gaps with the remembrance of films they had never seen.6
In reading The Black Cat, we should keep in mind how much our imagination
is inspired by memorable moments of the film, and not by a closed film text
being read from beginning to end. Watching a film may give us the occasion
to watch some memorable moments in it.
Let us have a closer look at the visual and narrative oddities of The Black
Cat. In its most beautiful, poetic, and memorable scene, the camera is set
free to move elegantly through the empty spaces of the cellar, accompanied
only by the voice-over of Karloff ’s character and his reflections on Poelzig’s
and Werdegast’s mutual involvement in the war. It is the most obvious sign of
introspection, or even of some kind of remorse, in the character of Poelzig:
“Did we not both die here in Marmaros fifteen years ago? Aren’t we the living
dead?” The shot has abstract qualities because the tracking camera only sug-
gests moving with the characters, not following but guiding them, with noth-
ing in view before them. The movement itself does not really take the point
of view of any of the characters. It is dissociated from the narration, which
means that it has a metaphorical function. It emphasizes, as Stefan Grisseman
says, an autonomous point of view of the film itself (74). According to Classi-
cal Hollywood Cinema, the influential neoformalist study of film, The Black
Cat would have to be classified as nonclassical, because space is subordinated
to narrative causality, not vice versa (Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson 50ff.).
The film does not allow the kind of cognitive mapping Hollywood cinema
is so well known for (53). The subjection of narration to space is another
important feature of European art cinema of the 1950s and 1960s, forming
an alternative way of narration to Hollywood (Nowell-Smith 569). Whereas
classical Hollywood cinema never wanted us to lose our orientation in the
space created by a film, we simply feel lost in modernist films, as well as in
Ulmer’s precode horror film.
44 Herbert Schwaab

The digression from the path of conventional cinema—which was caused

by the specific conditions of the cinema before the code—enables Erik
Ulman to notice a relation between this scene and a film by the pioneer of
intellectual cinema, Alain Resnais: “[That the] camera detaches itself from
the action to roam through the underground passages prefigures the el-
egant and ghostly fluency of Alain Resnais’ L’Année dernière à Marienbad
(1961).” A similar thought came into my mind just before I read Ulman’s
text, which was published in the online magazine Senses of Cinema. I take
this as a proof that it is possible to read The Black Cat along the lines of
our experiences with modern cinema of the 1950s and 1960s. But I don’t
agree with Ulman on his choice of example. There are some similarities
with Marienbad, whose nameless characters move like zombies through a
haunted world of illusions and unreliable memories, in what has the air of
a horror film. But Marienbad’s abstractness, which avoids placement in a
specific period and locale, doesn’t allow references to specific historic and
political events. This is why the sequence reminds me rather of Hiroshima
mon amour (1959). The quasi-philosophical voice-over of Karloff ’s char-
acter has some resemblance with the two characters’ voices underlying the
shots in the film in which they tell the parallel story lines of their lives in
occupied France and in Japan facing nuclear horror. Hiroshima is a film
about the traumatic memory of war. The camera is signifying the forces of
memory, and it learns to move in order to cope with that trauma. It is often
argued that Resnais’ autonomous tracking camera aimed to create the visual
equivalent for the dynamics of thinking and remembering, searching for
modes to represent the way the human mind works.7
In The Black Cat, whose ambitions differ from those of Resnais’ intellectual
cinema in significant ways, the tracking shot builds the emotional center of
the film, but it nevertheless remains somehow isolated in it. Poelzig seems to
show real grief over the death of his wife and some understanding for the sor-
row-ridden Werdegast. In this moment, Poelzig’s voice-over does not wholly
inhabit the same diegetic world as the other voices in the film. For a brief
moment, the film turns over to the realm of intellectual cinema and becomes
a counterpart to Resnais’ Hiroshima. In another scene, in which Poelzig sees
Joan Alison for the first time, the similarities become even more apparent,
as two subsequent tracking shots from slightly altered standpoints moving
toward Poelzig are combined. This form of repetition is a technique used
by Resnais, especially in La guerre est finie (1965), another film obsessed
with war and remembrance.8 That Ulmer’s film may find some resonance
in Resnais’ work proves that it is possible to read the film along the lines of
modernism. But what does it have to say about the interplay of progress and
regression, or about the connection between abstract art and Satanism?
 On the Graveyards of Europe 45

The movements add an almost-pure visual pleasure to the film that can
be used for many ends. Camera movements engage the viewer immediately
with the image. The development of the steadicam and the advent of digi-
tal cinema have led to films such as Gus van Sant’s Elephant (2003) and
Sokurov’s Russian Ark (2002), films that are entirely based on endlessly
extended tracking shots. Elephant is a visual essay on the Columbine High
School massacre, and its reflection on beauty and death pays tribute to the
young people killed in the traumatic incident. Russian Ark is dedicated to the
remembrance of things lost. The tracking camera is on a time travel through
the long walks of the Leningrad Hermitage. Both films use camera move-
ments to create an immediate emotional response in the viewer. There may
be a similar emotional or even redemptive force involved in the camera mov-
ing through the vaults of the fortress in The Black Cat. The camera move-
ment is a mode of communication: the films want to get to their audiences.
But at the same time, tracking shots have always been a staple of horror
films, from Rouben Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931) to Stanley
Kubrick’s The Shining (1980).9 In these cases tracking shots are not used
for communication; they are used to signify horror, violence, and human
suffering. Whenever the camera moves too much it is as if the camera were
guiding us to unknown territory, which is possibly one way of causing hor-
ror for us. Being the emotional center of the film—the moment, from which
my reading of the film takes its strongest impulses—the tracking shot in the
cellar remains ambivalent because an autonomously moving camera almost
automatically has connotations of horror.
The ambiguity of the film is further stressed in another memorable scene
with visual attractions, the celebration of the Black Mass. It is a dynamic,
rhythmic, extremely well-composed and well-paced sequence, but its visual
beauty has not been made to signify something outside of the film. Satanism
may lead us to the extreme limits of art for art’s sake or to horror for horror’s
sake, but there is always a certain hollowness involved in Satanism. And the
film itself doesn’t make any attempts to offer us a plausible explanation for
how and why Poelzig turned to Satanism. Ulmer even seems to mock Satan-
ism. Grissemann refers to the parody of a family idyll in the scene in which
Poelzig reads some lines in a Satanist book before lying down next to his wife
to sleep (77). It may prove to be the case that Satanism feels like an element
that has been added to the film, an element that is disconnected from the
film’s narration and its characters. The claustrophobic atmosphere of the film,
a world reduced to only a few interiors and characters, comes under attack as
this world is unnecessarily crowded with all the unknown people attending
the Black Mass. After this scene the film hurries, not really convincingly, to
its climax. The self-destruction of the two human monsters in a giant explo-
46 Herbert Schwaab

sion is quite plausible and inevitable: Europe’s troubled history, embodied in

the two characters, has to be left behind. But the heroine’s screaming is rather
unmotivated, and Vitus is shot accidentally by the supposed American hero.
In its first fifty minutes, the film carefully creates an atmosphere of sorrow,
doom, haunted memories, and aestheticism, but in the last ten minutes the
tone of the film has apparently changed. This heterogeneity proves that the
film is made up of individual moments.
But this possibly unintended unevenness of the film gives it a specific
quality. Isenberg points us to the campiness of The Black Cat, which is
most apparent in the dialogues; in Lugosi’s overacting and melodramatic
gestures, which contrast with Karloff ’s extremely controlled robotic acting;
the melodramatic or ironic quality of all the memorable lines; and the blur-
ring of boundaries between high and low, Europe and America, war trauma
and repressed sexual desires (5). Isenberg defines camp—referring to Susan
Sontag’s famous text “Notes on Camp”—as “seriousness that fails” (8). Ul-
mer becomes campy because he is too ambitious. The Black Cat is obsessed
with art and Ulmer wants to put as much as possible into the film —a mixture
of expressionism (something in the style of Caligari), some Bauhaus, and the
music of the composers he admired so much. Camp is not intended; it is art,
mostly popular art, running wild. Following Sontag, it should be added that
camp escapes auctorial control; it is art without authors, or great art coming
from minor artists. Camp is situated beyond the realms of high-cultural con-
noisseurship. Sontag clearly connects camp to marginalized members of soci-
ety, to minorities and subcultures, who are excluded from high culture. They
therefore create their own canon of beloved works by reading them against
the grain of commonly held aesthetic values. In this way the unintended “bri-
colage” aesthetics of camp becomes a form of resistance and protest against
art and society (Sontag).
As a form of protest, all the campy moments of The Black Cat can also be
read as theatrical or melodramatic. The gestures and words of the characters,
but also the movements of the camera and other elements of the visual style,
are aspects of an excessive mode of expression, of an excessive want to com-
municate with the viewer, a foregrounding of the telling of the story and not
the told. Peter Brooks traces the sources of melodrama back to a crisis of
communication in the nineteenth century, resulting from the alienation caused
by the secularization and transformations of modern society: The melodra-
matic mode is a “desire to express all” (2). In his book on the classical Hol-
lywood melodrama, film philosopher Stanley Cavell, whose work is based
on the philosophy of ordinary language, defines the melodramatic condition
as an expression of our general estrangement from the means of language
and communication (42). It is the desire to communicate, under conditions
 On the Graveyards of Europe 47

in which one is deprived of the words to express oneself satisfyingly.10 With

their raw and pure sensationalism, the horror films seem to be exclusively
interested in the titillation of their audience. But in a genre that often shows
traces of melodrama11—in being concerned with finding modes of expression
for things which can’t be expressed, in this case the horrors of World War
I—the tracking shots become a mode of communication based on a desire
to “express all,” or to find words when the conditions of language have been
lost. But although the horror film’s raw sensationalism can be used for such
a purpose, Ulmer himself didn’t seem to like the genre.
Ulmer’s contempt for the horror film becomes surprisingly apparent in his
attitude toward the European art cinema of the late 1950s and early 1960s.
In an interview with Luc Moullet and Bertrand Tavernier for the Cahiers
du cinéma, he expresses his dislike for Jean-Luc Godard’s Á bout de souffle
(1959), which he finds ugly, shocking, and disgusting: it’s “comme dans un
film d’horreur” (12). Does he seal the fate of The Black Cat in his condemna-
tion of Godard’s masterpiece of modern art cinema as a “horror film”? Would
Ulmer himself exclude The Black Cat from the high ranks of art because he
had nothing but contempt for the genre? Did he himself finally come to the
conclusion that there was a problematic relation between modernism and hor-
ror? Of course, Ulmer has never been a reliable source of information about
his own life and work. Regarding himself as an artist, he invented stories and
events to confirm this view. But contradictory remarks about his works are as
much the product of his ambivalence toward art and Hollywood as they are
the product of the ambivalence of modernism itself: films such as A bout de
souffle or even Salo are melodramatic, excessive, and overambitious. They
have some kind of “raw sensationalism” because they want to communicate
with their audiences; they want to signify what no longer can be signified
within conventional modes of representation. There are no clear-cut boundar-
ies between popular and art cinema, between horror films and European art
cinema. Popular culture itself could be regarded as a contributor to modern-
ism. Film critic J. Hoberman’s concept of “vulgar modernism” points us to a
modernism that operates out of the hybridity of popular culture itself:

There is a particular sensibility that is the vulgar equivalent of modernism it-

self. By this I mean a popular, ironic, somewhat dehumanized mode reflexively
concerned with the specific properties of its medium or the conditions of its
making. (33)

Hoberman refers to the self-referential moments of film comedies such as the

1941 Helzapoppin, to Mad magazine’s highly self-reflexive relation with pop-
ular culture, and to the pioneering efforts of TV comedian and “avant-garde
48 Herbert Schwaab

artist” Ernie Kovacs. That Godard learns from a filmmaker such as Frank
Tashlin proves that the boundaries between high and low tumble down (36).12
Another proof for the close link between popular culture and art cinema can
be found in Joan Hawkin’s essay on the “canons” and cultural hierarchies of
trash cinema. In mail-order catalogs for lovers of trash cinema, masterpieces
of European art cinema such as Godard’s Weekend (1967) find themselves
on the same pages with films such as The Yeti and the Werewolf (1975).
Hawkins takes this as an opportunity to shed some light on an aspect “gener-
ally overlooked or repressed in cultural analysis, namely, the degree to which
high culture trades on the same images, tropes, and themes which character-
ize low culture” (15). This brings out the horror-film qualities of Salò. The
film’s advertising in such a catalog simply leaves out any information about
Pasolini’s intentions to point us to the sources of fascism and sadism, and
refers to the film with the helpful description “left audiences gaggling” (16).
Amos Vogel’s important book Film as Subversive Art offers another example
of transcending the boundaries between high and low. Popular films, B mov-
ies, experimental and avant-garde cinema, and classic art and European art
cinema are all given the same attention as films that attack capitalist society
and shake our beliefs and convictions (Vogel).
All this may prove that modernism itself is ambivalent and contradictory.
The narration and the visual style of The Black Cat are deeply rooted in this
ambivalence. This means that there isn’t any closure. The film can be read on
more than one level. It cannot be reduced to the stylish architecture and the
“art for art’s sake” mentality of Poelzig and his inhuman, detached approach to
life. It also involves the more progressive forces of Dr. Werdegast, Hungary’s
greatest psychiatrist (that is, before he is totally driven out of his mind).
Michael Henry Wilson refers to the subversiveness of “the metaphysical per-
versity of a quasi-experimental” film (251), but I doubt that the film really is
shockingly subversive. Does the film answer the question of whether Poelzig’s
degeneration can be traced back to his attitude toward modernism? The film
may be subversive in enabling us to raise such questions, but it is too hybrid,
too uneven, too campy to really answer such questions. It should not be read as
if there were an intended subversiveness. As a film which, according to Raul
Ruiz, “breaks up into a series of situations, each with a life of its own” (cited in
Ulman), it is a film dominated by significant moments, and the tracking shots
in the cellar possibly belong to the set of moments we remember most.
Within this text I cannot offer a real conclusion to the questions asked. My
chapter runs the risk of becoming a B movie itself. As homage to The Black
Cat, I hurry toward the climax of my paper. I will not credit all the confusion
of this text to The Black Cat, but I will attribute some of it to the film. It is not
an organic work of art answering all our questions. If we have a unified view
 On the Graveyards of Europe 49

of The Black Cat, we may assume that the two European monsters have to be
destroyed in a huge explosion: doomed Europe has to be left behind. But what
really becomes erased from the film, at least in my memory of it, is the “new
world” represented by the undistinguished American couple: who cares who
they are and what happens to them? We might say that Europe carries the film
aesthetically: expressionism and the art of silent cinema bring the film to its
unique existence, not Hollywood’s classical mode of narration, which came
into existence in the years following The Black Cat. But is there any moral to
be drawn from that? I think not. The film offers moments of intensive reflec-
tions on the fates of its two main characters. But I wish the film would go on
like this and really turn into a modernist film and not a horror movie. I wish
the film would carry us away on an endlessly extended tracking shot. I wish
Poelzig were not a Satanist, and I wish Werdegast did not attempt to skin his
rival alive. I wish I could care for these characters the way I care for the char-
acters in Green Fields, a true piece of outsider cinema made not more than
three years after The Black Cat. Both films are indebted to European culture,
but Green Fields creates a more convincing representation of the interrelation
of past and present. Its realistic, vivid, and authentic portrayal of Yiddish life
causes a deep feeling of loss and longing for a world far away and long gone.
Of course, The Black Cat is visually more interesting, but its use of style often
refers to nothing outside its claustrophobic narrative realm. The visual beauty
of one of the most spectacular camera movements in Hollywood cinema, and
the philosophical depth of Poelzig’s comment that they were both killed in
Marmaros, are wasted within the conventions of the narrative concerns of a
precode horror movie. But as the memory of this scene dominates my imagi-
nation of The Black Cat, and since all my memories and all my knowledge of
films turn out to be based on moments—who cares?

NOTES

1. See also “Ulmer and Culture,” Bernd Herzogenrath’s excellent reading of

The Black Cat, which is based on Freud’s notion of culture, but which also refers
to Adorno and Horkheimer and the dark side of modernism and enlightenment. He
shows very convincingly how the film can be read as structured around the concepts
of culture and cult. Identifying similar motives in Ulmers’s Bluebeard, which was
made ten years later and which also deals with the subject of horror and European
culture, he claims that Ulmer knew exactly what he was doing. This results in a more
conclusive reading of the Satanist ritual at the end of The Black Cat than the one
that will be offered here. Bernd Herzogenrath, “Ulmer and Culture,” in Edgar G.
Ulmer: King of Poverty Row, ed. Bernd Herzogenrath (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland,
2009), 23–38.
50 Herbert Schwaab

2. Before the Marx Brothers were tamed in the postcode years at MGM, they
made five surrealistic and anarchic comedies for Paramount. Also, Million Dollar
Legs (1932) with W. C. Fields, a bizarre comedy about the inhabitants of the republic
of Klopstockia joining the Los Angeles Olympic tournament to raise money for their
bankrupt state, offers many surrealist moments.
3. William A. Wellman’s Wild Boys of the Road (1932) is a good example of a pre-
code film by the Warner Brothers studios. The film deals with the Depression and with
teenagers leaving home because their parents can no longer nourish them. They roam
the streets of the United States in a desperate search for work and money. The film offers
social critique and is unique for its realistic and sensitive portrayal of adolescence.
4. King Kong (1933) had to be recut for its redistribution in the late 1930s, leav-
ing out the scenes in which the giant ape devoured humans. Much of the overt sadism
of the original version was toned down. See Ronald Haver, David O. Selznick’s Hol-
lywood, 112.
5. John Belton’s pioneering work as a film scholar and historian was strongly
influenced by the auteur theory and its notion that films can be read as expressions of
the individual personalities of their creators. The theory was imported from France to
the United States in the 1960s by Andrew Sarris and his book The American Cinema.
As “auteur theory forced attention to what was really happening in a lot of films”
(Caughie 12), it created a new form of criticism that was helpful for the establish-
ment of film studies at universities. But as a regression into romanticist concepts of
art and authorship, the theory had its limitations (11). Although film studies began to
emancipate itself from this anachronistic discourse, finding new paradigms to follow
(e.g., semiotics, psychoanalysis), auteur theory did not vanish, but became one of the
dominant modes of practicing film criticism (15).
6. William K. Everson’s important book on the classical Hollywood horror films
demonstrates the capacity and need for imagination in the early days of film studies.
Everson’s pioneering effort in film history very often has to refer to films never seen,
but he attempts to evaluate these films on the basis of film stills, production notices,
and reviews. See William K. Everson, Classics of the Horror Film.
7. For film philosopher Gilles Deleuze, Resnais creates “a cinema of the brain”
(206). In his monography on Resnais, James Monaco speaks of a truism of Resnais’
intellectualism, denying that his films are a cold and abstract “cinema of the brain”
(3). The later works of Resnais indeed show the more playful, nonintellectual side
of his way of creating films; this becomes apparent in the neomusical On connaît la
chanson (1997) and its indebtedness to popular culture.
8. In La guerre est finie the repetition of camera movements and shots is used to
signify the state of mind of a member of the Spanish resistance on the verge of his
decision to return to Spain from his exile in France. In The Black Cat, the repetition
of the tracking shots doesn’t seem to be intended, but it remains an important element
of the peculiar visual style of the film and its digressions.
9. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde begins with an extended subjective tracking shot seen
with the eyes of Dr. Jekyll: we have to wait until his arrival at the university, where he
gives a lecture, to actually see the character for the first time. The Shining, from Stan-
ley Kubrick, is one of the first horror films (but not the last) to use the steadicam.
 On the Graveyards of Europe 51

10. Cavell describes the melodramatic condition with the following words: “It is
like searching for the power of a word when the conditions of language have been
lost” (42). He interprets the manner of performance of the melodrama’s female pro-
tagonist as an alternative mode of existence within a society that denies her existence
and represses her voice.
11. James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein (1935) offers a good example of the
melodramatic qualities of horror films. Melodrama deals with the negative condi-
tion of denial of acknowledgement by others. The human monster desperately seeks
acknowledgement as a human being, which will only be granted for a brief stay with
a blind hermit.
12. Hollywood film director Frank Tashlin, who made some very inspiring com-
edies and film parodies with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, was adored by the critics
of the Cahiers du cinéma. Tashlin was one of the first artists who acknowledged the
indebtedness of film to popular and mass culture.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adorno, Theodor, and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York:

Continuum, 1987).
Arnold, Frank. “Before the Code: Hollywood 1929–1934,” Epd-Film, January 1997,
24–36.
Belton, John. The Hollywood Professionals, Vol. 3, Howard Hawks, Frank Borzage,
Edgar G. Ulmer (London: Tantivy Press, 1974), 149–80.
Bogdanovich, Peter. “Edgar G. Ulmer: An Interview,” Film Culture 58–60 (1974),
reprinted in Who the Devil Made It: Conversations with Legendary Film Directors
(New York: Ballantine, 1998), 558–604.
Bordwell, David, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson. Classical Hollywood Cinema:
Film, Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1985).
Brooks, Peter. The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama,
and the Mode of Excess (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976).
Caughie, John, ed. Theories of Authorship (London: Routledge, 1981).
Cavell, Stanley. Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and R. Galeta
(London: Athlone Press, 2000).
Everson, William K. Classics of the Horror Film (Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel Books, 1974).
Gallagher, Tag. “All Lost in Wonder,” at www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/firstre-
lease/fr0301/tgafr12a.htm (accessed 3 March 2008).
Grisseman, Stefan. Mann im Schatten: Der Filmemacher Edgar G. Ulmer (Vienna:
Paul Zsolnay Verlag, 2003).
Haver, Ronald. David O. Selznick’s Hollywood (Munich: Rogner und Bernhard, 1981).
Hawkins, Joan. “Sleaze Mania: Euro-Trash and High Art,” Film Quarterly, Winter
1999, 15–29.
52 Herbert Schwaab

Herzogenrath, Bernd. “Ulmer and Culture,” in Edgar G. Ulmer: King of Poverty Row,
ed. Bernd Herzogenrath, 23–38 (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2009).
Hoberman, J. Vulgar Modernism: Writing on Movies and Other Media (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1991).
Isenberg, Noah. “Perennial Detour: The Cinema of Edgar G. Ulmer and the Experi-
ence of Exile,” Cinema Journal 43, no. 2 (Spring 2004): 3–25.
Krohn, Bill. “King of the B’s,” Film Comment, July–August 1983, 60–64.
Maltby, Richard. “A Brief Romantic Interlude: Dick and Jane Go to 3 1/2 Seconds
of the Classical Hollywood Cinema,” in Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies,
ed., David Bordwell and Noël Carroll (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1996), 434–59.
Minas, Günther. “Ein Fresko auf einer großen Wand: Die Bedeutung der Malerei für
die Filmarbeit Pasolinis,” in Kraft der Vergangenheit: Zu Motiven der Filme von
Pier Paolo Pasolini, ed. Christoph Klimke (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1988), 51–69.
Monaco, James. Alain Resnais: The Rôle of Imagination (New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1978).
Moullet, Luc, and Bertrand Tavernier. “Entretien avec Edgar G. Ulmer,” Cahiers du
cinéma 21, no. 122 (August 1961): 1–16.
Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey. “Art Cinema,” in The Oxford History of World Cinema, ed.
Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 567–75.
Sontag, Susan. Against Interpretation, and other Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 1966).
Ulman, Erik. “Edgar G. Ulmer,” Senses of Cinema, at www.sensesofcinema.com/con-
tents/directors/03/ulmer.html (accessed 3 March 2008).
Vogel, Amos. Film as Subversive Art (New York: Random House, 1974).
Wilson, Michael Henry. “Edgar G. Ulmer: ‘Let There Be Light,’” in Divine Appa-
rizioni: Cinegrafie, Vol. 12 (Ancona: Transeuropa, 1999), 249–55.
 4
From Nine to Nine
D. J. Turner

Shot in Canada in nine days in February 1936 for a Canadian company, From
Nine to Nine is possibly the rarest and also one of the least appreciated of
Edgar Ulmer’s films. It was intended for distribution in the United Kingdom
by Universal in partial fulfillment of that company’s distribution obligations
under Britain’s quota laws.
The British government had enacted the Cinematograph Films Act 1927 in
a bid to resuscitate the United Kingdom’s ailing film industry and encourage
British film production. Enacted for a ten-year period, it set rising quotas for
distributors and exhibitors. They were required to distribute and show, respec-
tively, a modest percentage of British product. For the purposes of the act,
films produced anywhere in the British empire were eligible, and this opened
the door to production of “quota” films in Canada.
The result of the act was a deluge of very low budget films, contemptu-
ously dubbed “Quota Quickies,” which were the object of much denigration.
Some, however, were actually better than many American-made B films; and
these British B films, on which the likes of Michael Powell and David Lean
cut their teeth, are now undergoing critical reevaluation, a process that is
providing some interesting discoveries as well as substance for a number of
equally interesting books.1
To make From Nine to Nine, Coronet Pictures, Ltd., a company incorpo-
rated in the province of Quebec, rented the recently constructed, then state-
of-the-art studios of Associated Screen News in Montreal. The only shooting
outside the studio was done in Montreal’s Mount Royal Hotel. The crew was
comprised almost entirely of Montrealers: James W. Campbell (production
manager), Harold Peberdy (designs), Fred Govan (art director, Donald Go-

53
54 D. J. Turner

van on the print), Alfred Jacquemin (photography), Robert Martin (assistant

cameraman), Maurice Metzger (sound), and Ross Pitt-Taylor (editor, Phillip
Taylor on the print), all employees of Associated Screen News. As usual,
Shirley Ulmer acted as script assistant, but only for the start of shooting.
She was in a Montreal hospital having her appendix removed. Local actors
Alexander Frazer, Julian Gray, George A. Temple, Frederick Dodds Slade,
Gerald Rowan, Alex Michael, and Cecil Nichol made up half of the cast. To
complete the cast, Ulmer brought in actors from the New York stage, among
them Miriam Battista, Doris Covert, Eugene Sigaloff, and Arthur Stenning.
To head them all he hired former American serial queen Ruth Roland; another
established American film actor, Roland Drew; and Kenneth Duncan, who
was a writer, a Canadian, and also an established film actor.2
One of the working titles for From Nine to Nine was “Death Strikes Again,”
but the original script was called “The Man with the Umbrella” for reasons
that become evident when the film is viewed—except that it’s a woman who
wields the brolly. The title From Nine to Nine has nothing to do with the

Figure 4.1. Ruth Roland (Cornelia Du Play), Miriam Battista (Toinette, the maid, dead
on the bed), and Arthur Stenning (Detective Sgt. Williams, pointing).
 From Nine to Nine 55

film. However, Bill Krohn has drawn my attention, via Lotte Eisner, to the
fact that in 1927 F. W. Murnau planned to make a film of this title based on a
popular book by Leo Perutz. First published in 1918 in German, the book was
translated into English and published in 1926 as From Nine to Nine. Perhaps
Ulmer remembered the project from his time working with Murnau, liked the
title, and decided to use it. An homage, perhaps.
From Nine to Nine was intended for release in the United Kingdom as part
of Universal’s quota compliance. But why would Universal, the very company
that had allegedly banished him from Hollywood after The Black Cat, hire
Ulmer? The genesis of the project is difficult to ascertain, but in his “Past Ser-
vice Record,” a document that Ulmer personally established (from memory)
in 1969, Ulmer wrote that he was “sent to New York from Hollywood at the
request of Universal’s New York quota film producer to then make a picture
in Canada.” Note that he wrote “sent.” For his next feature, Natalka Poltavka,
Ulmer wrote, “brought to New York from Hollywood” and not “sent.” Is it
possible he was still under contract to Universal at the start of 1936?3
Besides the mention by Ulmer in his “Past Service Record” and the film’s
submission to the British Board of Film Censors by Universal, there is little
to connect Universal to the production. On the credits of the existing mate-
rial, New York–based independent producer William Steiner, who would later
distribute the film in the United States (if the cumulative title list in the Film
Daily Year Book is correct), is credited as associate producer. There is no
producer credit and no mention of Universal.
On 18 February 1936, both English- and French-language newspapers in
Montreal accorded some attention to the shoot. While Léon Franque, film
chronicler in La Presse, sniffed, “The film will show nothing of Montréal
and have no publicity value for the city,” he did offer one interesting piece
of intelligence: all the scenes had been rehearsed ahead of time in order that
shooting should be over ten days hence. The Montreal Daily Star claimed
their reporter had caught Ruth Roland in a taxi as she left the Mount Royal
Hotel for the studio for the first day’s shooting. The film was described as a
thriller, tentatively titled “Death Strikes Again” or “From Nine to Nine.” Miss
Roland told the Star reporter, “We hope to create a character that I can keep
using in other motion pictures to be made here.” Franque mentioned that there
were five more films to come. Was this really the plan, or had Roland been
strung a line? In either case, this would be Ruth Roland’s last film.
Film Daily had mentioned earlier in the month that Ulmer and company
had left New York by train for Montreal with, among others, Len S. Kennedy,
who was to act as assistant supervisor.
From Nine to Nine was a considerable change of pace for Ulmer after Dam-
aged Lives and The Black Cat, not to mention Thunder over Texas, and he
56 D. J. Turner

seems to have been having fun with this modest tale of jewel thieves, murder,
and blackmail. He allows Roland to overact till there’s no scenery left to chew
and throws in comic relief on top of comic relief. Roland’s parrot endlessly
squawks, “Trouble, nothing but trouble” (the director’s commentary?) when
not suggesting it is time for cocktails, and a bumbling comic detective is
thrown in for good measure.
The plot is a little difficult to follow, possibly because twelve minutes
would seem to be missing from the extant U.S. release version—though the
reviewer for the Kinematograph Weekly had some problems with the continu-
ity in what was presumably the longer version.4 If indeed it is minus twelve
minutes, this could explain some of the continuity issues in the film in its
extant form. This presents a bit of a mystery in that this nitrate negative is
a camera original, complete with splices. But perhaps the bigger mystery is
why anyone would have gone to the trouble of cutting it at all.
The plot is as follows: In a snowy Montreal, a chauffeur with a French
accent and a magnificent raccoon coat delivers a message to the home of
wealthy jeweler Balsac. A snooty butler (Alexander Frazer) reminds him
bluntly of the existence of a servants’ entrance, then tells him he may wait
where he is (after instructing him to remove his cap). The chauffeur complies
in silence. Balsac (Julian Gray) is in the middle of telling his daughter’s
suitor, John Sommerset (Kenneth Duncan), that, far from getting engaged,
they must break off their relationship, even if Sommerset is secretary to the
governor-general.5 Balsac declines at first to read the message. When he does
finally elect to read the note, he abruptly takes his leave and enters the wait-
ing car. The chauffeur, meanwhile, has pilfered a few cigars. Outside, a man
asks two policemen for a light. (Though the film is clearly set in Montreal,
the policemen wear the familiar uniform of the British bobby, complete with
the distinctive helmet, a garb never worn by the Montreal police force.) The
man’s accent could be from the Balkans or the Scottish Highlands. This is our
introduction to Ivanov (George A. Temple).
To the sound of sirens we discover Balsac in the now-abandoned car, a
bullet through his head. Inspector Vernon (Roland Drew) of the Criminal In-
vestigation Division (CID) informs Balsac’s daughter Yvonne (Doris Covert)
of her father’s demise and sends Williams (Arthur Stenning), a bumbling
detective, to interview the servants. After establishing that the daughter is not
aware of her father having any enemies, Vernon dismisses the young couple.
Once alone, he helps himself to a generous belt of Balsac’s scotch. At head-
quarters, Vernon interviews the butler but learns nothing. The butler, back at
the house, opens a safe to remove jewels and documents. A waiting intruder
whose face we never see strangles the butler and heaves his body out of the
window. Vernon now interviews Ivanov, who claims to be the lover of the
 From Nine to Nine 57

maid, Toinette (Miriam Battista), and also claims to be employed at the Mount
Royal Hotel. Toinette corroborates his story.
Cornelia Du Play (Ruth Roland), a longtime acquaintance of Balsac, shows
up at his office, conveniently located in the Mount Royal Hotel, and asks to
see his latest acquisition, the extremely valuable Lavretsky collection of pre-
cious stones. After she has upset a tray of gems, a particularly precious speci-
men is found to be missing. Vernon, who just happens to be in the building, is
summoned; but Du Play is released after only a perfunctory search.
Sommerset receives a blackmail letter: someone has discovered that
when Balsac married Yvonne’s mother, his first wife was still alive—a fact
unknown to Balsac. Yvonne is thus the issue of a bigamous marriage. The
ubiquitous Toinette eavesdrops at every possible opportunity. International
jewel thief Schubin (Eugene Sigaloff) and his wife Gruschenka are also in the
hotel. Toinette enters their room to accuse them of double-crossing her and
her partner Ivanov, complaining that the blackmail plot was not part of their
agreed plan. Knowing that Schubin shot Balsac and that Ivanov killed the but-

Figure 4.2. Ruth Roland (Cornelia Du Play), Roland Drew (Inspector Vernon), and Ken-
neth Duncan (John Sommerset).
58 D. J. Turner

ler, Toinette threatens to turn state’s evidence to save herself. The impulsive
Gruschenka shoots Toinette.
The pair take her body to Du Play’s room in the Mount Royal Hotel and
dump it on the bed while Miss Du Play, oblivious to the deposit, sings in
her bath. Williams comes in to arrest Miss Du Play but she knocks him out
with a flatiron. Meanwhile, Sommerset makes his way to a dingy café, bear-
ing an envelope containing money provided by Vernon, which is intended
for the blackmailers. There a waitress instructs him to go to a flower shop
located (where else?) in the Mount Royal Hotel. Du Play meanwhile heads
to Schubin’s room and proposes to buy the now slightly depleted Lavretsky
collection. Ivanov arrives, followed by the police, and is chased onto the
roof, where he is shot. Schubin and Gruschenka are arrested, along with
Du Play; but Du Play is quickly released when it is revealed that she is a
private investigator working for an American agency (the Jewellers’ Protec-
tive Association).
The screenplay and dialogue were written by Kenneth Duncan based on
an original story by Edgar Ulmer and Shirley Ulmer. If the story is both
routine and ramshackle and some of the acting amateurish, the camera
work is good, and Ulmer manages to touch on some interesting points.
The film is unusual for what is in large part an American production in
that it makes no attempt to hide the fact that it is set in Canada. Indeed, it
rather insists on it, playing up differences, real or simply introduced as plot
devices, between Canadian and U.S. practices. While playing on these dif-
ferences it also touches on Canada’s social-class differences, as well as the
English/French divide of that era in Montreal: the butler with his British
accent lording it over the chauffeur with his French accent; the chauffeur
pilfering a fistful of cigars; the CID inspector talking down to everyone
and then, in his turn, pilfering a glass of scotch. Though the film is set in
Montreal many of the accents are British, or imitations of British accents,
rather than Canadian. This is to some extent appropriate, given that most
immigrants at that time were from the British Isles (fleeing the scourge
of the Quota Quickie, perhaps). As Bill Krohn so astutely observes in his
article on Ulmer, “King of the B’s,” in Film Comment, Ulmer uses “the
conventions of the fake-English detective story to paint a subtly corrosive
portrait of Canadian society” (62).6
Improbably, all the protagonists live or work in the Mount Royal Hotel.
Mention of this venerable establishment, where some of the film was shot,
is repeated until it begins to look like a send up of product placement. Prob-
ably the producers paid nothing for the use of this plush setting.7 Mean-
while, back at the studio, the sets, built on the new Northern Electric Wide
Range–equipped sound stage, bear a striking similarity to the art deco sets
 From Nine to Nine 59

of The Black Cat.8 There is no evidence that the film was ever shown in
Canada (Ontario provincial censors have no record of it being submitted, and
Quebec censorship records of the period have been destroyed); but according
to Kinematograph Weekly, after being trade shown on 2 April 1936, just six
weeks after the end of shooting, it was set for release on 17 August 1936 in
the United Kingdom (see supplement iv).
Though registered under the act on 31 March by Universal, it would be
released by General Film Distributors, Ltd.9 No American reviews have been
found for From Nine to Nine. It was passed without cuts by the New York
State censor in 1937, and distribution was attributed to Emerson Pict. Corp.,
a company that does not seem to exist. (See New York State censorship file
#32376, box #501). Film Daily did not review it, but it is mentioned in the
cumulative title list in the Film Daily Year Book, with William Steiner as the
distributor, starting with the 1937 issue.
One rarely finds lost films by actively looking for them. One stumbles over
them, there are chance encounters, or they find you. If you are lucky. My
recovery of From Nine to Nine, begun in 1975, deviated little from the pat-
tern I have outlined. I first contacted Universal in Los Angeles, London, and
Canada, looking for the film, and I drew a blank. Then, in 1981, I mentioned
it to Bill Krohn, who told me it was in the American Film Institute’s list of
holdings. I had gone through the AFI list from A to Z . . . and missed it. So
much for actively looking!
Low on its list of priorities, the AFI agreed to send its holdings on this title
to Canada. Six reels of original picture neg and five reels of sound track ar-
rived: there was no sound for reel 2. I had a safety print struck immediately,
and then I began the search for the missing ten minutes of sound. Fortunately,
16 mm prints had been made in the late ’30s for rental libraries—by the ’70s
a thing of the past—so I began to trawl private collectors, a notoriously secre-
tive tribe. I made slow progress. Bill Everson told me, tantalizingly, that he
had given away two prints. One had gone to the Cinémathèque Française, he
claimed, but the Cinémathèque professed no knowledge of it. The other print
he had sent to a collector in Paris, but my efforts to access this print came to
nought. Then, in 1998, at the invitation of Bruce Goldstein, I presented the
film (with reel 2 still mute) at Film Forum in New York. After the projection
and subsequent Q&A, a member of the audience came to me and asked why
there was no sound on reel 2. I explained the situation and described my
search for a print. To my surprise and delight he told me there was someone
in the audience who had a 16 mm print. That was when I first met Richard
Crane, a veteran New York collector with a vast collection of rare films. Mr.
Crane very generously agreed, there and then, to let me lift the missing sound
from his print. The process would take another four years; but finally reel 2
60 D. J. Turner

would have sound, some twenty years after I’d begun my search. And the 75-
minute version? Keep watching the skies.

NOTES

1. Among the best books are Quota Quickies: The Birth of the British “B” Film,
by Steve Chibnall; A Chorus of Raspberries, by David Sutton; and The Unknown
1930s, by Jeffrey Richards.
2. Formed in Montreal in 1920 as Associated Screen News of Canada, Ltd. (a
branch of Associated Screen News in New York), the company was reincorporated as
Associated Screen News, Ltd., in 1926. It operated until 1956.
3. Ulmer made Natalka Poltavka, a Ukrainian-language feature based on the
operetta by Ivan Kotlyarevsky, for Vasile Avramenko. Shooting began in September
1936, in the Biograph Studio in the Bronx, N.Y., and continued on location at Flem-
ington, N.J.
4. The print passed by the British Board of Film Censors on March 27, 1936, ran
74 minutes 41 seconds. The extant nitrate negative runs only 62 minutes 26 seconds.
5. The governor-general was the king’s representative in the colony. This office
still exists today.
6. Krohn’s original title was “Ulmer without Tears.” “King of the B’s” was a title
furnished by Film Comment.
7. In 1922, when it was built, this 1,000-room hotel was the largest in the British
Empire.
8. Totally owned by Bell Telephone, Northern Electric was the Canadian equiva-
lent of Western Electric in the U.S.
9. In May, at the time Carl Laemmle—Ulmer’s nemesis—was ousted from Uni-
versal, General Film Distributors acquired a 25-percent interest in the reorganized
Universal, and C. M. Woolf, a director of General Film, joined the board of the new
Universal. General Film henceforth released Universal product in England.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Kinematograph Weekly, August 6, 1936, Supplement iv.

Krohn, Bill. “King of the B’s,” Film Comment 19, no. 4 (July–August 1983): 60–64.
 5
Exile on 125th Street

African Americans, Germans, and

Jews in Moon over Harlem
Jonathan Skolnik

Moon over Harlem (1939) occupies a unique place within Edgar Ulmer’s
“ethnic intermezzo”1 in the 1930s. The story of Ulmer’s turn to niche-audi-
ence filmmaking is well known: after his affair with Shirley Kassler (who at
the time was married to a nephew of Carl Laemmele) damaged his relations
with major Hollywood studio executives, Ulmer moved in 1935 to New York,
where he directed a series of foreign language and “race” films, turning rural
New Jersey into a location for Yiddish shtetlach and Ukrainian farms; he
also directed several health-education films that targeted minority communi-
ties (see Grissemann 99–158). Ulmer’s foray into the world of black-cast/
black-audience feature filmmaking, however, opened up a deeper political
and social register in his work. As a rare white director of films for African
Americans in the segregation era, Ulmer entered into a direct confrontation
with the contradictions of Jewish identity within an American culture shaped
by racism and racial division.
Polemical debates about the specific role of “Jewish” Hollywood in the
objectification and exploitation of other minorities, especially African Ameri-
cans, have colored the scholarly investigation of ethnicity and film production
in America from the advent of sound film through the end of Jim Crow.2 Yet
beyond the thunder of accusation, mea culpa, or denial, there remains the
striking fact that the “separate cinema”3 to which blacks were relegated in
the segregation era also allowed for and, in many cases, depended upon some
degree of creative and financial interaction between African Americans and
whites (including a heavy overrepresentation of Jewish Americans) at the
margins of the American social system. Were these interactions a positive
collaboration which subverted racial boundaries, or did they amount to cyni-

61
62 Jonathan Skolnik

cal opportunism, or even exploitation? What interests me is not a search for

a simplistic answer to this complex cultural nexus—there is none—but rather
the fact that cultural products themselves, in this case the films, often reflect
upon these very questions, the condition of their production. The 1965 film
The Pawnbroker, which focuses on a German-Jewish Holocaust survivor in
Harlem, is a vivid example of this kind of film. In the following, I want to
bring these perspectives to bear on Moon over Harlem, the major black-audi-
ence production directed by the German-Jewish refugee Edgar G. Ulmer.
German-Jewish refugees from the Nazified film industry occupied a para-
doxical place in American society: in exile from Nazi racism, they were also
“white” in segregation-era America, immigrant outsiders in a new land, and
German Jews in an American-Jewish cultural landscape (and, indeed, a Hol-
lywood business climate) where Eastern European Jews were just as likely to
dominate. In the larger project from which this chapter is taken, I examine the
specific role of German-Jewish directors (Fritz Lang, Josef von Sternberg, Otto
Preminger, and many others) in exploring American racial dilemmas.4 What
is important to remember here, in the context of my analysis of Moon over
Harlem, is that Ulmer’s foray into “race” film is not unique. Indeed, another
German-Jewish immigrant, Arthur Dreifuss, was a major director of black-cast
films in the 1930s and 1940s. Due to space considerations, I cannot offer a
comparative analysis here; but in my discussion of Moon over Harlem I wish to
take issue with the general claim made by film historian Thomas Cripps that the
black-cast productions of Dreifuss, Ulmer, the Goldberg brothers, and others
subject African American film to the “B-picture assembly line” (Cripps 40–41).
Instead, I would like to show how Edgar Ulmer helps push to the breaking point
the conventions of what Cripps calls the black-cast “genre film.”
The plot of Moon over Harlem is intricate: Minnie (Cora Green), a widow
who works hard as a housekeeper in a posh hotel and nightclub, marries Dol-
lar Bill (Bud Harris), a smooth-talking ne’er-do-well. Minnie’s daughter Sue
(Izenetta Wilcox) attends college and goes out with Bob (Earl Gough), a well-
spoken idealist who dreams of cleansing Harlem of corruption and gangsters
like Dollar Bill. When Minnie walks in on Dollar Bill trying to rape Sue, she
throws her daughter out. Sue becomes a nightclub performer, and the famous
jazz clarinetist Sidney Bechet makes a cameo appearance. Dollar Bill is under
pressure from white gangsters who want to take over Harlem, as well as from
Bob, who mobilizes Sue’s idealist college friends to dissuade honest Harlem-
ites from paying protection money. Bullets fly, and Dollar Bill and Minnie
are killed. After the funeral of her mother, Sue and Bob stare dreamily at the
“moon over Harlem.”
In his interview with Peter Bogdanovich, Ulmer claims the film was shot in
four days on a budget of only $8,000 (the dancers were paid a pittance), and
 Exile on 125th Street 63

that he was brought in only after the film had been cast, invited by Donald
Heywood.5 While research on the genesis of Moon over Harlem is far from
complete, there may indeed be a degree of self-mythologizing on the part of
Ulmer as to his “quick and dirty” filmmaking. Ulmer’s plans for a Harlem
film seem to date from as early as November 1937. According to an article
in the Chicago Defender, a major African American newspaper, Ulmer had
contracted to direct a film by Mathew Mathews, to be titled “Blues in My
Heart.”6 Mathews was identified as a playwright previously honored by the
Academy of Dramatic Arts, Donald Heywood was mentioned as the com-
poser, and Alec Lovejoy was listed as an actor. The production company
was named as “Kinotrage [sic] Pictures.” The company never existed, and
the name was likely a typo of “Kinotage,” suggesting a venture planned by
a German-speaker, that is, Ulmer himself. In January 1939, the paper men-
tioned that Cora Green would play the female lead in “Moon over Harlem,”
and on 4 February further casting choices were announced.7 (The title “Moon
over Harlem,” by the way, was probably derived from the popular 1932 song
“Underneath a Harlem Moon,” by Mack Gordon [the pen name of Warsaw-
born Morris Gittler]; the painter William H. Johnson used Moon over Harlem
as the title for a work about the 1943 Harlem riot, referencing both song and
film—a fine example of allegedly inauthentic popular culture becoming an
authentic tradition. See figure 5.1.
The 4 February Defender article also mentioned that work had begun at
Lido Studios, on 146th Street and Seventh Avenue; the reporter detailed his
excitement over the impressive technical outfitting of the studio. On 11 Feb-
ruary, the paper reported that shooting continued at the Lido Ballroom.
Ulmer’s film project generated considerable excitement in the African
American press. On 25 March 1939 the Defender reported that the film was
ready and remarked that “it has a good chance to set a new high in major
Race productions.”8 By 29 April, however, the film had not yet been released,
and the newspaper’s critic was impatient, as were the actors: “What Has Hap-
pened to Moon over Harlem?” asked the headline.9 Some actors complained
that they had not been paid. Others (perhaps the same ones) hoped the film
would be released soon: “They feel that the film is one of the best ever made,
expertly directed and firmly handled.” On 17 June, the paper reported on the
film’s dressy premiere at the Regent. But on 29 July, the Defender sounded
a note of disappointment: star Bud Harris planned a lawsuit because Million
Dollar Pictures had sold distribution rights to Alfred Sack, and Harris did not
expect the return he had been promised. The film itself was warmly received
by the Defender and praised by other black newspapers such as the New York
Age: Moon over Harlem was not just an excellent “race” film, but an excel-
lent film.10
64 Jonathan Skolnik

Figure 5.1. William H. Johnson, “Moon over Harlem” (ca. 1943–1944). Reprinted
with permission from the National Humanities Center.

The film begins as the credits roll over stylized drawings of dressed-to-im-
press African American dancers and Donald Heywood’s soundtrack—which
wavers between lyrical, melodic jazz and agitated hurried phrases. The music
continues as the scene shifts to a nighttime panorama of a glitzy urban boule-
vard. As we recognize notable Harlem landmarks in the bright lights of 125th
Street—the Apollo Theater, Blumstein’s department store, the Alhambra night-
club and another one called “the Plantation”—we notice how Ulmer’s camera
revisits Blumstein’s and lingers in front of Ludwig Bauman’s clothing shop.
By dwelling on names that are both German and Jewish, Ulmer references
his own identity as a Jew in exile from Nazi Germany. As Ulmer zeros in on the
Jewish-owned businesses in the 1930s black metropolis, he alludes perhaps to
his own complex role as a white director of a black-cast film, projecting himself
onto the cityscape: he is now both an integral part of the Harlem landscape and
a privileged outsider at the intersection of capitalism, race, and 125th Street.
Jewish-owned stores, particularly Blumstein’s, had been the target of an angry
“Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” campaign in the early 1930s, and many
Jewish business had been attacked in the 1935 Harlem riot.11
 Exile on 125th Street 65

If names like “Blumstein” or “Ludwig Bauman” can function in the film as

a kind of hidden “signature” for Ulmer as the film’s author, it is because they
stand for a concrete historical and economic presence that subsumes rather
than erases Ulmer’s own name—the business establishment. For the characters
in Ulmer’s black-cast film, this cannot be the case. They (the men, that is) are
often known only by nicknames: the gangster is “Dollar Bill,” the black theater
owner is “Broadway,” and the underground banker is “Wall Street.” The names
are ironic references to the corridors of cultural and economic power from
which African Americans were marginalized in 1930s New York.12
Ulmer’s most striking disruption of the conventions of black-audience
entertainment cinema concerns the casting choices. As Cripps, Edward
Mapp, and other film historians have pointed out, black-cast films reflected
the widespread skin-tone prejudices within the black community: the heroes
were light-skinned, with dark-skinned African American actors cast as vil-
lains or bystanders. In Moon over Harlem, these conventions are exaggerated
to the point that they seem to be called into question. To start with, some of
the very first conversations in the film (at the wedding of Minnie and Dollar
Bill) are discussions of skin tone among the guests, which raises the issue as

Figure 5.2. Bud Harris as “Dollar Bill.” Courtesy of the Edgar G. Ulmer Preservation
Corp.
66 Jonathan Skolnik

Figure 5.3. Dollar Bill and the prostitute. Courtesy of the Edgar G. Ulmer Preserva-
tion Corp.

a question for the film. The villain, Dollar Bill, is conventionally dark skinned
(figure 5.2) and is a vicious, manipulative character.
Yet Moon over Harlem never descends into pure melodrama because Dollar
Bill has the positive qualities of an antihero: he is bold and unafraid of the white
mob moving in to Harlem. One of his henchmen (ironically an extremely short
“comic” actor) quips, “Dollar, you make us all feel more like men.” In general,
Moon over Harlem walks a fine line between drama and satire in its use of
exaggeration: the dark-skinned villains are extremely dark, and the well-spoken
Bob is always a notch too well spoken. (Bob prefaces an invitation to cut a cake
with a speech beginning “in defense of my reputation.”)
In fact, the film’s casting choices caused significant problems with the cen-
sors. In one scene, Dollar Bill consorts with a prostitute (figure 5.3), a black
woman who is so light-skinned that the Hays office assumed she was white
and threatened to block the film in June 1939 for portraying sexual relation-
ships between the races in defiance of the code.13
In comparison with the Hays office files on other black-cast films of the
era, this level of objection and intervention was highly unusual. At most, other
films were lightly chastised for risqué dialogue or dress, or for not show-
 Exile on 125th Street 67

ing strongly enough the consequences of gambling or crime—but never for

openly challenging race laws and social conventions of the segregation era.
Although Ulmer claims in the above-mentioned interview with Bogdanovich
that Moon over Harlem was cast before he became involved, the records show
that he took it upon himself to intervene in person with the censorship office
over this matter—which was resolved amicably. My sense from the censor-
ship files is that no other black-cast director would have risked jeopardizing
his work with such a provocation, and that Ulmer and his collaborators took
a chance and got away with it.
Moon over Harlem is also unique as a black-cast film for including rare
white characters. In fact, there are two. One, a bartender, is from a stock-
footage clip, probably an advertisement that Ulmer used either for fun or to
economize (figure 5.4).
The effect, however, is to give a visual dimension to the sense of a poor
art, which depends more on human talent than slick technique; it concretizes
a sense of estrangement from the glossy world of advertising, the world of
the powerful which is by definition circumscribed for a ghetto art. The other
white character depicted in Moon over Harlem is the downtown gangster
boss who barks orders to an unusually deferent Dollar Bill. Tellingly, the

Figure 5.4. The Bartender. Courtesy of the Edgar G. Ulmer Preservation Corp.
68 Jonathan Skolnik

Figure 5.5. The Neck. Courtesy of the Edgar G. Ulmer Preservation Corp.

white mobster is only pictured from behind: a bulging, muscular neck and
hat (figure 5.5).
By reversing the gaze of conventional cinema, power relations are thema-
tized, indeed exposed. To return to my qualification of Cripps’s description of
the white director’s handling of black actors in this era as the “B-movie as-
sembly-line”: this may indeed be true of Ulmer’s work. Yet I would argue that
in his case it may be a compliment. Ulmer’s ability to use limited resources to
create a powerful poor art that simultaneously undermines the conventions of
a marginalized “entertainment” genre for political effect is here a virtue.

NOTES

1. This is Noah Isenberg’s apt coinage. See Isenberg, “Perennial Detour,” 9.

2. See Michael Rogin, Blackface/White Noise: Jewish Immigrants and the Hollywood
Melting Pot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Joel Rosenberg, “Rogin’s
Noise: The Alleged Historical Crimes of The Jazz Singer,” Prooftexts 22, nos. 1–2
(Winter–Spring 2002): 221–39; Harold Brackman, “The Attack on ‘Jewish Hollywood’:
A Chapter in the History of Modern American Anti-Semitism,” Modern Judaism 20, no.
 Exile on 125th Street 69

1 (2000): 1–19; and, most recently, Patrick McGilligan, Oscar Michaux: The Great and
Only (New York: Harper Collins, 2007), 257–81.
3. For a history of black-audience productions and their relation to Hollywood
productions during Jim Crow and the Hays code era, see Edward Mapp and John
Kisch, A Separate Cinema (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1992); and Thomas
Cripps, Slow Fade to Black: The Negro in American Film, 1900–1942 (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1977).
4. See my forthcoming book, “Two must have got hanged together . . .”: African
Americans and German Jews in Hollywood, 1932–1965.
5. Peter Bogdanovich, “Edgar G. Ulmer: An Interview,” Film Culture 58–60
(1974): 189–234.
6. “Dorothee Codozoe Selected to Head New Harlem Film,” Chicago Defender,
13 November 1937, 19.
7. “Ted Yates Covers New York Town,” Chicago Defender, 28 January 1939, 17,
col. 3; and “Bud Harris to Take Lead in New Film,” Chicago Defender, 4 February
1939, 18, col. 4. Note the nice pun “take lead,” which gives away the fate of Harris’s
character in the story.
8. “Moon over Harlem Ready to Screen,” Chicago Defender, 25 March 1939,
18, col. 3.
9. “What Has Happened to Moon over Harlem?” Chicago Defender, 29 April
1939, 1.
10. Excerpts from two reviews are in Clarence Taylor, The Black Churches of
Brooklyn (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 74–75.
11. See Cheryl Lynn Greenberg, “Or Does It Explode?” Black Harlem in the
Great Depression (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), especially 114–39;
Larry A. Greene, “Harlem: The Depression Years; Leadership and Social Conditions,”
Afro-Americans in New York Life and History 17 (July 1993); Isabel Boiko Price,
“The Black Response to Anti-Semitism: Negroes and Jews in New York, 1880 to
World War II” (PhD diss., University of New Mexico, 1973), especially 177–339;
and Mark Naison, Communists in Harlem during the Depression (New York: Grove
Press, 1983).
12. I am grateful to Edward Mapp (City University of New York) for this insight,
conveyed in a conversation at the film series “German Exiles Confront Race in
America,” which I organized at the University of Maryland in 2003.
13. See the letter of 1 June 1939 from the Production Codes Administration to Mr.
G. Harris, secretary, Mercury Film Laboratories, New York. “Moon over Harlem” file,
MPAA/PCA records, the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture
Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles. I would like to thank the academy (how many times
does a professor get to say that?) for access to the archive.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cripps, Thomas. Black Film as Genre (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press,

1978).
70 Jonathan Skolnik

Grissemann, Stefan. Mann im Schatten: Der Filmemacher Edgar G. Ulmer (Vienna:

Paul Zsolnay Verlag, 2003).
Isenberg, Noah. “Perennial Detour: The Cinema of Edgar G. Ulmer and the Experi-
ence of Exile,” Cinema Journal 43, no. 2 (Winter 2004): 3–25.
Taylor, Clarence. The Black Churches of Brooklyn (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1994).
 6
Forging the “New Jew”

Ulmer’s Yiddish Films

Vincent Brook

At first glance, Edgar G. Ulmer would seem an unlikely candidate, cinemati-

cally and ethno-religiously, to spearhead a “golden age” of Yiddish film in
America. Yet together with the Polish American director Joseph Green, the
Austrian American Ulmer would play a pivotal role in the late-1930s rejuve-
nation of Yiddish cinema, with four films: Grine Felder (Green Fields, 1937);
Yankl der Shmid (Yankl the Blacksmith, aka The Singing Blacksmith, 1938);
Di Klyatshe (The Old Mare, aka Fishke der Krumer [Fishke the Cripple], aka
The Light Ahead, 1939); and Amerikaner Shadkhn (American Matchmaker,
1940; Hoberman 7). This small but impressive body of work, however, is gen-
erally treated by historians as an anomalous interlude in Ulmer’s career—be-
tween his early-Weimar and late-Hollywood periods—when it is discussed at
all. Rather, his prominent place in film history has been secured by his work
as set designer on F. W. Murnau’s The Last Laugh (1924) and other German
expressionist classics; his subsequent canonical film noirs (Detour, 1945; The
Strange Woman, 1945; and Ruthless, 1947); and a dark, low-budget Western,
The Naked Dawn (1954).
As for the ethno-religious aspect, Ulmer’s problematic relation to his
Jewishness is rivaled among European émigré directors only by that of Fritz
Lang. Lang, born to a Jewish mother who converted to Catholicism, stead-
fastly denied his Jewishness; yet he was forced to flee Nazi Germany because
of his Jewish lineage and was regarded not only by the Nazis but by the entire
émigré community as a Jew (Gunning). Ulmer’s Jewish approach-avoidance
syndrome is even more complex and convoluted. Born in 1904 in Olomouc,
Moravia, he was raised from infancy in Vienna by his Jewish parents. How-
ever, due to a staunchly secular upbringing, he claims not even to have been

71
72 Vincent Brook

cognizant of his Jewish heritage until, upon admittance to a Jesuit school as

an exceptional student, he learned of the Numerus Klauses—the 4-percent
quota on Jewish enrollment (Bogdanovich 577). His Jewish identity was liter-
ally imprinted on him shortly after World War I, when, following his father’s
death on the battlefield, he was sent to a home for war orphans in Uppsala,
Sweden, where he was made to wear a Jewish star on his clothing. Although
the marker was intended to identify the wearer as a needy child and was not
necessarily a sign of Jew-hatred, its negative associations could hardly have
failed to rub off on a sensitive fourteen-year-old who had almost been barred
from school on account of his Jewishness and who, consciously Jewish or
not, had been exposed since childhood to Vienna’s notoriously anti-Semitic
climate (Grissemann 26; Ulmer Cipes).
Ulmer would largely be spared the effects of Austrian anti-Semitism upon
his return to Vienna in 1920, largely because he did not remain in Vienna for
any extended period of time. Upon joining Max Reinhardt’s theater academy
in Vienna as an actor/art director in training, he traveled back and forth be-
tween Vienna and Berlin, where he was surrounded by Jews, of course, but
of a determinedly cosmopolitan variety (Ulmer Cipes). He also began, as
was the wont in Austro-German cultural circles, to move freely between the
theater and film media. In film this entailed, according to Ulmer, set construc-
tion (uncredited) on the cream of early Weimar cinema, including The Cabi-
net of Dr. Caligari (1920), The Golem (1920), and Die Nibelungen (1921;
Bogdanovich 561–63).1 In theater it meant, still as a teenager, traveling with
Reinhardt to New York and Los Angeles for the 1923 touring production of
The Miracle. For the remainder of the decade, Ulmer would divide his time
between Hollywood and Berlin, and, on his last American sojourn, would
cause a further rent in his Jewish identity. Quite remarkably, for the future di-
rector of landmark Yiddish films, Ulmer not only married Josephine Warner,
an American Episcopalian, but himself converted to Episcopalianism.
As with Lang, of course, Ulmer’s conversion provided no immunization
against Nazism. Thus, even before completion of the fabled Menschen am
Sonntag (People on Sunday, 1929), with its who’s who of soon-to-be Jew-
ish-émigré filmmakers (besides Ulmer, Robert Siodmak, Billy Wilder, Fred
Zinnemann, Eugen Schüfftan, and Seymour Nebenzahl), Ulmer emigrated
permanently to the United States in 1929. The refugee experience, reinforced
through contact with the burgeoning refugee community in Los Angeles,
including attendance at Salka Viertel’s weekly salons, no doubt laid the
groundwork for Ulmer’s rapprochement with his Jewishness (Ulmer Cipes).
But it was a Hollywood romance that played the decisive role in his return
to his hereditary roots. A seeming up-and-comer following the success of the
Universal horror feature The Black Cat (1934), Ulmer would be “blackballed
 Forging the “New Jew” 73

not for politics but for love” when he became involved with a Jewish script
supervisor, Shirley Kassler Alexander (Krohn 61). Ulmer was divorced from
Josephine by then, but Shirley was still married to Max Alexander, a nephew
of Universal chieftain Carl Laemmle. By the time Shirley obtained her di-
vorce and a reconverted Ulmer married her in a Jewish ceremony in New
York City in 1935, a pall had been cast over his Hollywood career that would
last nearly a decade.
Hollywood’s loss, however, was Yiddish cinema’s gain. Indeed, I would ar-
gue that Ulmer’s double exile—from mainstream American culture as well as
from his Austro-German homeland—coupled with his prodigal return to Jew-
ishness, made him an ideal conduit and catalyst for the Yiddish film revival.

PHASING INTO YIDDISH FILM

Ulmer’s entry into the world of Yiddish cinema coincides with what J. Hober-
man terms the fourth phase of Yiddish-language film (7). Although New York
myusik hols (music halls) had already begun showing movies in the pre-Nick-
elodeon days, the Jewish press tended to deride the first “flickers” as a “goy-
ish” form of lowbrow entertainment that “symbolized the loss of yiddishkeit
[Jewishness] in the New World” (Thissen 29). With cinema constructed as the
“low Other,” Yiddish vaudeville, which previously had been relegated to the
bottom rung of the cultural ladder, was redefined as a respectable theatrical
tradition and elevated to middlebrow status, while the already legitimated
Yiddish stage “maintained its status as a highbrow institution” (29). Not sur-
prisingly, then, the first phase of Yiddish film production (1911–1917), unlike
the movies in general, emerged not in New York (or Hollywood) but in Russia
and Poland (mainly Warsaw, then a part of Russia). Ironically, however, just
as Adolph Zukor, the head of Famous Players (later Paramount) and himself
a Hungarian-Jewish immigrant, would raise mainstream movies’ stature by
filming leading stage actors in classic plays, Yiddish cinema’s cultural cachet
would grow through the filming of Yiddish theater, and with the New York
Yiddish stage providing much of the material (Hoberman 6).
During Yiddish film’s second phase (1917–1928), Austria joined Poland
and the newly formed Soviet Union as a production center, and Jewish novel-
ists (e.g., Sholem Aleichem, Isaac Babel, Joseph Opatoshu, Harry Seckler)
joined playwrights as the prime suppliers of source material. The films, like
their sources, reflected “various vanguard tendencies—Symbolism, expres-
sionism, Futurism, communism—even when concerned with the Jewish
past” (Hoberman 6). The advent of the sound era ushered in the third phase
(1929–1935), and while it heralded New York City’s arrival as an industrial
74 Vincent Brook

hub (the first Yiddish-language talkie was filmed in New York in 1929), the
films—“everything from canned vaudeville acts and displays of cantorial
virtuosity to Biblical pageants, dubbed silent films, and political documenta-
ries”—were generally undistinguished (6).
Yiddish cinema “reached its zenith” during the fourth phase (1936–1941;
Hoberman 7). Spurred by a renaissance of the Polish movie industry in 1935
and the Spanish and French popular front movements, this phase flourished
in Europe during a brief eighteen-month period: from Germany’s annexation
of Austria in March 1937, through the Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland in
September 1939 that signaled the start of World War II and brought Polish-
Yiddish film production to a halt. U.S. production continued until the attack
on Pearl Harbor and America’s entry into the war in late 1941 (7).2
Besides Ulmer’s deepening interest in Jewishness (his own and that of
the Jewish people)—induced by his exilic status, his new Jewish wife, and
the “Jew York City” environment—other factors, in his background and that
of Yiddish film, made his involvement with this subcultural form far from
counterintuitive, but rather a natural fit. Ulmer, after all, had cut his cinematic
teeth on some of the classics of German expressionist cinema, including, if
we can believe his claim, the first Expressionist (with a capital “E”) works,
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and The Golem.3 In addition to demonstrating
links between certain expressionist thematic elements (extreme states of con-
sciousness, a dystopian worldview, and the supernatural) and the prophetic
and mystical strands in Judaism, The Golem is based on a Jewish folk tale of
a humanoid monster conjured by a medieval eastern European rabbi, which
not only predates Mary Shelley’s classic horror story but also provides the
basic premise for Caligari (itself cowritten by the Jewish Carl Mayer and
directed by the Jewish Robert Wiene). Moreover, the 1920 version of The
Golem, which was a remake of a 1914 German film of the same name, would
be remade again in France by Julian Duvivier and released in New York in a
Yiddish-language version in 1937, the year of Ulmer’s first Yiddish film.
An even more profound conflation of German expressionism and Jewish
concerns can be found in S. Ansky’s play Der Dibek (The Dybbuk). One of
the “postwar masterpieces of the high modernist cultural canon,” bracketed
with Caligari and The Golem “as an example of popular expressionism,” Der
Dibek was first staged in New York in 1921 and, more significantly for our
purposes, in Berlin around the same time by Ulmer’s mentor, Max Reinhardt
(Hoberman 60). Regarded as a prime example of “Chasidic grotesque” or
“Chasidic gothic,” this period tale of female possession by evil spirits “in-
fuses a specifically Jewish sense of the uncanny” with a Freudian-inflected
“sexual content” (280). The 1937 film version, directed in Poland by Michal
Waszynski, was one of the three biggest international hits of the fourth phase
 Forging the “New Jew” 75

of Yiddish film, the others being Joseph Green’s Yidl mitn Fidl (Yiddle [little
Jew] with the Fiddle, 1936) and Ulmer’s Grine Felder. And, together with
Green’s and Ulmer’s films, it represented the high point of the Golden Age.

GRINE FELDER AND YANKL DER SHMID:

YESHIVE BOKHERIM AND MUSKLYIDN

A yeshive bokher is a young, male religious-school student training to be-

come a Talmudic scholar or a rabbi. Musklyid is Yiddish for Muskeljude
(muscle Jew), a German term coined by early Zionist leader Max Nordau, as
a rhetorical counter to the anti-Semitic weakling stereotype and a model for
the strong, tough, “New Jew” Nordau believed to be a prerequisite for the
establishment of a viable Jewish state. As archetypes, the yeshive bokher and
musklyid are polar opposites, physically, psychologically, and ideologically.
The yeshive bokher is a physically frail, mild-mannered, somewhat ef-
feminate figure who, in his departure from, if not outright rejection of,
Western standards of masculinity, has been viewed, historically and as a
cultural construct, in three main ways: from the conventional gentile perspec-
tive, as an embarrassment and a figure of scorn; from the Orthodox Jewish
perspective, as an exemplar of an honored religious and scholarly tradition;
and, most recently, from the queer perspective, as a progressive alternative to
heteronormativity (Boyarin). The musklyid, befitting his construction as an
anti–yeshive bokher, is everything his “nerdy” cousin is not: a virile man’s
man given to bodily pleasures, labor in the fields and factories, and engaging
the world vigorously and with supreme self-confidence.
The ideological tension between the two types—the religious student stuck
in the past versus the man of nature geared to the future—responded to the
socialist strand within Zionism and the break-up of shtetl life in eastern Eu-
rope. These political and demographic trends infused the historical moment
of the early 1920s, when Peretz Hirschbein’s play Grine Felder, on which
Ulmer’s film was based, was written and first produced. By the time of the
film’s release in 1937, these forces had been strengthened and exacerbated by
the formation of the Popular Front on the one hand and the advance of fas-
cism on the other. Hirschbein’s genius was to meld past and future through
an idealized vision of eastern European life that emphasized its kinship with,
rather than resistance to, the emergence of the New Jew.
The precredits image of Ulmer’s Grine Felder, repeated at a key turning
point in the body of the film, emblematizes this syncretic fusion. Redolent
of socialist-realist images of peasants joyfully working the fields, a group of
men and women robustly reap the harvest on a resplendent, sunny day, to the
76 Vincent Brook

accompaniment of heroic music. The first diegetic image both starkly con-
trasts with this idyllic, somewhat derivative composition and shows Ulmer’s
auteurist hand. Two yeshive bokherim davening in prayer in the shadows of a
dark synagogue bemoan a fellow bokher who claims to be driven “by some
hidden force” to leave them. We do not see this mysterious figure for some
time, until the camera finally pans to him in another dark corner of the shul,
seemingly asleep but actually buried in thought. The two boys walk over and
one of them asks, “Where are you going, Levy Yitzchok? To a brighter syna-
gogue? Better Jews? God’s grace is here.” “The light of truth is everywhere,”
the other boy elaborates. “One need not search for it afar.” “But one must
search for it,” Levy Yitzchok (Michael Goldstein) responds. He then slowly
makes his way to the exit. “He’ll lose his way,” says the first boy. “He who
seeks the truth will find it,” says the second. As Levy Yitzchok (the first name
clearly connoting his spiritual aspect) opens the door, a shaft of light streams
in from outside, bathing him in an ethereal mist.
Our hero’s quest takes him to verdant fields—presumably somewhere in
the Russian Pale, though the exact location remains undisclosed. The perilous
reality lurking just out of sight is brought to mind, however, as is the fabulous
unreality of the setting. Relieved to meet a friendly Jewish farm boy, Avram-
Yakov (Hershel Bernardi), indicating that “Jews are nearby,” Levy is also
amazed to find Jews who “farm the land” and “eat their own food!”
Avram-Jakov’s family—with whom Levy spends the night, and by whom he
is then cajoled into remaining to tutor the illiterate youngster—are as intrigued,
and impressed, by the learned stranger as he is by them. Yet what begins as a
transformative experience mainly for the “country bumpkins,” for whom every
word from the “divinely inspired” Levy “is a gem,” becomes even more revela-
tory for Levy himself. Touched by his peasant hosts’ generosity and basic good-
ness, for which he finds Talmudic legitimation in Rabbi Eliezer’s adage “A man
without land is not a man,” Levy’s true epiphany is triggered not by scripture
but by sexual desire, for Avram-Jakov’s spirited sister Tsine (Helen Beverly).
Levy is initially threatened by his feelings for Tsine, who wears her own attrac-
tion to him on her sleeve. But his passion grows with the seasons in a process
analogous to the planting cycle, and fittingly comes to fruition at harvest time,
with the momentousness of the occasion underscored through a reprise of the
emblematic image from the film’s opening.
Levy’s proposal of marriage to Tsine does not signify a rejection of mind in
favor of body, however, but rather an amalgam of the two. For Tsine has un-
dergone a profound change as well, learning not only to read and write from
Levy, but also how to channel her initially charming but somewhat infantile
emotionality into a more thoughtful concern for others. Ulmer brilliantly cap-
tures both the opposition and interconnection of spirituality and physicality,
 Forging the “New Jew” 77

of heaven and earth, in several group shots in the family cottage, which frame
the figures within a secondary frame created by a long wooden table below
and a broad ceiling beam above.
Dialectical synthesis notwithstanding, the ending tilts toward the musklyid
when a second betrothal is announced, between Tsine’s sturdy older brother
Hersh-Ber (Saul Levine) and the neighboring family’s daughter Stera (Dena
Drute). A bone of contention between the two families up to this point, their
marriage is given the parents’ blessing only after Hersh-Ber persuades Stera’s
skeptical father Elkone (Max Vodnov) of his worthiness by showcasing his
“tough Jew” qualities, even threatening violence if Elkone deigns to harm
his beloved.
The film’s final pastoral image reinforces the privileging of musklyid over
yeshive bokher, while also promoting the idealized view that the Jewish
people’s past glory and future hope lies in a healthy relation to Mother Earth.
As Tsine and Levy walk hand in hand across the harvested fields past a plow
prominently placed in the foreground, their trajectory diagonally away from
camera connotes both the reclaiming of a bygone era and, especially in a late-
1930s context, the realization of the Zionist dream. By going “back to the
land,” Levy has indeed found a “brighter synagogue” and “better Jews”—but
only if “back” is taken to mean “return,” not “retreat,” and “the land” signifies
not only the soil but also the former and future Land of Israel. In this way,
Levy and Tsine’s coming of age becomes a coming together of the ages, with
the procreational symbolism of the personal and collective unions clearly
marked in the camera’s culminating tilt-down to a close-up of the plow, its
blade embedded in the fertile soil.
The forging of a New Jew is literally represented in Ulmer’s next Yid-
dish film, Yankl der Shmid. As the title further suggests, the narrative focus
here is primarily on the musklyid, and it is his transformation that governs
the story arc. Apprenticed from his youth to the village blacksmith, Yankl
(Moishe Oysher) grows into a strong, virile young man with a taste for drink
and an eye for the ladies. He also possesses an operatic-quality voice, which
he displays both at work and at play, partly as a showcase for star Oysher’s
singing talent, but also as a sign that beneath Yankl’s devil-may-care exterior
beats a worthy Jewish heart. Unlike in Grine Felder, the catalyst for Yankl’s
spiritual makeover is not the land, or a fusion of musklyid and yeshive
bokher elements. To the contrary, here the yeshive bokher, Raphoel (played
again by Michael Goldstein), is portrayed as a nebbish (loser) of no use to
anyone, least of all to his wife Rivke (Florence Weiss), who was forced into
marrying him but continues to lust after Yankl. Nor does religious scripture
play a role in bringing Yankl around, as it did for Levy via Rabbi Eliezer’s
Talmudic dictum.
78 Vincent Brook

Ultimately, however, Yankl’s change in consciousness derives from the

same basic source as Levy’s—the love of a strong woman, in this case Rivke’s
cousin Tamara (Miriam Riselle). But if musklyid and yeshive bokher are to
be taken allegorically, then so too must the women in Grine Felder and Yankl
der Shmid. Only by embracing, not just a woman, but the female principle,
both films seem to suggest, can musklyid and yeshive bokher achieve “true
manhood.” The difference between Tamara’s and Rivke’s metonymic func-
tion is that Tamara is more conscious of her transformative powers and more
comfortable with them. This awareness and comfort level are emphasized in
Tamara’s confrontation with her uncle, Reb Aron (Yudel Dubinsky), who op-
poses her marriage to the roughneck, womanizing Yankl: “Do not speak badly
of him. He is dearer to me than that dried-up yeshive bokher who courted me
last year. I will make a man out of him.”4
This takes some doing, for Tamara must deal not only with Yankl’s primal
urges but also with cousin Rivke, who transmogrifies into a femme fatale in
a desperate attempt to win back her true love. In this latter regard, as well
as visually, Yankl der Shmid, as Hoberman observes, “is closer than Grine
Felder to the expressionistic noirs and thrillers Ulmer would make in Hol-
lywood in the 1940s” (266). The noir aspect extends thematically to Yankl’s
near character backslide, and to Rivke’s intimation of suicide in the nearby
river when her seduction of Yankl fails; expressionist visual elements include
the dark, shadowy interiors and Ulmer’s “characteristic use of odd angles and
bold perspective” (266).
Politically, the film retains a proletarian edge consonant with the Popular
Front and socialist Zionism. The Russian connection, referenced in Grine
Felder’s socialist-realist imagery, is even more explicitly marked in Yankl der
Shmid’s onion-shaped spires and folk dances, and in its pervasive Marxist
ideology. As Hoberman explains:

Yankl, who sings an anthem to labor as he sweats in his smithy, is an explicitly

working-class hero . . . Even [Anna] Appel’s sympathetic shadknte [female
matchmaker] is given a heroic proletarian dimension: “All week long we strug-
gle for a living,” she tells the smith in a bit of class-conscious coffee-klatching
. . . A truly progressive girl, Tamara seems familiar with Freud as well as Marx.
“A man knows so little of himself,” she sighs when, after the designing Rivke
leaves her husband, Yankl insists on taking his former mistress in as a boarder,
just to prove she has no appeal for him. (269)

In replacing Rabbi Eliezer with Freud and Marx, Yankl der Shmid in no way
renounces its Jewish lineage. To the contrary: in addition to the psychosexual
and socialist links to Zionism, we have the fact that the founders of the psy-
choanalytic and communist movements, and a disproportionate number of the
 Forging the “New Jew” 79

groups’ leading members, were Jews. Moreover, Jews’ inordinate attraction to

the “talking cure” and a “classless society” are commonly explained in tradi-
tional Judaic terms—such as tikkun olam (healing the world), Talmudic exe-
gesis, and the prophetic tradition (Gillman 56). Certainly, more opportunistic
factors also play a role, such as the desire to create a more equitable political
system that would finally allow Jews “to secure the most elusive prize of all
. . . inclusion in the larger non-Jewish society” (Dollinger 4). What Yankl der
Shmid and Grine Felder are proposing, however, through their transforma-
tions of musklyid and yeshive bokher, is that this new, more inclusive society
must be predicated on a new, more expansive Jew.

DI KLYATSHE AND AMERIKANER SHADKHN:

SHRAYBERS AND MATCHMAKERS

In Di Klyatshe, Ulmer expands and contracts the New Jew principle. The
transformation, as in Grine Felder, entails a backward and a forward motion;
however, the backward move here is not to the land but to folk wisdom, and
forward not to Zion but to the New World. The film’s romantic permutation
also reveals a shift. The carriers of change are once again a young couple—
Fishke (David Opatoshu), a lame-legged beggar, and Hodel (Helen Beverly),
a poor blind girl—but the film’s moral center, as well as its narrative mover
and shaker, is the gray-bearded Rebe Mendele (Izidore Cashier), a shrayber
(writer), bookseller, and spiritual factotum who takes up the troubled lovers’
cause. And the trouble, this time, stems not from a particular social orienta-
tion or character flaw, but from eastern European Jewry’s tribal insularity.
Intra-Jewish conflict, and ultimate reconciliation, are foregrounded in
the film’s opening scene, whose location is geographically specified. On
the country road between the Jewish village of Glubsk (“Foolstown”) and
the more cosmopolitan city of Odessa, Rebe Mendele lies like a corpse in
a horse-drawn cart. When a cart comes up from behind and its horse starts
nibbling hay around the seemingly deceased Mendele’s face, he awakens and
angrily approaches the other cart’s driver. The two men raise their fists for a
fight, then suddenly recognize each other, and shake hands.
The film will return to this same setting and uplifting theme at the end,
when Fishke and Hodel, at Mendele’s urging and with his crucial assistance,
take flight from the poverty, pestilence, superstition, and corruption of Glubsk
toward the more modern and humane conditions of Odessa. The final image
shows the couple in long shot from Mendele’s point of view, silhouetted, as
they ascend a low rise against the glow of a cloudless sky (apparently inspir-
ing the film’s American title, A Light Ahead). But the lighthearted opening
80 Vincent Brook

and “enlightened” closing belie Di Klyatshe’s overall look and tone, which are
relentlessly dark and bleak. Most of the film takes place at night, in the town’s
narrow alleyways, cramped living quarters, and cemeteries. In its canted
lampposts, angular buildings, and expressionist shadows, Ulmer’s Glubsk not
only “suggests the confluence” of Chagall and Caligari, as Hoberman keenly
observes (303), but, even more than Yankl der Shmid, it presages Ulmer’s later
immersion in the film noir cycle.
While Ulmer supplies the noir, Rebe Mendele, a stand-in for S. Y.
Abramowitz, the author of the work on which the film is based, supplies
the Yiddishkeit. Under his pen name Mendele Mokher Sforim (Mendele the
Bookseller), Abramowitz was called the “Grandfather of Yiddish Literature”
by Sholem Aleichem (Hoberman 300). Rebe Mendele’s resemblance to his
literary creator is reinforced not merely through the name and shrayber/
bookseller occupation. In one scene in which he sells books and religious
paraphernalia on the street, Rebe Mendele reflexively announces, in direct
address to the camera, that in addition to prayer books, dime novels, and
skullcaps, he “even” sells “books by Abramowitz.” The irony of the “even”
will become more bitter as the narrative unfolds, for as with the goods he
peddles, the ideas Rebe Mendele propounds are both religiously and politi-
cally subversive.
The threat Mendele the shrayber poses to the Jewish establishment be-
comes an open secret when, at a meeting of the Glubsk city council, the coun-
cilmen express concern “because he may write about us in his books.” Not
that he doesn’t have enough material already, given the council’s refusal to
fund a much-needed hospital in the town despite a growing cholera epidemic,
which itself stems from a polluted river that the council has declined, and
continues to decline, to clean. The spoken rather than written word gives vent
to Rebe Mendele’s religious rebelliousness. Raising his head to the heavens,
he praises God’s infinitude, then adds a Job-like plaint:

Scattered over the globe are little Jewish cities. Thousands of years you gaze
down upon them. You see their wretchedness, their misery, and keep silent . . .
You listen to their sighs, you hear their groans in persecutions and massacres,
and you keep silent. Oh, like a sick child to its mother will I lament to you! Oh,
how it hurts! How can you look on and keep silent? How long will you torture
us? When will there be an end?!

When his earthly and heavenly pleas fall on deaf ears, Rebe Mendele does
what little he can to make a difference, starting with the hapless Fishke and
Hodel. Following an ancient Glubsk custom, the cripple and the blind girl,
as the poorest boy and girl in town, have been coerced into a “sacrificial”
wedding in the cemetery to absolve the city of it sins, the real effect of which
 Forging the “New Jew” 81

will be to stigmatize Fishke and Hodel as “the cholera groom and bride” and
their offspring as “cholera children.” Rebe Mendele coaxes the couple to go
through with the humiliating ceremony, then secrets them out of town in his
cart and onto the road he hopes will lead them “not to wretched need and
bitterness but to a normal life full of joy.” But whatever the future holds for
them, the couple is justified in any case “to leave a city still in the Middle
Ages that fights cholera with superstition.”
Released in summer 1939, in the shadow of the German annexations of
Austria and Czechoslovakia that brought nearly a million Jews under Nazi
rule, Di Klyatshe’s biting tone and allegorical meaning were as clear as
Kristallnacht. As the lowest of the low, the cripple and blind girl serve as met-
onyms for the perpetually marginalized and downtrodden Jewish people; and
their flight from a “city still in the Middle Ages” represents eastern European
Jewry’s last best hope of escape from persecution, if not outright annihilation.
The twist here is that the enemy is not merely without but within a Jewish col-
lective backwardness which, however much effected by forces beyond their
control, requires a complete reconstitution if the Jewish people are to survive.
And this survival, in the New World or wherever Jews can find a safe haven,
Di Klyatshe proclaims in no uncertain terms, calls for a New Jew as well.
Amerikaner Shadkhn, Ulmer’s swan song to Yiddish film, examines to
what extent the New World Jew fills the bill. The film ironically, in terms of
genre, resembles Italy’s fascist-era “white telephone” films: “romantic com-
edies in lavish settings, populated by men and women of leisure for whom
love and marriage are life’s greatest problems” (Hoberman 316). A superficial
Jewishness informs the plot: a wealthy, second-generation American-Jewish
Manhattanite, unlucky in love, turns to Old World inspired matchmaking as a
last resort. But the film’s subtext is only “too Jewish,” dealing with an issue
of increasing significance to American Jews: the threat to Jewish survival
posed not by pogroms or concentration camps but by assimilation and ac-
culturation.
That an irreparable rent in the fabric of European Yiddishkeit has already
occurred is indicated right off the bat in the posh apartment, elegant clothes,
and de-Judaized name of the film’s protagonist, Nathan Silver (Leo Fuchs),
but perhaps most tellingly in the pidgin Yiddish he and his friends speak in
the opening scene’s “bachelor party,” as they call this most American, or
at least non-Jewish, of customs. Other Americanisms such as “no sirree,”
“movie star,” and “You said it!” pepper the dialogue, and the Americanization
of the film itself is reflexively referenced in the party scene’s climax, which
parodies American gangster films. A shady-looking character in trench coat
and fedora bursts in and pulls a gun on Nathan, then threatens to turn it on
himself because Nathan has “stolen” his childhood sweetheart to be his bride.
82 Vincent Brook

When the tender-hearted Nathan calls off the wedding, making this his eighth
aborted engagement, his mother turns to the family tree to break the losing
streak.
Nathan’s matrimonial problems, she explains, “run in the family.” His
Uncle Shya, back in the old country, was as healthy and prepossessing as Nat
and yet as constitutionally unable to land a bride. So Uncle Shya decided to
become a shadkhn, reasoning that by helping others he might also help him-
self. Nathan’s response, and his mother’s rejoinder, succinctly establish the
film’s survivalist/assimilationist dialectic:

Nathan: But this is America, not Europe.

Mrs. Silver: Family characteristics know no boundaries. They travel across
oceans, over mountains.

And whatever obstacles familial bonds can’t overcome, cinema can com-
pensate for, as Nathan’s fantasy immediately shows: Uncle Shya (Leo Fuchs
with beard), basking in the glory of a wedding he has arranged, describes the
shadkhn’s purpose in a manner that clearly spoke, at least to Jewish audiences
at the time, to European-American relations as a whole: “He brings strangers
together and knits bonds of friendship closer.”
Nathan’s American version of matchmaking, while played for broad comic
effect, also satirizes the cultural transposition. The changing of his business
name from Nathan Silver to Nat Gold raises the name’s exchange value but
also sends up the materialism of the enterprise; while his new business de-
scription, “Advisor in Human Relations,” lampoons American euphemistic
jargon. When Maurice (Yudel Dubinsky), Nathan’s butler turned “executive
assistant,” misreads “relations” as “relishes, as in pickles,” Yiddish humor’s
genius for unmasking pretentiousness through ingenuousness is once again
revealed. Nathan’s procedural innovations, however—having a lawyer, doc-
tor, rabbi, and psychologist on staff to examine his clients before advising
them—are no joke to New York’s more traditional shadkhonim. Yet despite the
old guard’s bearded and black-hatted appearance, their American-style pro-
test, replete with picket signs in Yiddish and English (“Better a Shadkhn Than
a Shotgun,” “It’s Better to Do with A Shadkhn Than Never to Have Loved At
All”), betrays their acculturation, and Nathan has little difficulty striking a
deal with them that benefits all parties.5
The shadkhn’s traditional function, as Hoberman explains, was to mediate
“between the material facts of an arranged marriage and the Jewish folk-be-
lief that each marriage is divinely preordained. Perhaps the archetypal shtetl
Jew, the shadkhn is at once the instrument of a divine plan and a luftmentsh
[airman]” (318). Employing an American matchmaker to arbitrate tensions
 Forging the “New Jew” 83

between Old and New World Jewishness was thus a master stroke, at least in
a romantic comedy whose obligatory happy ending ensures—at least on the
surface—a successful resolution.
When Nathan ends up marrying Judith Aarons (Judith Abardanel), a
woman whose mother has hired him to find a husband for her daughter, but
who falls in love with Nathan (and vice versa), the merging of the American
Dream with its eastern European counterpart is posited as the best of both
worlds, for the happily married couple and the Yiddish-language audience as
well. It’s left to the schlemiel Maurice to underscore, but also to problema-
tize, the syncretism of American and Jewish ideals. After Nathan gives the
matchmaking business to his assistant and one of the traditional shadkhonim,
Maurice sums up, but also deconstructs, the arrangement: “Imagine! ‘Mau-
rice Zucker and Simon Schwalbenrok: Advisors in Human Relishes’—it’s our
dream, it’s our dream!”

CONCLUSION

Ulmer’s four Yiddish films propose, in varying degrees of urgency, the need
for the forging of a New Jew in the wake of the demise of eastern European
Jewry. That each film proffers a different alternative indicates the complexity
of the problem and the difficulty in finding a viable solution under rapidly
shifting historical conditions. Looked at from a postmodern perspective, how-
ever, Ulmer’s New Jews need not be seen as separate and mutually exclusive
models for Jewish identity, but can be seen rather as a fluid continuum of
evolving, overlapping, recombinant identities. Nor is such a perspective nec-
essarily anachronistic. The expression “two Jews, three opinions” may be of
comparatively recent vintage, but a Jewish tradition of multivocality can be
traced back to the Torah, whose ambiguities invited a host of heterogeneous
interpretations in the Talmud and Midrash. Indeed, when taken together, Jews’
diasporic existence(s), fragmented identity(ies), and indeterminate sacred
text(s) have led David Biale, Michael Galchinsky, and Susannah Heschel,
among others, to deem Jews a prototypically postmodern people. When we
take into account the Jews’ immigrant experience in the United States, a
country that Jean Baudrillard regards as postmodern from its founding as a
representationally based construction, Jewish imbrication with the postmod-
ern condition expands exponentially.
Viewed through a postmodernist prism, then, Ulmer’s “forging” of the New
Jew must be taken in both its constructive and deconstructive senses—that is,
as a reshaping and, alternately, as a falsification of identity. Falsification, here
again, in the poststructuralist sense of Mary Ann Doane’s notion of “masquer-
84 Vincent Brook

ade” and Judith Butler’s of “performativity,” need not connote prevarication

or deceit. Rather, as a concept it stresses the fallacy of inherent, immutable,
unitary identity and thereby an opening of the “self ” to its multiple facets
and liberatory possibilities. Ulmer’s Yiddish films point up the multiplicity of
self in the way each character’s New Jewishness reflects the contingencies of
the specific historical moment in which the particular film was made. Their
emancipatory potential emerges if the films are taken as a body of work in
which a wardrobeful of identities are being tried on, sent back for alterations,
and tried on again—in other words, when the idea of identity formation itself
is being tested.
And what better proctor for such an examination than Edgar G. Ulmer?
Born a Jew but raised oblivious to his Jewishness, he had Jewishness thrust
upon him in adolescence; he not only rejected Judaism but converted to
Christianity in adulthood; and he finally reclaimed his ethnic inheritance
in early middle age—thankfully in a place, if not quite a time, when it was
propitious to do so. Upon his early-1940s return to Hollywood, Ulmer, along
with many of his fellow Jewish-émigré directors, would transmute his re-
newed Jewish consciousness into the emergent film-noir cycle.6 In this way,
his Yiddish-film period indeed can be seen as a stepping-stone for the more
famous films to come, but not merely due to his growing aesthetic affinity for
a darkly expressionist cinematic style. On a more fundamental level, his Yid-
dish-language work bears witness to Ulmer’s growing existential awareness
of what it meant “to be or not to be” a Jew.

NOTES

1. Ulmer’s early career claims must be taken with a grain of salt. Among his wild-
est assertions were to have almost single-handedly invented German Expressionist
cinema; to have served as a subject for one of Freud’s psychoanalytic studies; and to
have been related to Arthur Schnitzler (Grissemann 12). If you read what he alleged
about himself, Bertrand Travernier observes, he would have had to have been “every-
where at the same time” (cited in Grissemann 12).
2. The fifth phase (1945–present), obviously beyond our purview here, consists
of “modest and mostly unsuccessful attempts to revive Yiddish cinema in Poland, the
United States, and, belatedly, in Israel” (Hoberman 8).
3. Barry Salt lists only seven “pure” Expressionist works, which, besides Caligari
(and excluding The Golem), consist of Genuine and From Morning to Midnight (both
1920), Torgus (1921), Raskolnikov (1923), Waxworks (1924), and Metropolis (1926;
198).
4. The translated quotation here combines Hoberman’s version (266) with the
subtitles in the video I viewed. All the Yiddish film titles are according to Hober-
man.
 Forging the “New Jew” 85

5. Shadkhn is spelled “shadchen” on the picket signs in the film. I use shadkhn to
avoid confusion.
6. Other Jewish-émigré directors who contributed substantially to the film-noir
cycle are Fritz Lang, Robert Siodmak, Billy and Willy Wilder, Otto Preminger, Curtis
Bernhardt, Max Ophuls, John Brahm, and Anatole Litvak.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations (New York: Semiotext[e], 1983).

Biale, David, Michael Galchinsky, and Susannah Heschel, eds. Insider/Outsider:
American Jews and Multiculturalism (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1998).
Bogdanovich, Peter. “Edgar G. Ulmer,” in Who the Devil Made It: Conversations with
Legendary Film Directors (New York: Ballantine Books, 1997), 558–604.
Boyarin, Daniel. Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of
the Jewish Man (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York:
Routledge, 1990).
Doane, Mary Ann. The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s (Blooming-
ton: Indiana University Press, 1987).
Dollinger, Marc. Quest for Inclusion: Jews and Liberalism in Modern America (Princ-
eton: Princeton University Press, 2000).
Gillman, Neil. Sacred Fragments: Recovering Theology for the Modern Jew (Philadel-
phia: Jewish Publication Society, 1990).
Grissemann, Stefan. Mann im Schatten: Der Filmmacher Edgar G. Ulmer (Vienna:
Paul Zsolnay Verlag, 2003).
Gunning, Tom. The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegory and Visions of Modernity (London:
British Film Institute, 2000).
Hoberman, J. Bridge of Light: Yiddish Film between Two Worlds (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1991).
Krohn, Bill. “King of the Bs,” Film Comment 19, no. 4 (July–August 1983): 60–64.
Salt, Barry. “From German Stage to German Screen,” in Before Caligari: German
Cinema, 1895–1920, ed. Paola Cherchi Usai and Lorenzo Codelli (Pordenone,
Italy: Edizioni Biblioteca dell’Immagine, 1991).
Thissen, Judith. “Movies vs. Jewish Theater: The ‘Grand Scandal,’” in Entertaining
America: Jews, Movies, and Broadcasting, ed. J. Hoberman and Jeffrey Shandler
(New York: Jewish Museum, 2003), 29.
Ulmer Cipes, Arianné. E-mail message to author, 3 November 2007.
———. Phone interview with author, 10 October 2007.
 7
When You Get to the Fork, Take It

From Ulmer’s Yiddish Cinema to Woody Allen

Miriam Strube

Since the beginning of moving images, Jews have been part of the film
industry, both as actors and as producers. In America, Jews appeared in one-
reelers as early as 1903, drawing on archetypes found in literature, vaude-
ville, and graphic humor. They also played an important role in the U.S. film
industry. However, this role has not been an easy one. In American Jewish
Filmmakers, David Desser and Lester D. Friedman point out that Jewish art-
ists and businessmen have shaped the destiny of the film industry ever since
Walter Selig moved his company to California in the early twentieth century
(1).1 Yet, for a long time, Jewish moguls were not keen on promoting either
Jewish culture or Jewish actors.2 As a story about Columbia’s Harry Cohn
illustrates, the prevalent attitude of the studio years was rather dismissive.
When the director Richard Quine wanted to employ a specific actor, Cohn
allegedly yelled: “He looks too Jewish! Around this studio the only Jews
we put into pictures play Indians!” (1). Obviously, Jewishness was equated
with unwelcome foreign traits. These studio moguls tried to achieve as-
similation, both on and off screen, which led to a de-Semiticizing in film.3
If the American movie showed Jews at all they were models of successful
adaptation. Hollywood constructed “Americanism” as an effortless process
of assimilation, an idealization of the road taken by the movie moguls them-
selves. Not survival but success, not making it to America but making it in
America was emphasized. It was not until the end of the studio system in the
late 1950s, and especially the growth of ethnic pride in the 1960s, that an
evolution of American consciousness was marked. But even in early Jewish
film, not all Jewish filmmakers depicted a smooth assimilation, especially
not those of the Yiddish cinema.

87
88 Miriam Strube

In the following, I want to briefly describe Yiddish cinema before turning

to Edgar G. Ulmer’s four Yiddish films and, in particular, to his Amerikaner
Shadkhn (American Matchmaker, 1940). With this film, I argue that Ulmer
creates a Jewish American persona deeply steeped in neurotic ambivalence, a
persona later employed, further developed, and popularized by Woody Allen,
most notably in his Oscar-winning Annie Hall (1977).

YIDDISH CINEMA

Yiddish4 culture in America, according to Patricia Erens (1976), has three

defining aspects: first, a sense of humanity based on the notion of mentsh-
lekhkayt (the ethos of the good man);5 second, the acceptance of suffering as
a fact of life; and third, the twin reaction to this condition, namely, humor and
philosophical resignation—or, put differently, optimistic pessimism (8). This
new American-Yiddish culture was at home neither in the Jewish past nor in
the gentile present, and it therefore created a utopia shadowed by history—a
utopia rendered desperate, complex, and poignant by a uniquely Jewish
struggle for equilibrium between two worlds. Yet it is also important to point
out that Yiddish was not used or celebrated by all Jewish immigrants. Often
it was seen as neither entirely respectful nor completely respectable; for reli-
gious Jews, it was the language of the secular, whereas for the “enlightened”
it signified nothing more than Jewish insularity.
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Yiddish culture was
strongly expressed in live theater, whose prominence was gradually replaced
by Yiddish cinema during the Depression in the 1930s. At that time, the Yid-
dish film companies were financially shaky independents catering to a clearly
defined group of Jews (Erens, Mentshlekhkayt 48). While Yiddish artists and
intellectuals embraced secular ideologies and opened themselves to their new
surroundings, they simultaneously risked the loss of a significantly Jewish
identity. In this respect, the Yiddish stage and screen were a means of identity
formation. As J. Hoberman explains, it was not only entertainment but an
antidote for homesickness and a source of collective identity, serving for its
audience as half congregation, half extended family (17). Hoberman says:

Novel for its audience, that broad, shifting spectrum of Jewish life between or-
thodoxy and assimilation, the Yiddish cinema is also novel in the history of cin-
ema. Drawing upon an established dramatic and literary tradition, yet employing
a language virtually unknown to the Gentile world and considered by many of
its users to be only a “jargon,” this was not just a national cinema without a na-
tion-state, but a national cinema that, with every presentation, created its own
 When You Get to the Fork, Take It 89

ephemeral nation-state. A language charged with ideology, Yiddish was most

important for those nationalists who rejected religion but resisted the Zionist
insistence on a reconstructed homeland . . . Yiddish was not just a language and
a folk culture but an entire Jewish world, a “Yiddishland.” (5)

Initially, Yiddish cinema was as secular as Yiddish culture, often imbued

with the perspective of the proster Yid (common Jew). For a long time it had
a tendency toward sentimentality, yet it was a sentimentality leavened with
comedy as well as with nostalgia and pathos. Looking at the development of
Yiddish cinema, in his excellent book The Bridge of Light, Hoberman differ-
entiates five different phases: The first, beginning in 1911 in the silent period
and ending during World War I, coincided with the development of movies
as a mass medium and marked the discovery of a Jewish film audience. The
second phase began with the fall of the tsar in 1917 and extended a dozen
years, through the end of the silent period. This phase was characterized by
ambitious (albeit sporadic) attempts to make specifically Jewish movies.
Less dependent than earlier films upon the Yiddish stage, these efforts drew
upon the work of Yiddish and Jewish novelists. However, this period took
place primarily in Europe. Conversely, the third phase, that of the early sound
period, was an almost entirely American phenomenon. Less universal than
the silent precursors, these were “exploitation” films attempting to attract the
Jewish audience, ranging from canned vaudeville acts and cantorial virtuosity
to Biblical pageants, political documentaries, and dubbed silent films. The
fourth phase of Yiddish cinema is the best known. It began in 1935, mainly
with the rejuvenation of the Polish movie industry. The first Polish-Yiddish
film intrigued American producers and initiated a dialogue between Warsaw
and New York. This so-called Golden Age coincided with the period of the
Popular Front against fascism, and was characterized by international hits
such as Joseph Green’s Yidl mitn Fidl (Yiddle [little Jew] with His Fiddle;
Poland, 1936), Edgar G. Ulmer’s Grine Felder (Green Fields; U.S.A., 1937),
and Michal Waszynski’s Der Dibek (The Dybbuk; Poland, 1937). The final
phase was concentrated in the immediate post–World War II period from
1945 to 1950 but, more generally, could be said to continue until the present.
Returning Yiddish cinema to filmed theater, the fifth phase is characterized
by a modest and rather unsuccessful attempt to revive Yiddish cinema in the
United States and Poland, and also in Israel. But as “Yiddishland” dissolved
into the American and Soviet mainstreams and was rendered obsolete by the
creation of an actual Jewish homeland, the survivors of its Polish center dis-
persed throughout the world (343).
Throughout these five phases, the most persistent strain in American-Yid-
dish cinema was the family melodrama, with its images of domestic and
90 Miriam Strube

psychic disintegration, of unhappy upward mobility, and of Americanized

children rejecting or abandoning the parents who had made sacrifices for
them. Such films dramatized the anxieties of immigrants over the disruptive
effects that the New World might have on their traditional values. Probably in
order to combat this anxiety, the wedding emerged as a ubiquitous symbol of
the perpetuation of the Jewish people and their rituals in Yiddish cinema. Yet
Hoberman points out the limitations of this symbol:

Joyous or pathetic, comic or macabre, the wedding is the favored set piece of
the Yiddish cinema. But this implicit emphasis on cultural continuity scarcely
papers over the profound uneasiness that haunts many Yiddish movies. While
pogroms, steerage, poverty, anti-Semitism, and other dismal facts of contempo-
rary Jewish life are downplayed, Yiddish cinema is hardly escapist. (10)

Just as in all secular Yiddish culture, in Yiddish American cinema there is a

tenuous connection between traditional Jewishness and American culture. As
a consequence, these films are often self-contradictory, depicting a double
consciousness and competing images of successful assimilation and the
yearning for the simplicity of the shtetl. Often these competing notions are
portrayed in antithetical perspectives. For example, the classic Tsvey Shvester
(Two Sisters, 1938) neatly breaks down into antithetical worldviews: arranged
marriage (which was the rule in the nineteenth-century shtetl) versus roman-
tic love, “old-fashioned” versus modern, Yiddish versus American. However,
implicit in these dichotomies is an urge for totality, the desire for a self-con-
tained and complete Jewish world.

ULMER’S YIDDISH FILMS

Ulmer has been praised as one of the most versatile filmmakers (Schürmann
1), who “continually reinvented himself ” (Isenberg, “Perennial Detour” 4).
One of his many sides is his Yiddish cinema, although it is little known.
(Erens, for example, does not even include him in her lengthy study The Jew
in American Cinema.) During a four-year interlude and on a tiny budget,
Ulmer made four films aimed at a Jewish audience, which were presented
in the United States with English subtitles: Grine Felder, Yankl der Shmid
(The Singing Blacksmith, 1938), Di Klyatshe (The Light Ahead, 1939), and
Amerikaner Shadkhn. After Amerikaner Shadkhn, no further Yiddish films
were made during World War II.
Ulmer was a self-identified secular Jew and, as George Lipsitz notes con-
cerning Ulmer’s ethnic films, he believed “that cinema as a medium had a re-
sponsibility to educate and communicate, that it belonged as much to people
 When You Get to the Fork, Take It 91

striving to define their ethnic identity as it did to investors seeking profits.”

(198). While Ulmer did not speak Yiddish, he was very familiar with the Yid-
dish theater scene on New York’s Lower East Side.6 In fact, during his first
visit to New York, he was introduced to Yiddish stars from Second Avenue,
“the second Broadway,” such as the famous actor Maurice Schwartz.
Together with Green’s 1936 classic Yidl mitn Fidl, Grine Felder, Ulmer’s
first Yiddish film (released the following year), was highly acclaimed both
critically and commercially. Indeed, these two movies were the most suc-
cessful Yiddish films ever made.7 They created an upsurge in Yiddish culture
and Jewish consciousness,8 and they revitalized Yiddish cinema and gave it
international status. Hoberman explains that these Yiddish hits were celebra-
tory in a way that
earlier Yiddish talkies had not been. Suffering was not glorified. Neither was po-
litical action—yet the image of Jewish fertility, cooperation, and folk resilience
suggest a conscious countermythology in opposition to the virulent ideology of
Nazi anti-Semitism. (235)

Green and Ulmer, Hoberman explains, combined a romantic nostalgia for

shtetl culture with a far more sophisticated and ambitious filmmaking than
that of American shund (235).9
Grine Felder (starring the distinguished actors Helen Beverly, Michael
Goldstein, and Isidore Cashier) was so popular that it not only won the best
foreign film entry at the Paris Film Festival in 1938,10 but allegedly required a
police presence to control the huge crowds during the first few days of its run
in New York. Although this film of a Russian shtetl was shot in New Jersey,
many praised its authenticity; for instance, Der Tog, a leading Yiddish daily
newspaper, applauded it for its depiction of Jewish rural life and the authen-
ticity of its language (cited in Schürmann 33). Grine Felder is based on a play
by Peretz Hirschbein, which was adapted for the screen by Ulmer and the
veteran Yiddish stage actor Jacob Ben-Ami, who also codirected the film. It is
an unsentimental and lyrical rustic comedy displaying a sense of longing for
roots. Furthermore, it celebrates an idyllic world of wholeness, in which work
and religion, man and nature, and parents and children are happily reconciled
(Hoberman 251). By offering a look at this world, the movie creates a number
of positive Jewish images. Interestingly, Talmudic learning is presented as
secondary: education of the heart is privileged over religious dogma. By fo-
cusing on the natural landscape as well as the folksmentsh (man of the people)
and his connection to his idyllic surroundings, the film idealizes the common
man and his spirituality; but it is a spirituality gained through embracing the
material world rather than denying it. The film, as Stefan Grissemann puts it,
dreams of the union of man and nature (115).
92 Miriam Strube

Ulmer’s second Yiddish film (again, set in eastern Europe but shot in New
Jersey) is also based on a literary text, namely David Pinski’s 1906 Yiddish
classic Yankl der Shmid. Adapting this drama as a vehicle for Moishe Oysher, a
renowned actor, cantor, and star of Yiddish radio, with a supporting cast mostly
drawn from the Yiddish Art Theater, the producer Roman Rebush and Ulmer
engaged Jacob Weinbert to compose the musical score and the playwright Os-
sip Dymow to rework the drama for film. Yankl der Shmid turned out to be less
successful than Grine Felder despite the almost unanimously good reviews,
many of which complimented the film on its literary qualities.
This folkloric and montage-filled musical focuses on the blacksmith Yankl
(Moishe Oysher), a working-class hero. Portrayed as a womanizing drunk-
ard who is constantly philandering, he ends up marrying Tamara (Miriam
Riselle), a poor orphan. Because of his relationship with Tamara, he finally
becomes a mentsh—a conscientious worker, husband, and father (the baby,
in fact, is Ulmer’s infant daughter). This naturalistic drama was one of the
first Yiddish productions to present a psychological study of physical pas-
sion, although sexual desire is presented as both a primal drive and a source
of ambivalence (Hoberman 265). In contrast to Grine Felder, religion barely
exists in Yankl der Shmid. Rather, the film celebrates mentshlekhkayt and the
proster Yid in a very secular way.11
Ulmer’s third film from this period, Di Klyatshe (or Fishke der Krumer
[Fishke the Cripple]), is the most political, the most complex, and the least
commercially successful of his Yiddish films.12 The script was adapted from
the 1869 satire titled Masaot Benyamin Hashlishi (The Travels of Benjamin the
Third), by Mendele Mokher S’forim (also known as S. Y. Abramovitsh or as
Mendele the Book Peddler), whom the famous Sholom Aleichem named the
“Grandfather of Yiddish Literature.” However, the prizewinning scriptwriter
Chaver-Paver (né Gershon Einbinder), Ulmer, and Ulmer’s wife Shirley jointly
changed the script so as to soften Mendele’s satire, which actually describes the
shtetl Glubsk (literally “fool’s town”) as swarming with hucksters, beggars, and
thieves, and as being surrounded by a moat of sewage (Hoberman 312).
Di Klyatshe is much stagier than Grine Felder (whose profits enabled
Ulmer to produce this movie), and it is Ulmer’s most expressionistic Yiddish
film.13 Di Klyatshe deals with poverty, exploitation, corruption, and hypoc-
risy. In contrast to his earlier Yiddish films, Ulmer now offers a negative view
of the shtetl, which seems to be mired in the Dark Ages. Life in Glubsk is
depicted as miserable and archaic, and its religion as self-serving, hypocriti-
cal, and little more than superstition; even the dietary laws are perverted by
commerce (Hoberman 302). Di Klyatshe contrasts Glubsk’s life with the
love story between the blind orphan Hodl (Helen Beverly) and the crippled
Fishke (David Opatoshu). Both of them are pariahs who are nevertheless
 When You Get to the Fork, Take It 93

characterized by purity. Contrary to the corrupt village people, these two

outcasts are not mercenary. Poor and thus unable to get married, they dream
of a humble home in the big city of Odessa, in which they can live together.
Strikingly, while his earlier Yiddish movies are nostalgic in focusing on the
vigorous and healthy rural life in eastern Europe, Ulmer’s Di Klyatshe looks
at the shtetl’s deformation and hypocrisy, envisioning the city as the place for
salvation. As Fishke says, “In a big city, there’s more opportunity.” At the end
of the movie they are enabled to leave for the big city through the assistance
of another central character, Mendele (Isadore Cashier), again an ideal of
the folksmentsh. Mendele helps them flee their midnight wedding, which the
elders have organized as a ritual in order to fight the town’s cholera epidemic
(instead of allowing modern medicine or sanitation). “The sequences end
with the lighting of a streetlamp, a striking allusion to the battle between
enlightenment and religious dogma . . . the town pariahs break free from the
dark ceremony and make their way to the bright road toward the big city”
(Isenberg, “Perennial Detour” 14).
It is thus significant that Ulmer’s next and final Yiddish film not only
shows the rural-urban dialectic, but actually takes place in a city—and not
just any city, but one far removed from the shtetl and the Old World. More-
over, in contrast to Ulmer’s three previous Yiddish films, which are derived
from Yiddish classics, Amerikaner Shadkhn is based on the story of Ulmer’s
Viennese cousin Gustav H. Heimo, and the script was written by Ulmer and
Shirley. They set Amerikaner Shadkhn at the Jewish heart of the New World,
New York City,14 as the establishing shot of New York manifests; and they
have given us “a comedy in which we see what became of Fishke and Hodl’s
descendents in the city” (Krohn 64) as well as the roles that Yiddish-speaking
Jews occupy there (see Noah Isenberg’s “Permanent Vacation,” chapter 1 in
this book). One of these roles is the shadkhn, or matchmaker.
The figure of the shadkhn is well-known in Yiddish cinema. For instance,
in the classic Yevreiskoye Schastye/Menakhem Mendl (Jewish Luck, 1925,
based on Sholem Aleichem’s story), the protagonist Mendl stumbles upon
a book that contains a list of prospective brides and grooms, and hence he
decides to become a matchmaker: “Shadkhn—that’s a real profession!” The
shadkhn, however, is usually a comic, if not a ridiculous, figure. In Jewish
Luck this is underscored when, at the film’s climax, the new matchmaker’s
career goes awry when the self-proclaimed “king of shadkhonim” uninten-
tionally arranges a match between two young women. Yet despite being a
comic and poor figure, the shadkhn is not without power. For one thing, his
qualification of individual yikhes (social pedigree) makes him a social arbi-
ter. Moreover, being a psychologist of sorts, he mediates between the Jewish
folk-belief that, on the one hand, each marriage is divinely preordained and,
94 Miriam Strube

on the other hand, material circumstances are consequential in an arranged

marriage (Hoberman 318).
In Ulmer’s film on a shadkhn, Leo Fuchs plays the matchmaker. Fuchs was
a dancer-comedian from Poland who was first introduced in Yiddish cinema
in Der Mazldiker Bokher (Lucky Boy, 1935). In the mid-1930s, he was touted
as both the “Yiddish Fred Astaire” and the “Yiddish Ray Bolger.” Cinemati-
cally, Amerikaner Shadkhn is a very simple, low-budget film (even by Ul-
mer’s standards), shot almost entirely in the studio. Thus, it often disappoints
with its bland action and its mainly set-bound and overly static mise-en-scène,
which for the most part seems more like canned theater than a well-made
film. However, as Grissemann rightly points out, the film, with its lavish set-
tings mostly populated by people of leisure, tries to simulate the luxurious
makeup of Hollywood films (139). This fact, coupled with the choice of the
romantic comedy as genre, makes this film the most American of Ulmer’s
Yiddish films. From its very beginning, the film seems to show that only in
America, and, more specifically, only in an American city, can the Jew—that
is, the Americanized Jew—aspire to and ultimately attain wealth.
Accordingly, the focus is on an assimilated, rich Jew, namely, Nat Silver
(Fuchs), who is an elegant and cultivated Jewish American businessman, a self-
made man, and a respected member of New York’s Jewish elite. Nat obviously
has made it in America in terms of money, but his attempts at love and marriage
have been repeated failures. He has a troubled relationship with women, as all
of his seven engagements have been called off at the last minute.15 The open-
ing sequence shows Nat at his bachelor party in his stylish art deco penthouse
on Central Park West (an address where Ulmer actually once lived), yet the
atmosphere is not portrayed as happy and cheerful. That night, Nat is awakened
during a dream of his approaching marriage to Shirley (the woman’s image in
Nat’s dream is of Ulmer’s wife Shirley). A distressed young man holding a gun
has invaded Nat’s apartment, and he reveals that only his own poverty prevents
Shirley from marrying him instead of Nat—a fact, as the young man says in
despair, that will lead him to shoot himself. This incident ends Nat’s eighth en-
gagement. As a consequence, Nat wonders why he has “such bad luck in these
affairs,” and he puts this question to his mother. His mother replies that it runs
in the family: “You are just like your uncle Shya, you have inherited his luck . . .
He thought by helping others he might help himself.” Uncle Shya thus became
a shadkhn, and Nat’s mother encourages him to do the same. “Unbelievable!”
Nat exclaims, “This is America, not Europe.” But his mother responds that
“family characteristics know no boundaries. They travel across oceans, over
mountains.” And so Nat decides to change his life by turning himself into a
matchmaker, that is, by becoming more like his uncle Shya, whom he resembles
both in character and in looks, an observation confirmed by a flashback show-
 When You Get to the Fork, Take It 95

ing Shya (also played by Leo Fuchs) in traditional clothing, performing a mar-
riage—and doing so without wanting a fee, as he just wants to make people
happy. Uncle Shya’s own loneliness, which parallels Nat’s, is underscored in the
scene following the ceremony. While everybody dances, uncle Shya is all by
himself, without a single person sitting by his side. Indeed, we do not even see
the other people; we only see their shadows on the wall while they are dancing
and celebrating the wedding.
Having decided to pursue his uncle’s trade, Nat pretends to go to Europe while
in fact staying in the New World, where he reinvents himself. He changes his
name from Silver to Gold and opens a human relations bureau on Grand Con-
course and 158th Street, becoming a modern—that is, American—shadkhn.
Given this plotline, Judith Goldberg persuasively suggests that the lan-
guage—Yiddish—is the only major element that identifies Amerikaner Shad-
khn as a Jewish film. In contrast, I would argue that Amerikaner Shadkhn is
profoundly steeped in Jewish culture, and that it anticipated the Jewish film
persona, namely Allen’s urban neurotic, who became almost instantly and
internationally recognizable. While the film indeed celebrates success in
America, it also emphasizes that the confluence of the city and wealth do not
necessarily produce happiness. The film is deeply ambivalent. Consequently,

Figure 7.1. Flashback: Uncle Shya, the traditional shadkhn. Courtesy of Arianné Ulmer
Cipes.
96 Miriam Strube

Figure 7.2. Lonely Uncle Shya, surrounded by shadows of people dancing. Courtesy
of Arianné Ulmer Cipes.

a contemporary review in the New York Post opened with the remark that after
watching the movie “we’re still not sure whether [Amerikaner Shadkhn is]
meant to be a serious drama with a solution (boy meets girl) or a rollicking
comedy, spoofing the marriage broker institution even now in vogue amid
Jewish family circles” (cited in Hoberman 319).
Not only is the film ambivalent, but it is also about ambivalence, about be-
ing torn, about inbetweenness. It presents the concept of the Jew as a cultural
hybrid with a double consciousness; psyches trapped between the old and the
new, having to negotiate partial acceptance and partial rejection; and a feeling
of urban anxiety, although it is an anxiety shown as not only painful but also
funny—and hence bearable. If Allen can be called the father of this neurotic
city-Jew persona, Ulmer can be called its grandfather.

AMERIKANER SHADKHN AND ANNIE HALL

“A man complains to his psychiatrist that his brother-in-law thinks he’s a

chicken. When the doctor suggests putting him in a mental institution, the
man claims: ‘I would like to but we need the eggs.’” This joke, with which
 When You Get to the Fork, Take It 97

Allen closes his reflection on human relationships in Annie Hall, is a paradox

typical not only of what I call the persona of the urban neurotic Jew but also
of the film itself,16 and of Amerikaner Shadkhn.
One of the most memorable sequences from Annie Hall is the well-known
dinner scene in which the protagonist Alvy Singer (Allen), a New York Jew,
meets the gentile family of his girlfriend Annie Hall (Diane Keaton). This
scene is built around both the contrasting conversations of Jews and gentiles
at dinner and the spaces that they inhabit: the cramped, urban interiors of the
former are contrasted with the brightly open, rural exteriors of the latter.
Here, Allen’s use of the split screen directly and powerfully displays the
contrast between the two families. This dichotomy is further strengthened
by the mise-en-scène showing the worlds of the gentile Hall family and the
Jewish Singer family, focusing on their differing table etiquette and noise
levels, the divergent colors of their worlds, and, by implication, their different
approaches to life. Both sound and colors are expressive of their emotional
states. The Halls have their meal at midday, in the bright light that pours in
through their windows, a reminder of the nature surrounding the Hall man-
sion. Unlike the Halls, the Singers have their meal enclosed in a cavelike
interior. In and from this small apartment, nature is nowhere to be seen—ex-
cept perhaps on the flower-print dresses of the women (Mast 131). The Halls,
however, wear, and live within, patternless, colorless neutrals such as whites,
off-whites, beiges, and grays—that is, earth tones that Allen always associ-
ates with goyism (and which become an important leitmotif in Interiors, the

Figure 7.3. Woody Allen’s famous dinner scene in Annie Hall. Courtesy of MGM Home
Entertainment.
98 Miriam Strube

film following Annie Hall). Visually, the harsh, clean lines of the Hall dining
room sharply contrast with the chaos of the Singers’ dining room, beyond
whose walls lie not the fields and trees of nature but the noisy rollercoaster
of New York’s Coney Island. The Halls speak, if they speak at all, quietly and
politely, one conversation at a time, about such banal topics as the weather,
swap meets, and boating. The Singers all talk at once, creating a loud, semi-
articulate noise, discussing rather depressing subjects such as failure, hospital
visits, and deadly diseases.
From Alvy’s perspective, Annie’s family lives in a bright, sunny world, which
supplies them with good health, wealth, and a sense of belonging. Alvy, both
distraught and impressed by Annie’s family during an Easter dinner, turns to
the camera and tells the audience that Annie’s family looks really healthy and
American, and adds: “Nothing like my family. The two are like oil and water.”
Alvy’s claim that the family looks “American” is particularly interesting, for his
family is also American in that they were all born in the United States. But Alvy
sees himself as an outsider, not an American, as a stranger from the hated New
York City, a world of pessimism and darkness, a world, as he explains, where
people fast to atone for sins they do not understand. His feeling of being an
outsider is epitomized in one of the film’s most memorable subjective images,
namely when Allen depicts Alvy in the garb of a Hasidic Jew.17
At first sight, the vision of Hasidic Alvy has a clear meaning—the “freaky
foreignness” of Jews, strangers in the American heartland of the clean, bright,
open, tasteful, normal gentiles. While many rest with this reading, Gerald Mast
rightly recognizes that Allen imbues this distinctive contrast with several twists
below its simple surface (132). The shot of Hasidic Alvy does not really convey
the Halls’ view of him, not even that of the Jew-hater Grammy Hall (Helen Lud-
lum); rather, it mirrors the way Alvy perceives the Halls’ gentile consciousness.
Alvy’s vision relates as much to the clear contrast between gentiles and Jews as
to his paranoia and persecution complex, his own insecurities and discomfort.
Earlier in the film, this belief of constantly being the object of scorn and ridi-
cule is denoted in more detail. Alvy perceives anti-Semitism everywhere—not
only in the looks of the Halls, but also in the mutterings under strangers’
breaths. Simple questions such as “Did you eat?” are, in Alvy’s mind, elided in
the vernacular American pronunciation as “Djew eat?”
Moreover, while the dinner sequence constructs a visual and aural binary
contrast between Jews and gentiles, Allen deconstructs this very binary op-
position in the scene following the dinner. Whereas Alvy only notices the
bright lights and healthful appearance of the Halls, the viewer is aware that
Annie’s brother Duane (Christopher Walken) suffers from feelings that ex-
ceed Alvy’s own profound pessimism. Sitting on his bed in a dimly lit room,
which is even darker than the Singers’ dining room, Duane tells Alvy that
 When You Get to the Fork, Take It 99

Figure 7.4. Hasidic Alvy, a stranger in the American heartland. Courtesy of MGM
Home Entertainment.

he wants to confess something. He then describes his desire to kill himself

by driving into the headlights of an oncoming car. Alvy is himself preoc-
cupied with death, which is reflected in the two books he has bought Annie
on their first date (The Denial of Death and Death and Western Thought),
and similarly in Alvy’s passion for Marcel Ophüls’ classic documentary
film The Sorrow and the Pity. Indeed, Alvy often whines about his obses-
sion with death, although he does not view suicide as an appropriate action
or solution. He therefore leaves Duane in his dark room, saying that he is
“due on the planet earth.”
In Annie Hall, Allen clearly disrupts Alvy’s notion of Jewish difference.
However, he shows the peculiar position of Jews in American society, one that
is marginalized and alienated—despite forms of assimilation. This form of
assimilation does not lead to the total disappearance of Jewish identity. This
inbetweenness, Allen seems to say, has an impact not only on Jews as a group
and their sense of belonging, but also on the individual, who is left feeling
insecure and unhappy. One of the coping mechanisms is an intellectual ap-
proach to life. As Mast suggests, the image of the Jewish intellectual replaced
the stereotype of the “money-counting Jew” (138). Part of this approach is an
interest in psychoanalysis. In Annie Hall, as well as in many other Allen mov-
ies, the protagonist has been in therapy for many years. However, despite the
interest in it, there is also an underlying suspicion of the techniques of Freud-
ian psychoanalysis as a means to better understand human behavior. In Allen’s
movies, this suspicion is emphasized by the fact that therapists usually do not
100 Miriam Strube

aid in making the protagonist happy or countering his anhedonia, that is, the
inability to feel happiness. Along these lines, Annie Hall’s title was originally
intended to be Anhedonia. Consequently, the film does not conclude with a
happy ending, with the reunion of the two protagonists. Alvy’s relationship
to Annie—like his two previous marriages to Jewish women—fails. Annie
Hall is, as Frank Krutnik labels it, a nervous romance, which is a response
to the sexual revolution of the ’60s challenging the ideology of heterosexual
romance and the patriarchal conceptions of sex and sexuality (Krutnik). It
thereby revises the genre of the romantic comedy, whose death Brian Hender-
son famously declared in the late ’70s (22).
Amerikaner Shadkhn obviously predates the nervous romance and belongs
to the genre of the romantic comedy ending with a happy marriage. Despite
such obvious differences, I want to point to a number of striking similarities,
to typical Allen themes (Lee 35) that are anticipated in Amerikaner Shadkhn:
existential issues, such as questions of Jewish identity, responsibility, and
feelings of difference from and ambivalence toward WASP society; intellec-
tual approaches to life; urban settings; neurotic insecurities and, in connection
with this, the interest in, yet suspicion of, the techniques of Freudian psycho-
analysis as a method for a better understanding of human thinking and life;
and, last but not least, problematic gender relations.
Already the paradoxical title, Amerikaner Shadkhn, combines the very
traditional Yiddish figure of the shadkhn with American identity and thereby
alludes to the clash of cultures and the consequent state of double conscious-
ness or inbetweenness, the inescapable ambivalence, that I have described as
the core of Annie Hall. When, after his eighth failed engagement, the protago-
nist of Amerikaner Shadkhn decides to become a shadkhn, he does not simply
copy his uncle’s business or looks. Instead, Nat modernizes the matchmaker’s
image and Americanizes the business: he does not wear a beard and hat like
a traditional shadkhn, but rather he dresses as a diplomat; and the sign on
his door does not say shadkhn but “advisor for human relations,” which his
friend and butler Maurice (Judel Dubinsky) misinterprets as edible “human
relishes.” In order to strengthen this modernized version and make it more
scientific, intellectual, and thorough, he also brings in specialists: a doctor, a
psychiatrist, a lawyer, and a rabbi.
He is particularly proud of the psychiatrist, “an expert on love prob-
lems”—however, we never really observe her in action or see her accomplish-
ing much, and Nat’s new approach once again lends itself to a comic remark,
when Maurice calls the new business “schadchenology.” Nat also proposes
to update the business using modern methods embodied in the “Schadchen
Trust,” which gives the matchmakers working for him a salary (while he—out
of mentshlekhkayt, or guilt, or emulation of his uncle—works for free).
 When You Get to the Fork, Take It 101

Ambivalence is further emphasized on the linguistic level. The film is

filled with comic stutters and other jokes on language, and has nearly as
much English as Yiddish. The degree of innocent alienation from tradition
is reflected by the comic acts (Hoberman 337). Most characters mix Yid-
dish with English, especially typical American expressions such as “You are
so nice,” which is a favorite expression of Judith’s mother. (Judith [Judith
Ababarnel] is the young woman who will eventually become Nat’s wife,
thus ending the film traditionally with a Jewish wedding.) Yet the people
using English are by no means presented as ideals of assimilation. They
are shown as comic or even ridiculous figures, such as a series of silly and
overly assimilated women (who are contrasted by comic figures symbol-
izing tradition, such as old shadkhn figures wearing beards and derby hats
while protesting against Nat’s new business). These people have not quite
found their place in the New World, as they are either hanging on to old tra-
ditions or striving for assimilation, which Ulmer portrays as overassimila-
tion. Despite this pursuit of assimilation, despite the fact that Nat and many
other characters are Americanized, being Jewish still plays a role in their
lives. It is neither Judaism (a main theme in Grine Felder), nor orthodox

Figure 7.5. The American matchmaker and his modernized version of “schadchenol-
ogy.” Courtesy of Arianné Ulmer Cipes.
102 Miriam Strube

and conservative faith (portrayed so negatively in Di Klyatshe), but a form

of cultural Jewish identity. For example, when Nat looks for a possible hus-
band for Judith, it is still important that he be Jewish; intermarriage is not
even considered by any of the involved parties.
It is not only this focus on ambivalence and inbetweenness, but also the
film’s humor that marks Amerikaner Shadkhn as coming from a Jewish
tradition. It is a humor that, according to Sarah Blacher Cohen’s definition
in The Jewish Wry, could be described as a collision of the serious with the
profane, the sad with the joyful (11).18 In one impressive and funny sequence,
seemingly without transition, Maurice and Nat start a lighthearted drinking
song,19 despite the fact that Maurice is obviously seriously depressed at the
beginning of the scene and Nat constantly seems to be suffering from melan-
choly. As Nat’s sister Elvy (Anna Guskin) says at one point, he is a schlemiel,
someone who has bad luck, who is “the hidden architect of his misfortune”
(Reik 41), and who represents the antithesis of the macho type (Ziv and
Zajdman viii). Americanized Nat is such a schlemiel figure. The end of his
eighth engagement certainly was unfortunate; but his behavior toward Judith,
his unwillingness to see her as the perfect match that she is and that he feels
her to be, comes rather from his anhedonia and his troubled and ambivalent
relationship to women. Gender relationships are further complicated by the
urban surroundings:

The City offers a setting for the exploration of the historical ambiguities of the
Jewish experience. In the process of emancipation, the city is also the bridge
from tradition to modernity. It makes the move from communal status to ethnic
and personal identity possible. (Desser and Friedman 6)

In Amerikaner Shadkn it is Judith, above all, who recognizes this fact, in a

scene in which she describes New York as a slippery skating rink. On this
skating rink she likes to socialize with “crackpots,” as her mother complain-
ingly points out, that is, with “artists, actors, dancers, and other peculiar
people.” Here the simplicity of the Old World’s shtetl is not to be found. In the
New World, a new sense of identity and consequently a new shape of gender
relationships spring from this urban experience.

CONCLUSION

Focusing on the main characters of Amerikaner Shadkhn and Annie Hall, one
could claim that both Nat and Alvy are neurotic urbanites. They are modern
and assimilated intellectuals, yet they are not fully at home in their urban
American home. Moreover, Nat and Alvy are similar not only in being char-
 When You Get to the Fork, Take It 103

acterized by their feelings of inbetweenness, the assimilation and American-

ization of Jewish identity into a non-Jewish lifestyle, but also in that they are
schlemiel figures who feel and reflect their anhedonia and existential turmoil.
This turmoil has its origins in the absence of Judaism in their lives but the
presence of a Jewish sensibility; the humor; the intellectual and self-reflective
approach to life; and, last but not least, their troubled relationships to women.
The main difference between Nat and Alvy is a matter of position and degree:
Allen not only moves the “crackpot” from margin to center, but also exagger-
ates the characteristics of this Jewish neurotic hero.
Bill Krohn proposes that Nat’s marriage to a woman “who represents ev-
erything new, after the comic detour of the Schadchen Trust, signals Ulmer’s
acceptance of his own new identity: during and after the war years, he be-
came a working Hollywood director, an ardent patriot, and supporter of the
free enterprise system” (64). Similarly, Hoberman entitles the chapter on
Amerikaner Shadkhn “Married to America.” One could furthermore argue
that in Amerikaner Shadkhn Ulmer does not just tell a story of a matchmaker,
but he himself becomes a matchmaker, namely between Yiddish cinema and
American film.20 For this European Jew, the United States turned out not to
be a detour, yet it was no place like home. Just as marriage is not easy for
Nat, just as Amerikaner Shadkhn is filled with moments of in-between-ness,
gloominess, and discomfort (despite the wedding at the end), Ulmer does not
believe in love at first sight or a simple, romantic love. Rather, in psycho-
analytical terms, he stresses Beziehungsarbeit (relationship work), which is
unstable and never-ending. Thus, in a vein similar to Allen’s deconstruction
of a stable notion of Jewishness and his celebration of a particular Ameri-
can-Jewish culture, which is alienated and marginalized and therefore lends
itself to insecurities not to be overcome by intellect or psychoanalysis, Ulmer
emphasizes ambivalence, not the total disappearance of Jewish identity, in his
final and most American Yiddish film on an assimilated, wealthy, urban Jew.
An American idiom might serve as a symbol for his route: “When you get to
the fork, take it.” For a Jewish American persona created by Ulmer or Allen,
there is no way out but this one.

NOTES

1. The only exception was Darryl F. Zanuck’s 20th Century-Fox, the “Goy Studio.”
2. As Stephen J. Whitfield elaborates, there is no single definition of Jewishness.
Whitfield also claims that the United States may be the site “that has most fully tested
the category of Jew, where the definition is loose enough to embrace culture rather
than religious belief or the identity of one’s mother” (10).
3. See also Neal Gabler’s thorough analysis in An Empire of Their Own.
104 Miriam Strube

4. Yiddish is a European Jewish language, which evolved during the Middle

Ages. It is the vernacular of the Ashkenazim (from Ashkenaz, the medieval Hebrew
name for Germany); and, like English, it is a fusion tongue, namely, an amalgam of
High Middle German, Hebrew, various Slavic languages, and Aramaic.
5. In “From The American Shadchan to Annie Hall,” Betty Yetta Forman de-
scribes mentshlekhkayt as “the standard of human decency and responsibility which
formed the idea of shtetl life and the subsequent American immigration community”
(6). Despite expectations raised by the title, Forman hardly devotes any attention to
Amerikaner Shadkhn, and her article differs greatly from my approach and analysis.
6. New York’s Lower East Side was the largest settlement of Jewish immigrants.
In 1910, this city within a city reached its maximum density, cramming over half a
million people into only a few square miles.
7. Theirs were the first sound films to “green” the Yiddish screen with extensive
exteriors. The lyrical optimism of their movies stands in marked contrast to the sanc-
timonious guilt of the American generational melodramas, as well as to the morbid
fatalism of later Polish films (Hoberman 235).
8. William Edlin praised the film in saying: “It is a joy and a great satisfaction to
be able to state that Grine Felder is a film we can take pride in; a film which we can
point to—the beginning of a new epoch in the experiment of producing American-
made Yiddish movies” (cited in Hoberman 250). Grine Felder repeated Yidl’s success.
In Literarische Bleter, Nakhman Mayzel, who had recently left Warsaw for New York,
lauded Grine Felder as an “outstanding artistic and financial success, unparalleled in
the history of Yiddish film in America” (cited in Hoberman 251).
9. Shund is a term of contempt indicating literary or theatrical “trash” and denoting
variously a vulgar display, an inept mishmash, a mass-produced trifle, or a piece of sen-
timental claptrap. Shund encompasses the full range of Yiddish kitsch, from the primi-
tive Biblical operettas to grim domestic melodramas. It was the first art form expressing
the distinctively American Yiddish community. True shund must be uplifting, pandering
variously to nationalist, family, or religious sentiments (Hoberman 206, 207).
10. It should also be noted that in America, Yiddish films were considered to be
“foreign,” both by the general public and the New York State Board of Censors, even
if they were made in New Jersey.
11. Hoberman compares these two Ulmer movies in filmic terms, stating that the
“interiors are dramatically lit and exhibit his characteristic use of odd angles and
bold perspective (for example, positioning outsized furniture in the foreground of the
frame). The exterior set, with its onion-dome facades and plywood cottages, is far
more elaborate than Grine Felder’s. The pace, however, is less fluid” (266).
12. Yet it is worth pointing out that the fall of 1939 was the most successful pe-
riod in the history of Yiddish cinema, as if Jews tried to express their solidarity at
the movie hall. Therefore, as Hoberman argues, “the strong competition from other
Yiddish releases was surely a factor. Indeed, given the film’s disturbingly downbeat
romance, continual emphasis on poverty and superstition, and blunt criticism of tradi-
tion, it could easily have performed even more poorly” (306).
13. “The performers tend toward stylized postures, and the frame is complicated
by the use of foreground props. With its crazy angles and skewed lampposts, Glubsk
 When You Get to the Fork, Take It 105

suggests the confluence of Marc Chagall and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” (Hober-
man 303).
14. Noah Isenberg therefore rightly calls Amerikaner Shadkhn “almost a sequel.”
(See chapter 1, “Permanent Vacation,” in this book.)
15. This is the main reason for the journalist Goldie Charles to assume that
Ulmer’s protagonist is homosexual, even though Ulmer never makes a clear refer-
ence on this account (Grissemann 140). However, I read his instability and “gender
trouble” merely as traits of the Jewish neurotic urbanite on whom I focus in this
chapter.
16. Annie Hall is the screen romance of the late 1970s. For Allen, as Neil Sinyard
points out, “it marked a significant shift of direction, in subject (from cine-pastiche
to self-revelation) and in persona (from stooge to sage). The film’s huge popularity
and Oscar-winning success (Woody winning Oscars for writing and direction, Diane
Keaton for best actress, the movie being voted best film) testified to his remarkable
dexterity in being able to transform private angst into public art” (46).
17. In contrast to Ulmer, at least as a child Allen spoke Yiddish (Baxter 11). He
was brought up Orthodox, and until he was bar mitzvahed at thirteen he had to at-
tend Hebrew school (Lax 33). However, he resented all organized faith. In his films
all references to Judaism and Hasidic rabbis are derisive. This is the case from his
first film, Take the Money and Run (1969), in which the protagonist agrees to be
a “guinea pig” for a new drug. This drug turns him briefly into a rabbi discussing
the Talmud.
18. Irvin Howe claims that at “the heart of Yiddish literature, often in its most ear-
nest works, one finds Jewish humor—the homely anecdote or joke. It is a remarkable
fact that this people of tragic destiny insisted on making laughter a major strand of
their folk expression” (16).
19. The songs further convey two things: Ulmer’s passion for music and, as Isenberg
remarks in reference to Alexander Horwarth, music or musical figures as a means of
highlighting the allegories of a typical emigrant situation (Perennial Detour 15).
20. Bret Wood sees this process of Americanization particularly on an aesthetic
level. He points to the stylistic similarities between Nat’s wedding party and the phan-
tasmatic jazz orchestra in Detour (cited in Grissemann 144).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Baxter, John. Woody Allen: A Biography (New York: Carroll and Graf, 1999).
Cohen, Sarah Blacher. “Introduction,” in The Jewish Wry: Essays on Jewish Humor,
ed. Sarah Blacher Cohen (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990), 1–15.
Desser, David, and Lester D. Friedman. American Jewish Filmmakers, 2nd ed. (Cham-
paign: University of Illinois Press, 2004).
Erens, Patricia. The Jew in American Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1984).
———. “Mentshlekhkayt Conquers All: The Yiddish Cinema in America,” Film
Comment 12, no.1 (January–February 1976): 48–64.
106 Miriam Strube

Forman, Betty Yetta. “From The American Shadchan to Annie Hall: The Life and
Legacy of Yiddish Film in America,” National Jewish Monthly, November 1977,
4–13.
Gabler, Neal. An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (New York:
Crown, 1988).
Goldberg, Judith. Laughter through Tears: The Yiddish Cinema (Fairleigh Dickinson
University Press, 1982).
Grissemann, Stefan. Mann im Schatten: Der Filmemacher Edgar G. Ulmer (Vienna:
Zsolnay, 2003).
Henderson, Brian. “Romantic Comedy Today: Semi-Tough or Impossible?” Film
Quarterly 31, no. 4 (1978): 11–23.
Hoberman, J. Bridge of Light: Yiddish Film between Two Worlds (New York: Schocken
Books, 1991).
Howe, Irvin. “The Nature of Jewish Laughter,” in The Jewish Wry: Essays on Jewish
Humor, ed. Sarah Blacher Cohen (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990),
16–24.
Isenberg, Noah. “Perennial Detour: The Cinema of Edgar G. Ulmer and the Experi-
ence of Exile,” Cinema Journal 43, no. 2 (Winter 2004): 3–25.
Krohn, Bill. “King of the Bs,” Film Comment 19, no. 4 (July–August 1983): 60–64.
Krutnik, Frank. “The Faint Aroma of Performing Seals: The ‘Nervous’ Romance and
the Comedy of the Sexes,” Velvet Light Trap 26 (1990): 57–72.
Lax, Eric. Woody Allen: A Biography, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press,
2000).
Lee, Sander H. Eighteen Woody Allen Films Analyzed: Anguish, God and Existential-
ism (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2002).
Lipsitz, George. “The New York Intellectuals: Samuel Fuller and Edgar Ulmer,” in
Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture, 7th ed. (Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 179–210.
Mast, Gerald. “The Neurotic Jew as American Clown,” in The Jewish Wry: Essays on
Jewish Humor, ed. Sarah Blacher Cohen (Detroit: Wayne State University Press,
1990), 125–140.
Reik, Theodore. Jewish Wit (New York: Gamut Press, 1962).
Schürmann, Ernst. The Primacy of the Visual: A Tribute to Edgar G. Ulmer (San
Francisco: Goethe Institute, n.d.).
Sinyard, Neil. The Films of Woody Allen (New York: Exeter Books, 1987).
Whitfield, Stephen J. In Search of American Jewish Culture (Hanover, N.H.: Brandeis
University Press, 2001).
Ziv, Avener, and Anat Zajdman, eds. Semites and Stereotypes: Characteristics of Jew-
ish Humor (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993).

FILMS CITED

Amerikaner Shadkhn (American Matchmaker, 1940)

Annie Hall (1977)
 When You Get to the Fork, Take It 107

Der Dibek (The Dybbuk, 1937)

Der Mazldiker Bokher (Lucky Boy, 1935)
Detour (1945)
Di Klyatshe (The Light Ahead, 1939)
Grine Felder (Green Fields, 1937)
Take the Money and Run (1969)
Tsvey Shvester (Two Sisters, 1938)
Yankl der Shmid (The Singing Blacksmith/Yankl the Blacksmith, 1938)
Yevreiskoye Schastye/Menakhem Mendl (Jewish Luck, 1925)
Yidl mitn Fidl (Yiddle [little Jew] with His Fiddle, 1936)
 8
A World Destroyed by Gold

Shared Allegories of Capital in Wagner’s

Ring and Ulmer’s Isle of Forgotten Sins
Andrew Repasky McElhinney

Lord, smile on those who smile,

Hosannah!
Grant them the wealth to live in style.
Hosannah!
Pardon their crimes against the masses.
Hosannah! Hosannah! Hosannah! Hosannah! Hosannah! Hosannah!
May God bless Rockefeller,
May God bless Henry Ford
May God bless J. P. Morgan, too,
And his great treasure hoard.
God bless Big Oil and Coal and Steel,
Send them their just reward.
May God bless sex appeal,
When wealthy men get bored,
God keep their faith and profits high,
And though the poor may starve and die,
Make sure no Earthly court will try the rich
Who rule the Earth the way you rule the sky.
Almighty Lord!
—Bertolt Brecht, Happy End: A Melodrama with Songs, 1929, translated
by Michael Feingold, 2006

THE BIRTH OF CINEMA OUT OF MUSIC

Before he acquiesced to the fact that only music can communicate what fails
words and tableaux, Richard Wagner sought to mount Gesamtkunstwerk—

109
110 Andrew Repasky McElhinney

dramatic pageants where music, text, and special effects synthesize to create
a total work of art, greater than the sum of its elements. With the advent of
motion-picture photography just before the turn of the nineteenth century, the
movement-image became the sibling to music, insomuch as both now pos-
sessed music’s previously unique possibility of expressing the inexpressible.
Western cinema, and especially synchronized “sound” cinema, makes mak-
ing “total works of art” almost accidental, as the medium inherently lends
itself to cathartic, overpowering, all-encompassing spectacle whose root can
be found in Wagner’s operatic revolutions of the nineteenth century.
Radical new theater techniques had been in the Norse air since Georg
Büchner left his observationist plays unfinished in the 1830s and they, per-
haps because of their unfinished nature, elicited a startling, strange, new
dramaturgy that moved narrative along at an unstable emotional pace. Though
still underrecognized in its great significance, Frank Wedekind’s most indeli-
ble contribution to post-Wagner world drama was fusing Büchner’s disjointed
(unfinished) hyperrealism with his own distinct form of burlesque, at a time
when Scandinavian drama, especially Henrik Ibsen, ruled the stage with a
revolutionary, “modern” approach to the representation of European psychol-
ogy. For the first time on the Western stage, unsolvable ambiguity ignited
both structure and content, melding the effect into one inseparable element
of performance.
From Wedekind’s experimental performance works, infused with Büchner,
Bertolt Brecht synthesized much of his style, so much so that we can, on an
elemental level, understand Brecht’s theater as the flower of Wedekindian
grotesque and Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk. Because of its privileged place
at the intersection of German cinema between the wars, Brecht’s theatrical
influence was inseparable from feature-length cinema, especially once the
sound era ostensibly relegated the movement-image to an imitation of theater.
Brecht’s theater speaks most pointedly today as the European exclamation of
the first half of the twentieth century. As he himself tells us, “art is not a mir-
ror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.”
But indirectly, a sort of declawed Brecht permeates. His effects of alien-
ation, seduction, and propaganda are used to trigger or merely to facilitate
any old narrative today. Everything is Brechtian in our post-postmodern era.
His use of the lurid, of the enticing-and-yet-forbidden, to fuel theater is the
dramatic technique on which Western sound cinema (and its advertising) is
based. Ultimately, when method is inseparable from narrative, the medium is
the message.
With the premiere of Happy End in 1929, Brecht summarized this polyfor-
matic genre that we see in his theater and in Western sound cinema’s imitation
of theater as “melodrama with song.” Brechtian “melodramas with song” are
 A World Destroyed by Gold 111

the defining genre of the twentieth century because they provide a format
in which entertainment and allegory can coexist in an easily digestible, and
perhaps commercial, form.
To a large extent—and this is made all the more convincing an observa-
tion because of the existence of exceptions, like the work of Chaplin and
Dreyer—Western sound cinema has consisted of individuals creating less
ambiguous representations of the personality possibilities they understand to
be relevant to the items they wish to juxtapose against them. Ergo, all cinema
is allegory, just as all media is propaganda, and all theater is manipulation of
illusion and disillusionment.
Germany from 1919 to 1933 was a creative golden age. In that era, German
theater, silent cinema, and music fused European aesthetics into technique,
and for over a decade produced the most indelible images and sounds of the
twentieth century. Weimar Germany is now a time of legends—Reinhardt,
Brecht, Wiene, Murnau, Lang, Pabst, Weill, Schoenberg . . . It was in this
fertile milieu that Edgar George Ulmer came of age. Ulmer would go on to
excel at cinematic “melodramas with song.”

RECALLED TO LIFE

Western cinema has excelled at melodramas with songs—if, indeed, it is not

almost totally comprised of them. Classics as diverse as L’Atalante (1934),
The Wizard of Oz (1939), Casablanca (1942), The Night of the Hunter (1955),
The Searchers (1956), Dr. Strangelove (1964), Aguirre Wrath of God (1972),
Jaws (1975), Stand By Me (1986), The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her
Lover (1989), and The Rock (1995) all fit into what we can consider the
“melodrama with song” genre.
Ulmer made melodramas with songs in nearly every genre, often in dip-
tychs—Thunder Over Texas (1934) / The Naked Dawn (1955), Detour (1945)
/ Murder Is My Beat (1955), The Wife of Monte Christo (1946) / Pirates of
Capri (1949)—which afford Ulmer a first and last word on genre archetypes.
Like Shakespeare or the Greeks before him, Ulmer frequently assembled
preexisting narratives into a new, inherently more complex whole. Ulmer’s re-
working of Hamlet as Strange Illusion (1945), and his reworking of Wagner’s
four-part music drama Der Ring Des Nibelungen in Isle of Forgotten Sins
(1943), are potent reimaginings of world classics, almost postmodern in the
way their simplification for the screen illustrates core truths of the source that
more straightforward productions often miss. Ulmer’s deconstructions, usu-
ally heavily related to his budgets, are dramaturgical inventions unthinkable
in any other circumstances than their own. It is this unique essentialism that
112 Andrew Repasky McElhinney

propels intermittently moldy melodrama forward with a contrastingly sophis-

ticated psychological expression of the profound uneasiness at the illusion of
representation that any performance phenomenon offers.
Ulmer’s cinema is remarkable because of its synthesis of Weimar-era the-
atrics at a time when the cinema afforded a massive world audience, and the
European political upheavals of the 1930s created a direct migration from the
film capitals of Europe, and especially Germany, to Hollywoodland, U.S.A.
Ulmer’s “golden hour” was his time at the Producers Releasing Corporation
(PRC), where he directed some of his most evocative and distinct work, in-
cluding Bluebeard (1944), Detour, and Club Havana (1945).
Ulmer’s first major PRC movie was Isle of Forgotten Sins, first released
in 1943 and later reissued as Monsoon. In it, Ulmer and composer-conduc-
tor Leo Erdody shape a dreamy South Seas adventure yarn into a meditation
on philosophical themes developed in Wagner’s Ring operas, expressing
these dramatic concerns with liberal quotations of Wagnerian leitmotifs
woven into the movie’s almost constant underscoring. An understanding of
Wagner, and the significance of each quoted Ring leitmotif, adds an im-
mense layer of illumination and unexpected metaphorical depth to Isle of
Forgotten Sins.

Figure 8.1. Film poster for Isle of Forgotten Sins. Courtesy of Arianné Ulmer Cipes.
 A World Destroyed by Gold 113

CGI CAN NEVER TOP THIS!

Just as the first part of Wagner’s Ring, Das Rheingold, begins with an un-
modulated 136-bar prelude based on the chord of E-flat major (meant to
represent the Rhine), Isle of Forgotten Sins begins with the sound of the sea.
In Ulmer’s work, the water sounds are followed by the swelling of an unseen
orchestra and a camera pan over driftwood, on which the main titles appear.
Erdody’s overture fills the soundtrack, resembling an orchestra warming up
before a concert. All sorts of musical phrases and percussive crescendos fly
out of Erdody’s pit, until this cacophony is overwhelmed by an unseen choir
harmonizing, giving voice to powerful forces of nature that will eventually
and apocalyptically deluge the human squabbling at the heart of Isle of For-
gotten Sins’ melodrama.
To illustrate the importance of the score’s construction and its multiple au-
thorship to the viewer, Erdody’s credit reads “Music by ERDODY [. . .] ,” the
ellipses denoting that Erdody’s contribution is the final redaction of music,
and that his score will draw on other composers.
Isle of Forgotten Sins opens with a subjective, nearly point-of-view track-
ing shot that winds down a corridor of bedrooms in a vaguely Asian setting.
It is clear that we are in a brothel and that a still-unseen madam is waking her
“girls” to ready themselves for fresh sailors. The musical underscoring is a
noodling oriental theme that Erdody and Ulmer use to connote the exoticness,
and also the toil of the prostitutes.
Marge Williams (Gale Sondergaard) is revealed to be the madam of the
brothel, called the Isle of Forgotten Sins, which officially operates as a legit
nightclub with live music, food, and drink. Marge reminds the women that
they are under heavy scrutiny by a magistrate who is seeking any provocation
to close the place. Marge tells them to clean up the floor show (“All rough
stuff is taboo”), and a gong announces the opening of the establishment for
the night.
Marge has a special relationship with the new prostitute, Diane (Rita
Quigley). In a private moment, Marge tells Diane that it’s not easy when your
“modesty has taken a beating” and reminds her that “giving patrons an eye-
ful is a stepping stone on [your] way home.” Already, Ulmer has presented
us with a world where love has been affected by capital, if not conjoined to
it, and where capital and the pursuit of capital force individuals to do things
that they would otherwise be uncomfortable with. In almost every one of
his motion pictures, Ulmer treats money, as Al Roberts says so pointedly in
Detour, as “paper crawling with germs.” This is a direct correlation to Der
Ring, where omnipotent power can only be achieved by theft, the violation of
nature, and the forswearing of love.
114 Andrew Repasky McElhinney

In the tradition of other great Ulmer-film heroine portrayals like those

of Janet Smith, Vera, and Jenny Hager, Sondergaard’s approach to playing
Marge is ambiguous. In her aside with Diane, we must ask the following:
is Marge just trying to protect her investment in the woman? is she seduc-
ing her? or does Diane represent a daughter or a younger version of Marge
herself? Ulmer often sets up these character dualities, as they serve to
transform the under-written into the fertilely suggestive by the nearly total
ambiguity of performance. In montage theory, this technique is named the
Kuleshov effect.
The action of Isle of Forgotten Sins moves aboard a docked ship belonging
to Jack Burke (Frank Fenton). Below deck, Burke has tied up shipmate Clancy
(John Carradine). Stealing his money, Burke makes for the Isle of Forgotten
Sins. Arriving there, he takes Marge to her office, tells her that her lover
Clancy is dead, and proposes that they run off together. As Marge is weighing
her options, Clancy bounds in, mad as hell, and he and Burke fight.
Burke and Clancy’s sparring is gleeful and joyous; they attack each other
with a verve and flirtation that physically illustrates the complex and often
contradictory bonds they share. Almost immediately, the men break the table
lamp and the room plunges into near darkness. Here, Ulmer undercranks the
camera and the drama gains momentum by being captured in a jittery fast
motion. Clancy and Burke’s fisticuffs spill into the nightclub centrum, and
in a matter of moments they have nearly destroyed the place. The patrons are
greatly amused that the club is living up to its wild reputation. After Clancy
has beaten Burke unconscious, a plantation owner named Carruthers (Sidney
Toler) injects himself into the fray and leads the club in celebrating the new
champ, buying all a round of drinks.
Money makes Burke and Clancy fast friends again. Clancy has recognized
Carruthers, through his distinctive “banshee laugh,” as a missing sea captain
named Krogan. Six months earlier, Krogan had been captain of the Tropic
Star, which sank under mysterious circumstances, taking its cargo of three
million dollars in gold to a watery grave. Clancy surmises that Krogan sank
the ship on purpose and reckons that Krogan must have the gold on his island,
or that the treasure is still with the sunken ship. The appearance of Krogan’s
first mate, now using the name Johnny Pacific (Rick Vallin), confirms to
Clancy that Carruthers is Krogan. Clancy tells Burke that there will be “so
much money for both of us” that they will have “no reason to double cross
each other.” Clancy and Burke shake hands on joining forces and pledge to
fight “back-to-back,” not between themselves.
Chaos again erupts at the Isle of Forgotten Sins as a man falls from the
balcony onto the main dance floor and dies, having been shot by Olga (Betty
Amann), one of the dancers. The visiting magistrate places everyone in the
 A World Destroyed by Gold 115

club under “technical arrest,” leading to riotous panic breaking out as patrons
and club employees alike scramble to escape the law.
Burke, Clancy, Marge, and some of Marge’s women flee in Burke’s ship
with the club’s cash. They set their course for Moran Island, where Car-
ruthers/Krogan has his plantation. Burke and Clancy plot to use the women
as a distraction for Krogan and Pacific while they snoop around to figure out
what has become of the Tropic Star’s gold. For their part, Clancy promises
Marge and the other women a share despite Burke’s objections. Diane wants
nothing to do with gold, and her forfeited share is claimed at gunpoint by
Olga, who has also fled to the island.
The action switches to Krogan, Johnny, and their concubine Luana (Veda
Ann Borg) on Moran Island. As they watch Burke, Clancy, and Marge arrive
on Burke’s boat, we hear the first Wagner leitmotiv quoted on the soundtrack,
as shown in figure 8.2. It’s Hunding’s theme from Act I of Die Walküre,
the second of Wagner’s four Ring operas. In Walküre, Sieglinde has been
separated from her twin brother Siegmund and forced into a marriage with
Hunding, a warrior from an uncivilized tribe. Act I begins with Siegmund
finding Sieglinde in Hunding’s hut, where she lives as an abused sex slave.
Wounded and fleeing pursuers, Siegmund asks who she is and where he is.
Sieglinde replies, “Dies Haus und dies Weib sind Hundings Eigen,” roughly,
“This house and this woman are Hunding’s possessions”; and, with that line,
Hunding’s leitmotiv sounds on a muted horn. In Isle of Forgotten Sins, the
horn call represents the pending battle between Clancy-Burke and Krogan-
Pacific, just as in Walküre it anticipates the Hunding-versus-Siegmund battle
at the climax of the second act. In Der Ring, the horn’s balefulness painfully
evokes Sieglinde’s imprisoning marriage to Hunding, and in Isle of Forgotten
Sins it evokes the way the women are treated as objects by men.
In one of the most lyrical moments of Isle of Forgotten Sins, Marge and the
other women go on a moonlit swim with Krogan and Pacific. The soundtrack
merges music, the sound of water, and the chatting of the characters into
an intriguing ambient soundscape; where the story is being told visually,
the soundtrack is a muddled reflection of the emotions displayed and sug-

Figure 8.2.
116 Andrew Repasky McElhinney

gested on the screen. Ulmer’s pioneering use of the limitations of his sound,
where we get the gist rather than word-for-word audibility, anticipates Robert
Altman’s deservedly famous layered stereo soundscapes, and illustrates yet
again Ulmer’s miraculous skill at using the meagerness of his budget to his
artistic advantage.
As Krogan forces himself on one of the women in the water, Isle of For-
gotten Sins cuts to Clancy and Burke searching the plantation house. Clancy
finds a map of where the Tropic Star went down, and he and Burke surmise
that the gold is still at the bottom of the sea, ripe for looting.
Forty-two minutes into Isle of Forgotten Sins, the twenty-four-minute
centerpiece deep-sea diving sequence commences. Clancy commands the
ship and air bellows, while Burke goes down, an air line and microphone
his umbilical cord to the surface. Burke is represented underwater by Ulmer
photographing a puppet in a tank. The Rheingold E-flat-major Prelude chord
emerges, as if from the depths of the brine, on the soundtrack.
In Rheingold, the head god, Wotan, in acquiescence to the nagging of his
wife Fricka, has hired giants, Fafner and brother Fasolt, to build a home.
With it, Fricka hopes for a hearth that will keep her adulterous husband from
further infidelities. However, fearing the destruction of the gods, Wotan has
turned Fricka’s dream house into a fortress and agreed (earnestly or not—it
is never clear) to trade Fricka’s sister Freia, goddess of youth, to Fafner and
Fasolt as payment for the castle (named Valhalla). Not only is Fricka outraged
at this selling of her sister, but the race of gods clamors for Freia’s return be-
cause they age rapidly when not revitalized by her magic apples. Wotan turns
to crafty half-god, and sometimes adversary, Loge to help free Freia from his
contract with the giants. Loge recounts how the Nibelung gnome Alberich
has recently gained a gold hoard by stealing the magic Rheingold—which
can only be taken from nature by the renunciation of love—and forging it
into a magic ring granting omnipotence. Loge suggests that Alberich’s booty,
gained via the ring’s magic, might prove a worthy substitute payment. Enticed,
the giants agree to accept the treasure in lieu of Freia. Amorally but legally,
Wotan and Loge then trick and trap Alberich, who under threat of death relin-
quishes the ring and the hoard to the gods, but not before he curses the ring,
and all who come into contact with it, with envy, unslakable lust, and death.
These events, in the concluding part of Der Ring, Götterdämmerung, result
in the immolation of the gods and the rebirth of the natural world though a
catastrophic flood.
In Isle of Forgotten Sins, we have a simplification of the Rheingold argu-
ment, where Ulmer reduces Wagner’s panoptic Ring universe to a relatively
elemental story of one pair of crime partners using a second to help them
steal some gold—the equivalent of the Rheingold subplot wherein Wotan
 A World Destroyed by Gold 117

and Loge (re)steal the gold from Alberich, who first stole it from the Rhine.
Just as Wotan is unwilling to renounce love but desires unlimited power and
therefore needs Alberich to steal the gold, Krogan-Pacific need Clancy-Burke
to obtain the treasure for them from the bottom of the ocean.
One of Wagner’s greatest dramatic reforms was his attention to soundscape.
His music, and music in general he would argue, is meant to invoke the drama
as well as the movement within the created space—the descent and return to
Nibelheim in Rheingold or “Siegfried’s Rhine Journey” in Götterdämmerung
are but the two of the most prominent examples of this “cinematic” technique
in Der Ring. Wagner’s dramatic innovations were not confined to the music
and text of his shows; rather, with the construction of the Bayreuth Festival
House, he moved performing art closer to installation and away from presen-
tation by seeking a total effect. With that in mind, the Bayreuth orchestra pit
is covered, so that the audience’s vision is directed to the stage, and the so-
norities of the instrumentation blend seamlessly with the actors’ voices. Thus,
the audience is immersed in the created world and therefore must navigate its
own role in the drama and allegory at hand. The contemporary parallel to the
effect of Wagner’s covered orchestra pit and a movie’s nondiegetic scoring,
once we see the interchangeability of the disciplines of music drama, opera,
and movies, is what we name the “cinematic.”
At first, Burke’s excursion under the sea in Isle of Forgotten Sins brings no
sign of the treasure. He remarks to Clancy that there is “nothing but sand”
at the bottom of the sea. On the soundtrack, the Rhinemaidens’ lament for
their stolen Rheingold punctuates Clancy’s frustration. In Rheingold, the
gold is stolen from its rightful place in nature, and through the power of the
renunciation of love by Alberich directly, and Wotan indirectly, it takes on a
supernatural importance that brings about the destruction of the world order.
In Isle of Forgotten Sins, Ulmer/Erdody use this allusion to underscore how
money taints love, and greed leads to destruction.
Clancy stirs the frustrated Burke on, telling him not to be discouraged be-
cause the gold’s “got to be somewhere.” Burke urges Clancy to “check the map.”
Dramatically parallel, the motif of Erda’s warning of the gold’s destructive force
from Rheingold follows his line (figure 8.3). Clancy finds the wrecked Tropic
Star and Ulmer/Erdody harness the exuberant music that accompanies the rev-
elation of the treasure in scene 1 of Rheingold (figure 8.4).
For the next few minutes, quotations from Rheingold’s prelude, the Rhine-
maidens’ lament, and Erda’s warning repeat on the soundtrack. Clancy ascends
from the depths; his relief at being safely back on the surface is expressed by
a repetition of the joyous “Rheingold Revelation” leitmotiv. All is not calm on
the surface, however—as the Rheingold prelude sounds below, a tremendous
monsoon (represented by naturalistic sound effects and the double exposure
118 Andrew Repasky McElhinney

Figure 8.3.

Figure 8.4.

of stock footage) builds in the sky above. Just as Wagner often incorporates
diegetic sounds (e.g., anvils, steerhorns, fluepipes) into his total musical theater,
Ulmer incorporates natural sounds to compound and contrast with Erdody’s
nearly overweening underscoring. The tension of this music–sound effects
dichotomy mounts until it is expressed by the unseen chorus that sings a lively
jig, recapitulating the narrative of the adventure for gold before us. In Der Ring,
Wagner often has secondary characters reiterate major themes, using them to
provide new details or explain situations differently from how we have previ-
ously understood them. Ulmer’s/Erdody’s vocal chorus provides this effect, but
in a modern way—“modern” insofar as Erdody’s choral song has an alienation
effect from the drama at hand. Erdody’s song asks the audience to consider the
“why” of the adventure. Enamored of Greek drama, Wagner wanted the orches-
tra to replace the chorus. In Isle of Forgotten Sins, Ulmer uses Erdody’s score
as his Wagnerian Greek chorus. When lyrics are added to Erdody’s music, the
effect becomes Brechtian because, rather than drawing us further into the illu-
sion, it questions the illusion, forcing the exploration of metaphor.
 A World Destroyed by Gold 119

Clancy takes his turn diving, and Burke commands the ship in the face of
worsening weather as Krogan-Pacific poise themselves to ambush the team.
Unable to dive for the gold themselves, it is revealed that Krogan-Pacific have
lured Clancy-Burke into doing the hard work for them. With its interwoven
chords representing hard labor and mighty strength, the giants’ leitmotiv from
Rheingold is shown in figure 8.5, making explicit the affinity between Wotan-
Loge using Fafner-Fasolt, and Krogan-Pacific using Clancy-Burke.
As Krogan orders his native minions to attack Clancy-Burke and take the
gold, the Rhinemaidens’ motif again fills the soundtrack; yet this time it is
their reintroduction music from their final, more somber, appearance in Der
Ring, at the top of Act III of Götterdämmerung. The familiar but transformed
music of the Rhinemaidens’ third Ring appearance underscores both the futil-
ity of humankind’s quest for gold and the destruction that the gold wreaks,
causing people to forswear love for tangible assists and therefore betray
their souls. In Isle of Forgotten Sins the gold has distracted all of Ulmer’s
characters, save the sage native king of Moran Island, from the danger of the
impending monsoon, just as in Der Ring the gold distracts nearly everyone
from the impending Götterdämmerung.
The giants’ leitmotiv appears again to accompanying Clancy-Burke’s rais-
ing of the chest of gold from the sunken Tropic Star. Ulmer’s/Erdody’s Wag-
ner quotes then shift to the music of the “Gods’ Entrance to Valhalla” from
the end of Rheingold. While outwardly celebratory, the music carries with it
the knowledge that the creation of Valhalla has sealed the gods’ fate, and that
they have already begun to destroy themselves.
Clancy fakes having the bends so that Burke will bring him to the surface be-
fore the gold. As with Fafner and Fasolt, distrust and envy are core tenets of the
men’s relationship. Eventually in Rheingold, Fafner kills Fasolt for the treasure,
and in Isle of Forgotten Sins, the suspicion of a double cross is never far from
either Burke’s or Clancy’s mind. The fear that one man will desert the other to
feed his self-interest permeates the diving sequence, and this is the same net of
fear that most of Der Ring’s characters find themselves trapped in because of
gold. Erdody works the giants’ leitmotiv and the “Gods’ Entrance to Valhalla”
music into a feverish cycle, until the moment when the trunk of gold is tugged
to the surface and the “Revelation of the Rheingold” quotation again sounds.

Figure 8.5.
120 Andrew Repasky McElhinney

As Burke helps Clancy on board, the giants’ leitmotiv repeats yet another
time. As Clancy “recovers” from faking the bends, the Valhalla music, that is,
the music of false victory, further echoes in Erdody’s underscoring.
Clancy and Burke take the chest of gold to a dark room. They open the
chest, and the gold finally lies before them after their intense subterfuge and
labors. Ulmer chooses to have the gold remain dark (and, without a close-up,
loveless) in the chest. In a rare moment, Erdody’s score is silent, the Greek
“chorus” of Isle of Forgotten Sins muted while ghostly winds rage outside to
accompany the scene. Burke pays his crew their share of the gold, and he and
Clancy are left alone to haggle over the rest. Burke proposes a 2-to-1 split.
Clancy objects, but Burke tells him that since he has furnished the diving
equipment, boat, and crew, he deserves a larger share. Burke reminds Clancy
that the knowledge of the gold was his. Clancy is unimpressed, as to him,
the idea of something is not the same as the means to do it. In Rheingold
this is directly analogous to Fafner telling Fasolt that he has more right to the
gold because Fasolt wanted Freia more than he desires the Nibelung hoard
and the Ring, which Wotan has substituted as payment. As they dispute the
distribution of the gold, Clancy and Burke fight more violently than ever be-
fore, trashing the room and knocking over a lamp, which begins a fire as the
monsoon approaches outside.
The finale of Isle of Forgotten Sins echoes the finale of Der Ring, in which
Wotan’s disowned daughter Brunnhilde ignites a fire that (supernaturally)
rages out of control. After the immolation brings about the dusk of the gods,
the Rhine waters rise, flooding everything in their embryonic fluids. In
Wagner’s world, the corrupt social order has fallen and is ready to be rebirthed
out of nature. Whether this rebirth will be a perpetuation of the cycle or a
new, better phase of humanity is the ambiguous question that Wagner’s music
meditates on in the final minutes of Götterdämmerung.
Krogan-Pacific board Burke’s boat and interrupt Burke and Clancy’s fight.
They confine Burke-Clancy to a closet, which Pacific nails shut. Krogan-Pa-
cific abscond with the gold and blow up Burke’s ship, but Burke and Clancy
escape at the very last minute as the monsoon hits Moran Island full blast.
Marge and the other women wait for the men to return to the plantation
house. Olga reveals that she betrayed Burke and Clancy’s looting plans to
Johnny Pacific. As she and Marge are about to fight, Krogan and Pacific re-
turn with the gold and the news that Clancy and Burke are dead. Olga pulls a
gun, demanding the gold; but when she goes to fire, her gat is empty. Krogan
laughs at Olga, telling her that he neutered her gun, remembering her bad
habit of shooting people, and knocks her to the ground with his hands.
Suddenly, Krogan turns a gun on everyone, including his partner Pacific,
and claims the entire treasure hoard for himself. “As long as we’re having a
 A World Destroyed by Gold 121

showdown,” he says, “we might as well make it a good one.” Pacific objects,
saying that Krogan didn’t know about the gold being on board the Tropic Star
until he informed him. Krogan calls Pacific a “weak sister” who “didn’t have
innards enough to steal it” alone. With this final turn of events, Ulmer makes
the parallels between the Krogan-Pacific and Clancy-Burke relationships
explicitly clear. The couples are doubles for each other—there are no heroes
where gold is concerned.
Pacific fires his pistol at Krogan. Krogan shoots back; and after exchanging
six shots each, both men slump to the ground dead. At that very minute, Burke
and Clancy waltz in, the former noting the “nice shooting” of his slain adver-
saries. Luana takes a gun off the floor and points it at Burke and Clancy. Burke
removes the gun from her as if she were a child, and tells her that Clancy “can’t
give you the gold, but I can.” Luana falls into Burke’s embrace. As when Alb-
erich lovelessly woos Grimhild with gold to mate and sire an heir, the women
in Isle of Forgotten Sins all have their price for companionship.
At the very moment that Luana trades love for gold, the eye of the monsoon
wrecks the plantation house and washes Burke, Clancy, and the women out to
sea in an apocalyptic frenzy. In ragged, open waters, Clancy holds Marge and
Diane to a piece of driftwood. Exhausted, Marge tells Clancy that she cannot
hang on much longer. Clancy holds her, and himself, against the raft as Marge
tries to sacrifice herself to the stormy sea. The monsoon rages harder, and we
fade out on Clancy clutching Diane and Marge to the raft, as it appears that
they may be, or are being, overcome by the waves.
For the coda of Isle of Forgotten Sins, we fade in on a peaceful skyline after
the monsoon has passed. We find Marge minding the till at the Bird Cage
Café. Erdody’s oriental theme from the beginning of Isle of Forgotten Sins
perfumes the soundtrack after a long absence. Marge stands by the cash reg-
ister, a picture of an embracing Burke and Diane at its side. Clancy appears,
looking disoriented. He pours himself a drink, and asks Marge for money for
another scheme which he promises to fill her in on later. Marge gives Clancy
the money, thrilled that her man needs her and always comes back to her, yet
worried at what worse fate could result from Clancy’s shenanigans. Clancy
runs out, and Marge slams the register shut wearily. She is left looking after
her man as we fade out on Sondergaard’s wry smile.

THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE

The most remarkable aspect of Ulmer’s PRC films is their subjective use
of the unconscious as a cinematic location, the tone of which places the
entire context in a dream state. For Ulmer, it’s the logical alchemy of the
122 Andrew Repasky McElhinney

silent expressionist-philosopher awoken by the vulgar clamor of sync sound.

The epilogue to Isle of Forgotten Sins in the Bird Cage Café easily plays as
Marge’s satirically bourgeois death dream, projected as she loses her struggle
with the monsoon. Because everyone is alive and accounted for in the Café
coda, it is a “happy ending” sure to please censors and studio brass alike.
However, when examined, this happy end is anything but, as Marge finds
herself trapped in the existential living hell of perpetually almost having what
she most desires.
Detour possesses a similar dream ending. In the final shot, it is uncertain
whether Al is narrating his capture by the authorities, or projecting a fantasy
of capture that will absolve him of the constant fear of detention that tor-
ments him more truly than any physical incarceration ever could. In Detour,
the law (represented by a squad car) finally catches up with Al by the side
of a highway. The ridiculousness of the cops’ putting him in the car; pulling
away; and then having to stop to reclose the door, only to drive away again, is
a detail—a final (?) detour—so preposterously mundane that it reiterates the
complete stench of failure and almost-success that Ulmer assembles around
Roberts with the skill of a slapstick comedian.
In these dreamy happy ends, Ulmer’s synthesis of technique and material
is at its most unquestionably successful. Moving the narrative into metaphor
by harnessing the concept of “dream,” Ulmer exposes his artifice, and this
exposure better illustrates the narrative just presented than the actual first-
person experience of spectatorship. Ever the psychoanalytic director, Ulmer
moves praxis to this subconscious climax, which forces the immediate review
of the action in the viewer’s conscious, making the true experience of watch-
ing an Ulmer movie one of remembrance—most resplendently cathartic when
experienced in personal retrospect. As a unique result, the memory of an Ul-
mer movie is often stronger than the experience of watching one, as Ulmer’s
cinema becomes dream.
In his famous February 1970 interview with Peter Bogdanovich, printed
in Who the Devil Made It—Conversations with Legendary Film Directors,
Ulmer remarks, “I really am looking for absolution for all the things I had
to do for money’s sake.” It is easy to understand the frustration of a man
more talented than his means, who was so crafty at making so much out of
so little that his skill confined most of his cinematic expressions to B-pro-
grammers and genre exercises. In Isle of Forgotten Sins, both Krogan-Pacific
and Burke-Clancy struggle with ideas versus means, and this film is but one
example of Ulmer illustrating capital’s destructive influence on creativity.
From The Black Cat (1934) to Ruthless (1948) to The Amazing Transparent
Man (1960) to The Cavern (1964), wealth is the constant antagonist to love
and can only be achieved by love’s renunciation. This Wagnerian struggle in
 A World Destroyed by Gold 123

Ulmer festers until it tears an Ulmer movie apart in a “Liebestod”-like climax,

always—sometimes insanely—celebrating the unconscious’s true dominion
over the soul.
As a result of Ulmer’s unique dramaturgy, where catharsis is welded to
memory, Erdody’s musical underscoring abstracts his collaborations with Ul-
mer closer to ballet or opera than traditional sync cinema. As in opera, time
in Ulmer becomes an emotional reality rather than a naturalistic one—the
mise-en-scène lasts the duration of the created emotional phenomenon,
rather than representing the actual time of interactions. Once created in the
actor’s deliberate performance, this emotional time is charted in the sculpt-
ing of spaces by Ulmer’s camera, which induces an intentional vertigo in the
spectator—which, in turn, places much of Ulmer’s cinema in the dream state,
demanding interpretation for full understanding. Tracking shots, such as the
magistrate’s entrance into the Isle of Forgotten Sins, reveal as much as they
obscure, often doubling over the same studio space, oddly claiming it for
multiple purposes within the same frame. Camera pullbacks remove specta-
tors from the volatility of the characters’ interpersonal interactions, present-
ing them as cosmic targets unaware of how at the mercy of their environment
(often referred to as “fate”) they are. Push-ins, as when Marge is waiting for
the men to return with the gold, remove us from a larger panorama and focus
the spectator on specific character obsessions, so empathetically illustrated
as to threaten to overwhelm the thrust of genre/plot at any time. When Ulmer
arrives at his climaxes, these obsessions overwhelm presentation and reveal
themselves to be what the movie has really been about.
Finally, each Ulmer movie is a struggle between capital and love, bisected
by vertical lines of light and divided into a primal binary between dark-
ness and light. Because Ulmer rarely had the means to lavishly illustrate
his scripts, the shadow plays he devises to represent that which he cannot
conjure create a far richer presentation than all the gold in the world could
buy. As Godard tells us, “Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most
secret self.”
Note: Thanks to Madlon Laster, George McElhinney, and Frank Thornton.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bentley, Eric. Frank Wedekind’s “The First Lulu” (New York: Applause Books,
1994).
Bogdanovich, Peter. Who the Devil Made It: Conversations with Legendary Film
Directors (New York: Ballantine, 1998).
Cooke, Deryck. An Introduction to Wagner’s “Der Ring Des Nibelungen” (London:
Decca, 1968).
124 Andrew Repasky McElhinney

Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and B. Hab-
berjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).
Fitzgerald, Gerald, et al., eds. The Ring—Metropolitan Opera (New York: Metropoli-
tan Opera Guild, 1988).
Godard, Jean-Luc. “What Is Cinema?” Les amis du cinéma (1 October 1952, reprinted
in Godard, on Godard, trans. and ed. Tom Milne, 1968).
Jarman, Douglas. “Berg: Wozzeck; An Introduction,” in Wozzeck Wiener 1987 (Ham-
burg: Polydor International, 1988).
Magee, Bryan. The Tristan Chord: Wagner and Philosophy (New York: Henry Holt,
2001).
Newman, Ernest. The Wagner Operas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).
Sarris, Andrew. The American Cinema Directors and Directions, 1928–1968 (New
York: Da Capo Press, 1996).
Styan, J. L. Max Reinhardt. (London: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
Wagner, Richard. The Authentic Librettos of the Wagner Operas, Complete with Eng-
lish and German Parallel Texts and Music of the Principal Airs (New York: Crown,
1938).
———. Der Ring Des Nibelungen (Decca, 1968).
———. Der Ring Des Nibelungen, Recorded Live at Bayreuth Festival 1953 (Gala,
999791, 1994).
Weill, Kurt, and Bertolt Brecht. “Prologue,” in Happy End: A Melodrama with Songs
(Ghostlight, 7915584418-2, 2006).
 9
Ulmer and the Noir Femme Fatale
Alena Smiešková

If during the silent era the audience had known him as a stage designer and
a producer, and in horror films as a successful writer and an emerging new
talent in the genre, it was the film noir where Edgar G. Ulmer used at best his
experience with the German film expressionists such as Wegener, Murnau,
Wiene, and Lang, and convincingly immortalized himself. Because what in
many hands would be ridiculous and banal acquired, in Ulmer’s hands, the
subtle quality of the style, and what the mainstream would recognize as the
drawbacks of seclusion and lack of opportunities that Ulmer exploited to the
full brim. Therefore it is no surprise that he later became known as the “King
of the Bs.”
Film-noir poetics were ideally suited to low-budget “B” movies, as
Schrader points out in his “Notes on Film Noir” (165). Ulmer’s best films
were therefore created in the period that Schrader describes “oddly both one
of Hollywood’s best periods and least known” (153). Such contrasting charac-
teristics suggest that this era in American film can be seen (and I agree with
this opinion) as “an immensely creative period—probably the most creative
in Hollywood’s history” (164). But at the same time, it is quite understandable
that it was, for a long time, avoided and underestimated by the official criti-
cism. Representations that were in harsh contrast with the dark poetics of film
noir dominated American cinematography and culture at the time that the first
film noirs appeared. The postwar period in the United States reflected a high
degree of normative behavior in a number of areas of life, ranging from the
family to institutions such as schools, hospitals, the army, and the govern-
ment. It is precisely film noir, with its dark poetics accentuating corruption
of character and institution, along with despair and alienation, that brings up

125
126 Alena Smiešková

the subversive view of an otherwise optimistically presented American reality.

These values remained overlooked and undisclosed in the 1950s. For a long
time film noir was perceived as “an aberration of the American character”
(165). In contrast, the American Western was “more American” because its
characters idealized fundamental qualities of American life, such as individu-
alism, freedom, pragmatism, and the “American Dream.”
More importantly, the subversive quality of film noir rests not only in the
sociological interpretation of its elements; it is also deeply rooted in its style,
choreography, and mannerist visual representation. It opens up the possibili-
ties for unconventional solutions, unacceptable for Hollywood films of that
time: unhappy endings, and the dislocation of female characters from familiar
and acceptable positions. This is the quintessential difference, the quality
that other mass-produced American films of the time did not and could not
achieve. Last but not least, the noir films, together with auteur cinema, had an
immense influence on the latest trends in contemporary cinema.
In her seminal essay “Lounge Time: Postwar Crises and the Chronotope
of Film Noir,” Vivian Sobchack acknowledges that the reference to external
sources in no way resolves the internal logic of those films (129). Moreover,
describing the social context of the noir-style films as “transitional,” her
understanding clearly comes closer than it seems to the understanding of
the film-noir poetics of Schrader (131). In Schrader’s view, the film noir is
defined more precisely by the “more subtle qualities of tone and mood,” in
contrast to traditional conventions of the genre specified by the setting and
conflict (154). And thus the social context that gives rise to a desire to restore
the lost patriarchal order, as Sobchack asserts, generates the timeless world in the
interspace between the past and present, populated by characters anxious of their
futures, with fluctuating and unstable identities, disclosing the secrets of male
and female sexuality, dominance, and submissiveness (131).
I would like to focus on three manifestations of film-noir style in Ulmer’s
oeuvre. The link uniting their interpretations is the character of the femme
fatale. This chapter is grounded in the premise that Ulmer’s heroines in
The Strange Woman (1946), Detour (1945), and Murder Is My Beat (1955)
represent disquieting versions of feminine beauty as a formal representation
of unpresentable experience and concepts. I work with two approaches: the
aesthetics of the film noir and the aesthetics of sublime sentiment.
In Jean-François Lyotard’s reading, it is the model of the Kantian sublime,
its function, and its operation that provide for both the logic and the impulses
of contemporary art. For “the sublime . . . is an equivocal emotion” that
arises in a “conflict between the faculties of a subject, the faculty to conceive
of something and the faculty to ‘present’ something” (77). If we agree with
Janey Place, in her text Women in Film Noir, that the world constructed in
 Ulmer and the Noir Femme Fatale 127

film noir is “paranoic, claustrophobic, hopeless, doomed, predetermined by

the past, without clear moral or personal identity,” then this world is “transi-
tional” and must always be defined anew, as is also true of the identity of its
characters (41). The irreconcilability of the realizations that something that
resists figuration may still be conceived of in one’s mind splinters the unified
perception of reality and undermines the stability of its concept. Lyotard ex-
plains: “We have the Idea of the world (the totality of what is), but we do not
have the capacity to show an example of it. We have the idea of the simple
. . . but we cannot illustrate it with a sensible object which would be a ‘case’
of it” (78). Therefore the “Ideas of which no presentation is possible” as “the
unpresentable” challenge representation in art (78). Thus, Kantian conflict
can be understood as a philosophical equivalent of the aesthetic efforts that
have marked the content and form of the construction of the world in film
noir. When Schrader says that the “theme [in film noir] is hidden in the style”
or that “it works out conflicts visually rather than thematically,” his under-
standing accentuates the dominance of visual means of expression (166). It is
therefore analogical to the possibilities of figuration to which the definition
of the Kantian sublime extends.
It is interesting to note that Ulmer filmed The Strange Woman and Detour
at approximately the same time. While Detour has become a cult film, after
The Black Cat (1934) the most famous of his oeuvre, The Strange Woman be-
longs among the most neglected and least discussed in the overall context of
his films. It may be because The Strange Woman is not a “conventional” film
noir. As an adaptation of the novel of the same title by Ben Ames Williams,
it is situated at the beginning of the nineteenth century in the busy world of
a port town, which is populated by a variety of characters, ranging from the
highest to the lowest and poorest. The class stratification creates a firm back-
ground with its stable social conventions and expectations. As the title sug-
gests, the protagonist, Jenny Hager, is a strange woman, dislocated from the
stereotyped roles assigned to women by nineteenth-century bourgeois society.
The film is narrated from her perspective, and it is exactly her otherness that
creates the dynamics and excellent visual stylistics of the film.
Hedy Lamarr, who stars in the film, was called an “angel and sinner” in a
1947 review of the film in the New York Times—the two words capturing the
ineffable character of the protagonist. The film presents the transformation of
Jenny Hager—a half orphan living with her drunkard father in the port town
of Bangor—into the most influential and richest lady of the town (until her
tragic end). Jenny understands from the very beginning that if she wants to
change her predestined social status, she must count on her femininity: “I am
going to be beautiful,” she asserts in the opening scene. The scene is one of
the examples of Ulmer’s mastery. Ulmer did not need expensive stage design
128 Alena Smiešková

or an extensive budget: the dynamics of the story depend on the camera angle,
the mise-en-scène, and the surprising editing. The minimalism at the end of
the scene is the most impressive and foreshadows the development of Jenny’s
identity. At the beginning of the scene, Jenny, still a child, assures her father
of their happy and prosperous future. The camera photographs her in a close-
up, while at the same time the viewer can watch the eccentric detail in the
corner of the frame, where her hand is playing with a strand of her hair. The
detail here is equally seductive to that of Lamarr raising her eyebrow slightly
in other scenes, in which she uses this mannerism to nonverbally complete the
discourse of a seducer—for example, in scenes with the grown-up Ephraim.
In the case of the former scene, her voice is accompanied by the vertical
movement of the camera, and we suddenly see the same image in the river—a
mirroring of the real Jenny. The image, like in a fairy tale, is suddenly blurred;
and following the fade-out, the grown-up Jenny stands on the riverbank, as
if born out of the narcissist reflection in the water. In contrast to Narcissus,
however, Jenny at least temporarily escapes the self-destructive influence of
her own sexuality.
The character of Jenny can be classified as the proto-noir femme fatale.
She has, however, a lot in common with other types of strong femmes fatales
in film noirs, such as the bar singers, hostesses, and models who act in roles
where they deliberately construct their own images (Gledhill 17). In contrast
to the typical femme fatale who appears in a film noir situated in the second
half of the twentieth century, who has two possibilities—she can work or she
can live off a man—for Jenny there is only one option: she can live off her
husband only. Striving to achieve a new social status, she marries the most
influential man in town—Isaiah Poster, the father of her childhood friend
Ephraim. She becomes a respectable woman, and, in spite of the conventional
solution, the character of Jenny defamiliarizes the role of a woman in mar-
riage. She actively constructs her image of a charitable and merciful woman.
After the church mass at which the priest has invited the congregation to
donate money to build a new church, she sees that the rich of Bangor are si-
lent, and she raises her voice: “If the men of Bangor won’t give to the church
the women will.” Her rhetoric is decisive and self-conscious, and it subverts
the hierarchy of dominance and submissiveness in the traditional representa-
tion of family. Thus, in spite of the fact that film noirs present an active and
independent woman outside of the traditional family, Jenny, as the wife of a
respected man, not only constructs her destiny but also builds her positive
public image.
To illustrate the visual means that Ulmer uses to present the conflicting
character of Jenny, I will mention one more scene. Ulmer’s film is the most
persuasive when he finds a formal expression for the undecidable rational
 Ulmer and the Noir Femme Fatale 129

and emotional situation that occurs when Jenny is passionate, manipulative,

and beautiful at same time. At such moments, the spiral of seduction extends
on; and due to the visual stylization, the viewer is as immersed in it as the
characters in the film.
The scene I wish to discuss is a seduction scene that takes place after a fam-
ily dinner, where Jenny, paradoxically, substitutes for Ephraim’s dead mother.
Ulmer’s convincing iconography, based on the play of light and shadows, is
a suitable counterpart to the menacing juxtaposition of domestic and gothic
atmosphere at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
When Isaiah, Ephraim’s father, leaves with the candle, Jenny extinguishes
the lamp to light the candle on the mantelpiece. A few seconds after darkness
has filled the space, Jenny raises the candle to her face; and her face, partly
illuminated, creates one of the most beautiful moments in the film. Her white
face stands out of the dark background, and it is beautiful and disquieting at
the same time. One eye, illuminated by the candle, radiates her inner light
and passion as she pretends to be committed to Ephraim; the other is buried
in shadows. Her mysterious expression is underscored by an oblique shadow
cast over her neck, dividing it to two triangles, white and black. When she
leads Ephraim upstairs she lights the way with the candle. We leave the
nineteenth-century gothic atmosphere, and, together with Jenny, we enter a
ghastly, timeless world beyond any time specifications, sharply formatted by
vertical and diagonal shafts of light that come from outside. Ulmer creates
a visual counterpart to the ambiguity of values in this world, and the move-
ment of the camera following the characters as they go upstairs redefines the
dominant role in the family.
In this film, Ulmer constructs a genuinely complex femme fatale character.
The film does not provide us with a Freudian resolution or social criticism
of the patriarchal system; it provides a provocative version of reality and dis-
closes the duality of the femme fatale—on the one hand a philanthropic saint,
and on the other hand a woman driven by her unbound sexuality.
Detour is a classic film noir. Its visual qualities, as well as its story, are
examples par excellence of the noir style. The plot is narrated in flashbacks,
accompanied by the narrator-protagonist’s voice-over. The pace of the film
is seemingly slow; it moves “quietly” through a sequence of “almost” banal
events, ultimately to its fatal ending. From the beginning, Ulmer works with
the fragmented character of the protagonist and the space. Al Roberts, a pia-
nist with a classical education, plays in a small nightclub in New York while
living through his romance with his fiancée, Sue. Al’s stability, his late-night
shows with Sue, and his enamored looks while walking Sue home along
fog-filled New York streets are undermined by the visual representation of
the aforementioned scenes. Ulmer uses the low Dutch angle to produce the
130 Alena Smiešková

disequilibrium of the situation; dark and foggy New York streets are the visual
counterpart to uncertainty and the upcoming dissonance in their life.
Sue leaves Hollywood to start her career, and Al decides to come to see her.
He is almost penniless, and thus he hitchhikes. His journey across America
on a highway is the entrance to a dark, surreal world, where the familiar be-
comes unfamiliar. Al moves within the space that Sobchack defines as “the
common places from wartime and postwar time American culture” (130).
These are the places intimately familiar to Al: “the cocktail lounge, the night
club, the bar, the hotel room, the boarding house, the diner, the dance hall,
the roadside café, the train and bus stations, the wayside motel,” in his case
also a gas station and a used-car lot and the highway (130). His life, however,
in a sequence of events, disjoints from the common circumstances and leads
to his tragic end.
The rhetoric of the protagonist is persuasive, and he insists that the tragedy
of his life can be substantiated when he identifies the breaking point at which
his prospects and his stable fortunes collapsed. In the opening scene, he
introduces his retrospective recollection in this way: “I keep trying to forget
what happened and wonder what my life might have been like if that car of
Haskell’s hadn’t stopped.” But as Jon Tuska claims in his work Dark Cinema:
American Film Noir in Cultural Perspective, “the hamartia of the male pro-
tagonist is only rarely manifested as an error in judgment but rather is most
often the consequence of a fatal obsession, usually with the femme fatale”
(211). Roberts interprets tragic circumstances as an intrusion of fate into his
life; he sees himself as entrapped in the circumstances without his free will,
without the possibility of altering anything in his life. He says: “But one thing
I don’t have to wonder about, I know. Someday a car will stop to pick me up
that I never thumbed. Yes, Fate or some mysterious force can put the finger
on you or me, for no good reason at all.” Everything in the film is presented
exclusively through his perspective; the retrospective narrative is often inter-
rupted, and the camera focuses on his face in a close-up. But similarly to other
narrators in film noirs, his narration is also unreliable.
Roberts oscillates between two women—Sue, whom he follows to the West
Coast, is his destiny, as is Vera, whom he meets on his way out west. Sue
represents for him stability and, implicitly, the lost patriarchal order; Vera is
a changeable and active element whose dominance Roberts does not want to
admit: “The most dangerous animal in the world.” She disquiets him with her
ephemeral identity: at one moment it is that of a child, then suddenly it is that
of a beast. When she introduces herself—“Call me Vera”—she shows that her
present identity is only one of the possibilities.
In the instance of this film, I agree with Sobchack that the films cir-
cumscribed as “noir” are seen as playing out negative dramas of postwar
 Ulmer and the Noir Femme Fatale 131

masculine trauma and gender anxiety, brought on by wartime destabilization

of the culture’s domestic economy and a consequent “deregulation” of the
institutionalized and patriarchally informed relationship between men and
women (130).
Roberts’s disequilibrium is presented in the film by two different represen-
tations of the femme fatale. Sue is a blond woman who, after a short episode
at the beginning of the film, appears only in short sequences when Al tries to
reach her by phone. In these scenes, Sue is photographed by a static camera;
she is stiff like a puppet in a light-colored dress, sitting in an armchair and
elegantly holding a dark telephone. Sue functions for Al as a part of the pa-
triarchally institutionalized relationship: marriage. To the viewer, the scenes
offer a chilling chimera that is miles away from the Sue that Roberts projects.
The dissonance between them is tangible, documented by her clothes and the
props in the environment occupied by Sue. The distance grows emotionally;
Sue is self-controlled, and, in contrast to the excited and nervous Al who calls
her, her responses are mechanical and emotionally disinterested.
Vera is Sue’s other Self. She is dark-haired, passionate, energetic, and
tangible. Al is more and more infatuated by her charm and manipulation. If
Roberts speaks about some mysterious force, then Vera is the physical repre-
sentation of this unpresentable concept. Although Ann Savage, who stars as
Vera, appears only in the second half of the film, her appearance is unforget-
table. The camera accentuates her physical beauty, and, with her mesmerizing
looks and harsh, sharp words, she dominates each scene. Her accidental
death corresponds with the feminist interpretation of the masculine desire to
conquer fate.
There are only a few possible resolutions to the fatal relationship for the
male protagonist in film noir. One of them, as Claire Johnston shows reinter-
preting Lacan’s psychoanalytic system in film noir, is that the woman must
be found guilty and punished as a result of the “fault” in the Symbolic Order
(111). In this case the male protagonist can be freed from his bondage to the
femme fatale when she dies. One morning Roberts enters Vera’s room to find
out that he has accidentally strangled Vera with a telephone cable. In this
scene, the camera angle is as if from Roberts’s perspective; it moves from ob-
ject to object, focusing and defocusing the lens. Now Roberts’s earlier words
sound like an ominous metafictional premonition: “If this would be fiction
I would fall in love with her, marry her and made her a respectable woman,
while she would make a sacrifice and die.”
I have mentioned above that the ineffable quality of fate is materialized in
the film in the character of the femme fatale. Both heroines can be classified as
the “noir” femme fatale par excellence. While Vera is existentially present, Sue
is only an illusion. The frame shot in which Sue reappears in Al’s imagination
132 Alena Smiešková

in the reflection of the rear mirror shortly before he encounters “fate” is among
the most fascinating in the film. The camera shows Al’s face in the rear mirror
of Haskell’s car, which in the center of the frame is conspicuous in the darkness.
Sue, singing in a close-fitting, glittering dress, appears in a fade-in/fade-out,
with the shadows of musicians in the background. The shot’s diagonal outlines
and the low Dutch angle of the camera disrupt the compositional unity. The
visual means of expression are the iconographic representation of Roberts’s
disturbed mind, and they foreshadow Al’s submissiveness toward “fate.”
A similar shot can be found in Lost Highway (1997), a cult film by David
Lynch, when the protagonist’s face makes a visible appearance in a car in the
darkness of night. Lynch’s film does not hide its affiliation with the film-noir
style. The highway that becomes the fate of the male protagonist in Detour is
the metaphoric loop in Lynch’s metanarrative. Al Roberts makes “only” a de-
tour on his way to beloved Sue, and there he meets Vera in a fatal encounter.
Another connotation that links together the worlds and characters of Lost
Highway and Detour is their existential situation. After arriving in Holly-
wood, Vera and Al seek accommodation in a hotel under false names. When
they enter the hotel room, Vera says with relief, “Home, sweet home.” Her
words are ironic—what could be more in contrast to home, and all its associa-
tions, than a hotel room? The hotel room represents everything that is fleet-
ing, temporary, and unstable, and if this heterocosmos is the index of stability
for Vera, then it signifies that for her—as well as for Lynch’s characters and
Al Roberts—there is no such thing as home.
Ulmer works with a very low budget and minimalist means. There are only
three major characters. Ulmer uses only two sets, which he rearranges and
alters depending on the setting. The shots filmed in the car are accomplished
with a static camera and a movable background. In spite of this, the forced
perspective, the expressionist motifs, and the nightmarish world grounded in
fatalism produce the atmosphere of one of the blackest film noirs ever made
in the classic period between 1935 and 1955.
The last film to be analyzed belongs to the end of the film noir period.
Murder Is My Beat was produced in 1955. It is probably also because of this
that the representation of the femme fatale differs in this film. Ulmer forms an
alternative solution to the relationship between the male protagonist and the
femme fatale Eden Lane (portrayed in the film by Barbara Payton).
In many respects, the film manifests its affinity with the noir style. It is
the traditional model of the murder mystery and its investigation based on
the premise of “Whodunit?”—in this case the investigation of the murder of
mysterious Frank Dean. The epistemological search for the truth is, however,
marked by the failure of the protagonist, a detective who must be called off
the case after he has helped the main suspect, Eden Lane, escape.
 Ulmer and the Noir Femme Fatale 133

The film has a nonlinear structure; its narrative is as if cut in half. The
convoluted sequence of events formally corresponds with the complicated
process of the search for the truth. The introductory part of the film shows
the investigating detective Ray Patrick alone, in a motel. Eden, whom he has
helped to escape, has disappeared again. Ray persuades his boss that he can
finish the case because he believes Eden is the key to the resolution of the
mystery. In the following retrospective narrative, we learn “how it all started.”
Then the plot returns to the present; and, after a series of many revelations,
including the disclosure of infidelity, exchange of identity, blackmailing, and
murder, the Dean case is resolved.
The resolution comes in a dramatic scene in which Dean’s wife jumps
from a moving train and dies. This scene formally reduplicates another key
scene, which also takes place on a train at night. In that scene Ray, who has
traced Eden to Dean’s cottage in the mountains, is escorting her into the hands
of justice. Eden spots Dean, a supposedly murdered man, at one of the sta-
tions. When she and Ray are alone in a compartment, she speaks excitedly
about her innocence. Her blond hair, covered with a white bandana, and her
white face, on a dark background, contrast with her deep, velvety voice. Ray
starts to have doubts. He persuades himself: “When a man starts to doubt,
what he presents as right must be right.” In a scene almost identical to that
of Dean’s wife’s suicide, they jump out of the train at a place where the train
slows down. The camera shoots the empty darkness behind the opened door
of the train, and in the following shot we can see Eden’s body falling onto the
pavement. The fall that seems to be fatal is, however, without consequences.
If Eden had died in this moment of the narrative, it would have been an
accidental death very similar to the death of Vera in Detour. Ray would have
acted in a manner dependent on his fatal attraction to the femme fatale. The
motivation for such an obsession has been depicted in the previous scene in
the mountain cottage. In accordance with the desire to restore the dominance
of Logos and consequently the order in chaos that the murder investigation
brings, the femme fatale would die accidentally and the successful cop would
become a wreck and bump—similarly to the situation in Detour. This film,
however, presents another solution. After the fall that seems to be tragic, Ray
stands up and brushes off his coat, then helps Eden to stand up—and we
already know the rest. After many obstacles and mysteries, the case is suc-
cessfully closed. Ray has been suspended and no longer works for the police;
however, he goes to work as a private eye, with Eden as a prospective Mrs.
Patrick at his side.
At first sight, such a happy ending does not correspond with the dark poet-
ics of film noir. However, if we agree with Johnston’s interpretation, which
offers the Lacanian solution of the conflict within the Symbolic Order, Ray
134 Alena Smiešková

has assigned the femme fatale a role in a newly restored patriarchal order,
and in marrying her he has sublimated the fatal attraction within a socially
acceptable framework (111).
Payton, however, in spite of this “predicament,” remains the could-be-noir
femme fatale in this film. Much of the construction of her character is rooted
in the visual qualities of the film and her acting. Even though the film “may
lack the classic dimensions of . . . Detour . . . it benefits from the presence of
Barbara Payton as an ambiguous femme fatale” (Silver and Ward 191).
In this case, the scene at Dean’s cottage in the mountains mentioned above
is the most instructive. Ray approaches the cottage in a snowstorm. After enor-
mous effort, which in the film looks more comic than persuasive, he opens the
door of the cottage—which he can do only with a gun in his hand—and finds
a gentle, unprotected woman with the face of an angel standing next to the
mantelpiece, instead of a cunning, merciless murderess. Payton has something
in her of Kim Novak from Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) or Jean Seberg from
Godard’s Breathless (1959). Feminine tenderness blends with inner strength
and endurance in her acting. “Ulmer extracts the maximum narrative tension
from the viewer’s uncertainty over Eden Lane’s guilt, an uncertainty reinforced
by Payton’s portrayal of Eden in a ‘neutral’ manner” (Silver and Ward 191).
The mantelpiece scene reminds us in many aspects of the seduction scene
described above in The Strange Woman. It seems for a moment that it is the
hard-boiled cop who dominates the situation. When the interior light fades out
because of a power failure, Eden comes closer to the mantelpiece to light the
candles. There is a change in the field of dominance. Ray offers Eden a ciga-
rette, and they smoke together, next to the mantelpiece. When Eden moves to
the sofa and narrates her version of the story (“Maybe this is a new angle”),
the camera focuses on her face in a close-up situated in the left part of the
frame, while the rest of the scene remains in shadow; there is only a cigarette
in Ray’s hand, which is off center in the bottom right corner of the frame. It is
the index of his presence when Eden starts to tell her version of the story. The
frame composition shows that Ray’s presence is no longer dominant. “Payton’s
performance permits the suggestion of instability beneath the surface calm of
Eden’s visage,” and as a result of this Ray depends on Eden; she is the embodi-
ment of truth for him in the case (Silver and Ward 191). Thus Ulmer repeatedly
uses the beauty of the femme fatale to present the unpresentable.
During his analysis of the “unpresentable,” Lyotard, interpreting Kant,
asserts that modernist art, within which we can place Ulmer’s stylistic ap-
proaches to film noir, is characterized by the nostalgic desire to present the
unpresentable, the desire to find the form for that which is the unpresentable
(81). As we have pointed out above, the world constructed in the film noir,
more than that in any “A” Hollywood movie, produces a new, changeable,
 Ulmer and the Noir Femme Fatale 135

and subversive reality—it is intentionally “anti-realistic” (Gledhill 19). The

conventional or simplified forms of representation are not suitable to present
the disequilibrium. Moreover, as Sylvia Harvey asserts, “the dissonances, the
sense of disorientation and unease, although frequently present at the level of
plot and thematic development are . . . always a function of the visual style of
this group of films” (Silver and Ward 171). Director Edgar G. Ulmer searches
for the means of expression that could capture the semantic dissonances and
the disequilibrium of the world presented, or of the fragmented identities of
the characters. The curious camera angles; the composition of visual images
and mise-en-scène; and the lighting, which ranges between light and shadow,
help him to defamiliarize common and banal objects (172). In The Strange
Woman, Detour, and Murder Is My Beat, the femme fatale character, in her
various modifications from the proto-noir femme fatale to the could-be noir
femme fatale, becomes the visual representation of unpresentable concepts
such as altruism and seduction, fate and truth. Thus it is the character of the
femme fatale that embodies the novel meanings and visual techniques that
continue to make film noir attractive to audiences.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gledhill, Christine. “Klute, Part 1: A Contemporary Film Noir and Feminist Criti-
cism,” in Women in Film Noir, ed. E. A. Kaplan (London: British Film Institute,
1978), 6–21.
Harvey, Sylvia. “The Absent Family in Film Noir,” in Movies and Mass Culture, ed.
John Belton (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 171–82.
Johnston, Claire. “Double Indemnity,” in Women in Film Noir, ed. E. A. Kaplan (Lon-
don: British Film Institute, 1978), 100–111.
Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans.
Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, Theory and History of Literature, vol. 10
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).
“Murder Is My Beat,” in Film Noir, ed. Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward, co-ed. Carl
Macek and Robert Porfirio (London: Martin Secker and Warburg, 1979).
Place, Janey. “Women in Film Noir,” in Women in Film Noir, ed. E. A. Kaplan (Lon-
don: British Film Institute, 1978), 35–55.
Schrader, Paul. “Notes on Film Noir,” in Movies and Mass Culture, ed. John Belton
(New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 153–70.
Sobchack, Vivian. “Lounge Time: Postwar Crises and the Chronotope of Film Noir,”
in Refiguring American Film Genres: Theory and History, ed. Nick Browne
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 129–70.
Tuska, Jon. Dark Cinema: American Film Noir in Cultural Perspective, Contributions
to the Study of Popular Culture, no. 9 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978),
199–215.
136 Alena Smiešková

FILMS CITED

The Black Cat (1934, Edgar G. Ulmer)

Detour (1945, Edgar G. Ulmer)
The Strange Woman (1946, Edgar G. Ulmer)
Murder Is My Beat (1955, Edgar G. Ulmer)
Vertigo (1958, Alfred Hitchcock)
Breathless (1959, Jean-Luc Godard)
 10
Detour’s Detour
David Kalat

Once upon a time there was a motion picture called Detour (1945). It was a
small, wiry thing, gristle and bone. It would have been the runt of any litter,
except for the sad fact that it came from a litter of runts, movies made for
pocket change and thrust out into the world without support, left to fend for
themselves in a harsh and competitive environment.
What Detour lacked in polish and graces it made up for with a steely
constitution. It was made of stern stuff, this angry little poem written in the
language of failure and defeat. Its flickering frames contain a story of an as-
piring artist whose talent would seem to merit one kind of fate, glorious and
celebratory, but whose life is shuttled down a cruel detour to a very differ-
ent destination. He begins his adventure dreaming of a new life in a sunnier
world, and finishes up lost and lonely, an exile.
The grubby little picture flailed its way across movie screens in 1945 with
no greater or lesser prominence than any of its impoverished brethren. It was
a B movie, and such things have no shelf life. Detour, however, did. More
than a half century later, film critics and fans were still falling over them-
selves to shower it with accolades. In movie parlance, Detour had “legs.”
It was fashioned by a man named Edgar G. Ulmer, who, like some Jewish
mystic of myth, had a habit of pulling clay from the ground and giving it his
special imprint, such that it could come to eternal life, a golem. Detour was
not Ulmer’s only bid to cinema immortality, but it was his most distinctive
and memorable. His own life had been touched by such detours: he was an
artist of no small ability, whose destiny was redirected, stunted, misfired. For
the pointy-heads who took up Detour as their cause célèbre, the film and its
maker were a Möbius strip, art and artist endlessly reflected in one another.

137
138 David Kalat

Figure 10.1. Detour—67 minutes of bad road, Ulmer’s most notorious movie. Cour-
tesy of David Kalat.
 Detour’s Detour 139

Ulmer has been called many things—“King of the Bs” is a common title.
But the nickname says more about his circumstances than his role within
them. Look past the fact that he made low-budget programmers, look only at
the films themselves, and we can see he was heir to the grand traditions of
German Expressionism, and a direct precursor and inspiration to the avatars
of the French New Wave. That he worked in American genre pictures, mer-
cenary as mercenary gets, makes his legacy that much more important: here
was living proof that the world of European high-art cinema and American
commercial moviemaking were not mutually exclusive.
Or so film historical conventional wisdom would have you believe. Real
life is never so tidy.

PORTRAIT OF THE YOUNG MAN AS AN ARTIST

The story starts in those dusky years at the close of World War I, when a
Mittel-Europäische artiste, his head full of demons, winds up on the set of
various German Expressionist epics: The Golem (1920), The Cabinet of Dr.
Caligari (1920), Metropolis (1927) . . . One could scarcely ask for a more
auspicious time and place to be cutting one’s eyeteeth, even if Edgar was only
hunkered in the wings with a claw hammer, helping build the sets.
In 1924, Ulmer was jettisoned from the citadel of Universum Film AG
(UFA) to start anew in America. Ulmer says this was done without consulting
him, an overseas transfer he never wished for (Bogdanovich 565–66). Maybe
so, but in hindsight we can see that this, the first of many detours to come, was
fortuitous: the filmmakers with whom he was working at the time would soon
be making the same leap to Hollywood, only more frantically, as the shadow
of fascism descended across their safe European home. He was not the first of
his kind to emigrate. Define “his kind” as you will—artist, intellectual, Jew,
or just plain rational human being. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to see that
Europe was becoming a very ugly place to live (although, to history’s great
regret, too many rocket scientists chose to stay in Germany).
Ulmer touched down in the heart of Hollywood at Universal Pictures,
where he apprenticed as an assistant director under the likes of William
Wyler. Making quickie Westerns for Universal was the proverbial study in
contrasts—from the sumptuous spectacles of German Expressionism to
cranking out programmers like a string of sausages. It was also an education
in the ways of the American studio system. Back home, the director was king.
If Fritz Lang wanted to make a movie about a futuristic city riven by class
divisions and threatened by a crazy humanoid robot, it was up to his producer
to support that endeavor. Here, film ideas were cooked up by the front office
140 David Kalat

and assigned to directors, who could be replaced should they wander too far
off base.
Roughly a decade after first trodding American soil, Ulmer found him-
self called to the office of Carl Laemmle Jr., scion of Universal Pictures.
Junior had watched the climbing profits of recent hits Dracula (1931) and
Frankenstein (1931) reach unimagined heights. These films would still be
making money for the studio in the twenty-first century, but Junior had
no way of knowing that. More to the point, he had no way of knowing
whether the trend had already peaked. Given the apparent popularity of
Gothic horrors, it would seem a good bet to make another one and watch
the cash roll in; given the huge expense of Gothic horrors, it would seem
a terrible bet to risk so much money on an unknown. Faced with this di-
lemma, Junior had a brainwave. He decided to join the genre’s top stars,
Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, in the same film; slap on the title of an
Edgar Allan Poe story; and market it as a successor to the Frankenstein/
Dracula tradition, but made at a discount to hedge the bet (Bogdanovich
575).
It was a dog of an assignment. Ulmer was saddled with two of the most
egocentric scenery-munchers in the business but given none of the special
effects or spooky makeup that had made them stars in the first place. He was
supposed to compete with Gothic thrillers that had cost three to four times
as much as he was allotted (Palm 00:22:50). The Poe connection, such as it
was, was of no use either, since by common agreement “The Black Cat” is
an unfilmable story.
All Edgar had going for him was a cynic’s worldview. He had grown up in
the ashes of war with deprivation and want all around him, and it had imbued
him with a sense of futility and dread that was to become quite fashionable.
He didn’t need supernatural monsters, since he was to pack The Black Cat
(1935) with enough misanthropy to horrify even the most stalwart. If Ulmer’s
Black Cat were to be remade today, its story of moral ruin and grisly torture
would be ginned up in the style of Saw (2004) or Hostel (2005). But in the
discreet days of the mid-1930s, and in the subtle hands of Master Ulmer,
the film was given an austere elegance that hovers queasily above its subject
matter. The result is a gloriously “go-for-baroque” thriller that has justifiably
lingered in memory over seventy years and counting. Ulmer had done some-
thing you’d expect from Superman—he had grabbed a lump of coal from the
dirt and, in his hands, turned it into a diamond. The Black Cat put black ink
in Universal’s ledgers.
If you were to stop reading right now, it could seem as if this story has a
happy ending. Edgar Ulmer arrived in Hollywood and made it big. But read
on, and discover the next fork in the road.
 Detour’s Detour 141

In the wake of The Black Cat, Ulmer had earned the kind of creative au-
tonomy he held most dear. He was allowed to pitch his own film idea to Ju-
nior, an adaptation of Bluebeard with Karloff as a serial killer. Go for it, said
the boss. Budgets were drawn up, plans were afoot, posters were struck with
Karloff’s face and Ulmer’s name. The movie itself, though, was not made.
Ulmer left the studio, then he left Los Angeles, then California.
Fate had stuck out its foot.

SECRETS AND LIES

It is said that Ulmer tanked his career over a girl. Her name was Shirley. As
a script supervisor at Universal she was paid to attend to details, to make
sure things matched. And so it could not have escaped her notice that the
man barking orders on the Black Cat set was a darkly handsome rogue with a
syrupy Old World accent. The passion that bloomed between them came with
a price: she was married. Or, to be more precise, she was married to Max
Alexander—a Universal executive, Papa Laemmle’s nephew, Junior’s good
buddy, and Edgar’s boss. Their love was what one would call a bad career
move (Knipfel 12).
Homewrecker Edgar and his slatternly bride were no longer welcome in
Hollywood or anywhere the fury of the Laemmles could reach. These young
lovers chose each other over career and comfort, accepting the uncertainties
of the future so long as it could be faced together.
This is a fairy story.
Ulmer was a fabulist. He not only wove stories on film, he wove them from
the fabric of his own life. His personal biography is a riot of exaggerations,
half-truths, white lies, and unsubstantiated fantasy. He was by no means the
first filmmaker to show a cavalier disregard for the facts of his life—indeed
it is a fairly common enough human trait in all professions. Who among us
does not prefer the shining fantasy of the person he or she wishes to be over
the often disappointing and embarrassing facts of who he or she actually is?
For most of us, this tendency is harmless; but when historians come calling
to draw inferences and conclusions from the details of a person’s life, it starts
to matter whether those details were accurately recorded.
For example, Ulmer styled himself a Viennese native. Vienna was and
is one of the seats of European culture, and made a perfect birthplace for
an artist—but it was some hundred miles south of the truth. In fact, Ulmer
came from the then-Czechoslovakia, from a town called Olomouc. This
proved inconvenient to the man, so he filed it away in a drawer. It is a small
point, but it lets a little doubt into the discussion about all the other points
142 David Kalat

of Ulmer’s life for which he is the primary research source (Grissemann

21–30).
“I had done pictures in Europe with Murnau and with Fritz Lang and de-
signed sets for The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and the golden pictures like that,”
Ulmer told Peter Bogdanovich in 1970 (562). Ulmer elaborated which pic-
tures he had worked on with Lang: “Metropolis, Die Nibelungen, and then I
worked with him later on a film called The Spies—Spione—a classic picture”
(563). Bogdanovich was fascinated by these tales, and asked Ulmer to explain
what his role precisely entailed:

I was really Production Designer. At that time, up to the coming of sound, there
were two directors on each picture: a director for the dramatic action and for the
actors, and then for the picture itself, who established the camera angles, camera
movements, et cetera; there had to be teamwork . . . With Murnau I invented a
new role called “Production Design,” which meant the designing of each and
every angle. (563–64)

The classics of German Expressionism are celebrated today not so much for
their stories but for their visual artistry. If Ulmer wants to take credit for those
visual triumphs and relegate their named creators to having merely directed
the actors, it would behoove him to offer up some proof. The credits on the
film prints themselves and the archives of UFA are of no help to him, how-
ever. Ulmer may be telling the truth, but the documentary evidence does not
back him up.
If you will forgive the personal digression, I wish to offer an anecdote by
way of analogy. I was once employed as a color timer at a motion picture pro-
cessing facility whose primary clients included several major stock-footage
archives. Filmmaker Gus Van Sant was directing the feature-film adaptation
of Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1993). His picture used cranes as a symbol;
but instead of filming new footage of the gangly birds for this purpose, he
licensed some stock footage. Van Sant made many poor directorial choices
on that misfired flick, so his ill-considered choice of some very grainy 16
mm shots of flying cranes was nowhere near the worst of his troubles; but it
didn’t help that this already crummy material ended up in the inexperienced
hands of my youthful self to blow up to 35 mm. I performed my task ineptly,
and assumed he would reject the resulting mess and go shoot something
watchable to sub into its place. When I eventually saw the movie at a theater
the following summer, I was shocked to see my miserable failings splattered
across a forty-foot screen for paying customers.
I have since taken to telling people that I personally ruined Even Cowgirls
Get the Blues. Although I have a point (my incompetence caused the film’s
central visual metaphor to come across as an amateur-hour reject), I am of
 Detour’s Detour 143

course joking. The closing titles of that film list hundreds of names, and not
only is mine not among them, neither is that of the company for which I
worked. I contributed to the film, in a visible way, but it is absurd to pretend
that my role was significant.
Ulmer may well have made sets on some of the golden oldies of Hoch-
Deutsch Expressionismus, but in granting him that we can also safely assume
that the absence of his name from the rosters was a signal of his importance
to the finished product. He could do his job well, or he could do it poorly,
but he was never other than a jobber on a massive endeavor staffed by lots
of people—all of whom could affect the quality of the end product by doing
their jobs well, or poorly.
Movies are not books. Auteur theory is a useful shorthand for historians
trying to tease out what makes a movie what it is, but it is a simplification.
Movies are made by teams, committees, armies. It takes a village to make
a movie.
Edgar Ulmer wanted to think of himself as a singular artist, whose personal
vision extruded through his works. He wanted to be an auteur. Hollywood is
an industry, and has little room for the go-it-alone artist. Ulmer and Holly-
wood were destined to be an awkward fit.
In telling the story that Ulmer’s promising career in Hollywood was de-
railed by a romantic indiscretion, Ulmer and his biographers safely answer
the question with a grand romantic myth. Ulmer worked in the margins of the
film industry the rest of his life because he had to, because he was kicked out
of the mainstream, goes the story; he could have triumphed within the system
if only, if only . . .
Edgar and Shirley went on the lam to flee Max Alexander’s wounded
pride. Their personal diaspora ultimately brought them to Producers Releas-
ing Corporation (PRC), the most decrepit outfit on Poverty Row. Here Ed-
gar would forge his legacy, shooting six-day wonders on budgets that would
make Roger Corman seem profligate by comparison. Here he would eke out
his professional existence, shut out of the big leagues, all but squandering
his cinematic gifts.
Buried in this story is a secret, a hidden fact that casts doubt on the
narrative surrounding it. At PRC, you see, Ulmer served as a de facto
chief of production, choosing projects and overseeing other filmmakers in
addition to those flicks he himself directed. Ulmer extended his creative
influence throughout PRC during his tenure there in the 1940s. At this
time, one of the producers working alongside him was a fellow Universal
alum—Max Alexander. If Ulmer’s trajectory away from Universal had
been to flee Alexander, his arrival at PRC could not have put him any
closer to the man.
144 David Kalat

STUNTED AMBITIONS

In the 1930s and ’40s, it was bog-standard distribution practice to send out
motion pictures in pairs. One, the A picture, was the glossy, star-studded
primary feature intended to draw crowds; the flip side of the double bill was
short and cheap, and it was intended to give those crowds a sense they had
gotten a full day’s worth of entertainment off their ticket fare. Eventually, the
term “B movie” would morph into a reference to any cheaply made film, but
time was it had a very specific meaning.
Big studios could make B movies as well as anyone. Better, even. But that
was of little use, since the main concern for a B movie was not whether it
was good but whether it was there. Since B movies were not marketed for
themselves, it did not much matter what they were. For this reason, the realm
of B-moviemaking was the best avenue by which independents could compete
with Hollywood.
The publicity engines of the big studios profit from the illusion of Hol-
lywood as a place where glamorous artists and creative visionaries express
themselves for the entertainment of the world. Those publicists, however, toil
in the service of a far less glamorous crowd of number crunchers, financial
whiz kids, and corporate institutions. At its best, Hollywood is an almost
magical balance between these competing worlds, in which the creative
expression of talented celebrities does provide enjoyment to the masses and
thereby profits to the men in suits.
Deep in the shadows of the Valley, there existed a twisted parody of Holly-
wood: a parallel world lacking nearly all of the characteristics one would nor-
mally associate with the movie colony. Its public face was neither especially
creative nor in any way glamorous; its private sphere was too starved of cash
to be called Big Business, except as a joke. But in this parallel world, they did
make movies. It was a place affectionately called Poverty Row.
Ben Judell was a hardheaded survivor of Hollywood’s low-budget trenches.
In 1939, he decided to launch his own concern, initially named Producers
Pictures. He lined up investors, some property on which to construct a studio,
agreements with the distribution exchanges, scripts, and filmmakers, and
set out on an ambitious program of aggressive picture making. In less time
than it takes milk to go bad, he ran into dire financial problems. He poured
too much money into the earliest productions, which faltered at the box of-
fice, leaving the second round of productions half-finished and out of funds.
Pathe Labs was preparing to foreclose on Judell’s unpaid lab bill of nearly a
million dollars when his chief investor Sigmund Neufeld stepped in to take
over. Judell shuffled off into the darkness, and Neufeld retooled the studio to
more modest goals. He slashed the production schedule and lowered the bar,
 Detour’s Detour 145

and the newly rechristened Producers Releasing Corporation started to make

money instead of lose it.
This caught the attention of Seymour Nebenzahl, the savvy producer re-
sponsible for Fritz Lang’s M (1931) and Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933). As
the Nazis took power, he and Lang had skipped out of Germany to stop over
in France for a while, where Nebenzahl produced one of Buster Keaton’s
better talkie features, The King of the Champs-Elysees (1934). Not long after
that, Nebenzahl came to America, like so many gifted European filmmakers
of the age. The film world is divided into two camps: the dreamers and the
pragmatists. The dreamers become directors, heads full of fancy, while the
pragmatists become producers. Nebenzahl was a brilliant producer—which
meant he was pragmatic. While Edgar Ulmer shuffled around looking for a
studio to call home, Nebenzahl went and bought himself one. He invested in
PRC, along with his partners at Pathe, who had noted the turnaround in the
company’s fortunes under Neufeld.
At this time, in the early 1940s, Ulmer was relegated to shooting newsreels
for Pathe—a sad comedown for such a talent, but it paid the bills. He was
in discussions with Paramount to join them as a staff director, to begin on a
remake of The Blue Angel, starring Veronica Lake! As his talks went forward
and his hopes soared, his bosses at Pathe suggested that PRC might be a good
gig for a man of his skill. Nebenzahl was an old friend from the glory days
of German silent cinema, and Seymour made it clear the job was his for the
taking.
Posterity knows that Ulmer did not get the Paramount job, but not why.
The contents of the discussions, the inner workings of the minds of the men
who looked at Ulmer and said “no” . . . these things are lost to us. What we
have is the result: Ulmer took the job at PRC, and laid down a personal myth
that this was his desire. PRC was better suited to his personality. His talent
at maximizing production value on minimized resources would prove a more
valuable asset in an environment of want. He was never constituted to blandly
sublimate himself to the wranglings of studio politics—“the Hollywood hash
machine,” as he famously called it in his conversations with Bogdanovich
(592). In the fringes of Hollywood he would find a measure of creative con-
trol almost unthinkable in the big movie houses.
Three times it happened: three times he had an opportunity to prove
himself within the system, and three times his fate was misdirected. The
first was in 1935 with The Black Cat, when Ulmer saw his success opening
doors—only to have them just as swiftly slammed shut. Then, in the summer
of 1941, Ulmer negotiated with Paramount, only to wind up at an absurdist
parody of a movie studio instead. The third and final grab at the ring came
in 1946, when Ulmer’s The Strange Woman returned him more or less to the
146 David Kalat

Hollywood mainstream; but his agent never took proper advantage of the
situation, and nothing came of it. The notions that Ulmer was exiled because
of the Max Alexander affair or because he opted for the freedom of indepen-
dence do not bear scrutiny. These are excuses. Why, you ask, did Ulmer work
on the fringes? The question is its own answer. Ulmer did not function within
Hollywood. To ask why is to assume that he could have functioned within the
system. Yet the evidence shows that given the chance, he did not. It does not
matter what Edgar G. Ulmer thought about his choices; his destiny was set for
him. At a place like PRC, he flourished. Might as well pretend he liked it.

DETOUR, MARK 1

Edgar G. Ulmer’s Detour is the story of a frustrated artist, kicked around

by fate. Al Roberts and his girl Sue are small-time musicians eking out an
existence in a Greenwich Village nightspot. Sue harbors dreams of being dis-
covered, and sets out west to seek fame and fortune. Al decides to follow her,
and hitchhikes across country to catch up with his lost love. Along the way he
is picked up by a driver, Charlie Haskell, with a wad of cash and some ugly
scars on his wrist. Before Al finds out much about his mysterious benefactor,
Haskell dies suddenly in a freak accident. Al realizes to his horror that he is
trapped—no one will believe he did not kill the man, and so his only course
of action is to act as if he did: hide the body, rob it blind, assume the dead
man’s identity, and run.
As the groaning noise of guilt and fear crowd his panicky brain, Al tries
to seek comfort by finding someone even less fortunate. He picks up Vera, a
grizzled wretch of a girl, at a gas stop, but is puzzled by her cold reaction to
him. Too late, he discovers that Vera is the one who put the scars on Haskell’s
wrist. She recognizes the car but not its new owner, and concludes Al must
have murdered Haskell for his money. Using this as blackmail leverage, Vera
makes Al her slave.
His only escape from Vera’s clutches is yet another freak death, as he
unwittingly strangles her with a telephone cord during a drunken argument.
Once again, Al has to go on the run, but this time there will be no end. Just
running, endless running. He will never see Sue, never settle down in one
place, never play music, never even hear his own name. His freedom is bought
at a terrible price.
Throughout this grim tale, Al’s voice narrates the cruel twists of his life
with a tone of perpetual complaint. Film noir has a rich tradition of voice-over
narration, but Ulmer’s use of it here has a peculiar and interesting effect: there
is a dissonance between what Al says and what we see, a disconnection be-
 Detour’s Detour 147

tween the events he describes and how he interprets them. It is a subtle thing,
but the man who made The Black Cat without once showing a man denuded
of his skin is a man who wields subtlety as a weapon.
The first note of discord is struck early in the narrative, when Al proposes
marriage to Sue. Fans of Ulmer’s frugal expressionism may be spending most
of their attention on the fact that the director has rendered the streets of New
York without even bothering to build a set, using just a couple of street signs
and enough fog machines to blanket Texas. Within the swirling tendrils of fog,
however, a tender romantic moment is going quietly awry. Every sweet noth-
ing Al purrs gets thrown back in his face, and Sue’s unsentimental response to
his proposal is to announce coolly that she is pulling up stakes and heading to
Hollywood. “Maybe you’ll decide to come out, too, later on,” is the best she
can come up with to soothe his damaged ego, and it doesn’t help much.
For the love of Al’s life, the reason he will uproot his own life and go hunt-
ing for her across the nation, Sue is no great shakes. We see her in just three
scenes of the film, and in none of them does she make much of an impres-
sion—aside from coming across a little callous in response to Al’s profession
of love. In the end, we do not really know much about her—and that is the
point. Neither, really, does Al. He is not actually in love with her. He is fixated
on his image of her, an idealized abstraction that has little to do with the real
Sue and everything to do with Al’s needs.
Every time Al opens his mouth, misanthropic poison spews out. Handed
a tip by a customer, he eyes the ten-dollar bill in his hand and pronounces it
“a piece of paper crawling with germs.” Al, being a glass-all-empty kind of
person, can see that the road to Hollywood is littered with the bones of the
talented and the ambitious, and he decides to simply hunker down where
he is and make a life out of grudging resentment. He doesn’t believe in the
future, and he is consumed by so much self-loathing that he honestly cannot
imagine any better tomorrow. For all her flaws, Sue is the one solid anchor
in his self-pitying world. Once she departs, he is likely to be sucked into his
own personal black hole of despair. He either has to chase after her or sur-
render to nihilism.
The second glimpse into Al’s fractured psychology comes when Haskell
picks him up and offers to drive him all the way from Arizona to Los Angeles.
It is a lucky break, the only one to come Al’s way in the entire sad story, but
he never reckons it as such. The first thing he does is set about examining the
dental work on his gift horse. Through the narration we can see that there is
no trace of humility or gratefulness in Al, just jealousy and contempt.
When Haskell dies, it as is if the story skips a groove. The audience scratches
its collective head in mutual befuddlement: “Huh? What just happened?” It
is never clear if Haskell perished from a heart attack, from cracking his skull
148 David Kalat

on the rocky ground, or maybe as a result of some other detail denied us in

the blankly abstracted sequence. In what should be—is—the key scene of the
film, the threads binding cause to effect become tangled and torn.
It is here, when the film makes the least sense, that Ulmer’s careful hand
reveals itself most clearly. The entire story line hangs on the premise that Al
believes no one would ever accept his innocence. If there were even the re-
motest possibility that Al could persuade someone that Haskell’s demise was
accidental, then Vera’s blackmail attempts might not work. So Ulmer makes
sure that not even we in the audience are convinced. Al, the narrator of his
own story, cannot quite believe his own version of events either. For a crucial
moment, the narration and the events on screen have slipped out of sync, and
Al’s fate has tumbled into the gap between.
For all his railings against how unfair all this is, Al never owns up to the
possibility that he made this bed himself. He clicks his tongue in discontent
about Vera’s ungracious response to his offer of a lift, never appreciating the
irony that he was just as diffident toward Haskell. He protests vigorously
against Vera’s labeling him a murderer, never pausing to reflect that his theft
of Haskell’s identity and belongings is every bit as illegal. Above all hangs
the question of why he went after Sue in the first place, whether she was ever
worth the trouble he visited upon himself in her name. She vanishes from the
story even before she vanishes from Al’s life, as if she was never more than
a blond cipher.
There is a sleight of hand at work here, a sly juggling of what is shown to
the audience, so adroit as to be all but undetectable. Ulmer’s magic lies in the
absences, the empty spaces. There’s nothing up his sleeve, he says as he shows
a minimalist tableau. Detour clocks in at scarcely more than an hour and has
only four principal characters (two of whom are dispensed with before the
halfway point), and the set designers took the week off, leaving the fog ma-
chines and back-projection screens to take up the slack. Ulmer once boasted,
quite implausibly, of having been contracted by Murnau to build completely
new sets for each and every change of camera angle (Bogdanovich 564). Ul-
mer treats Detour like a photonegative: if I can’t have unique sets for every
shot, how’s about no sets at all!
In anything minimalist, what is present takes on added potency. With so
much excised, the choices of what to leave in seem touched by some special
significance. Consider Al’s rejection by Sue. It is superfluous to the plot, in-
somuch as there are countless ways in which the story could have motivated
Al to go trekking to L.A. As far as the plot is concerned, it matters little if Al
is seeking a girl he will never find, or running from the mob, or on his way
to start a new job. From a narrative point of view, Sue is a classic MacGuf-
fin, a mere excuse to motivate the hero into action. Of all the myriad ways
 Detour’s Detour 149

in which to accomplish this, Ulmer chose this one: a boy wants a girl, who
does not much seem to want him back. It is a fragment of some untold tale,
an unanswered question, a dangling participle.
What was removed that left a hole this shape?

DETOUR’S DETOUR

Martin M. Goldsmith was a drifter, thumbing his way across the Depression-
ravaged remains of a once-great nation, secretly nursing the dream to write
for the movies. In 1938, the vagabond author was skulking around studio
lots in Hollywood taking menial jobs on soundstages in the hopes of rubbing
shoulders with the icons of the screen. Every night, he bundled up his day’s
worth of vain hopes, frustrations, loneliness, and caustic bile and disgorged it
into his typewriter (Doody, unpaginated foreword).
Come 1939 and he got this mess of venom and spite published by the Ma-
caulay Company as Detour: An Extraordinary Tale. It was his second novel,
written in a spartan language of clinical disgust.
Half of the book tells the story of Al, and his fateful misadventures with
Haskell and Vera. Shuffled in between the chapters of Al’s unhappy chronicles
is a second story, Sue’s. When she drops out of Al’s life, her own story contin-
ues on its own tragic and wayward path. Sue goes west to seek her own fate,
and is just as abused by the results.
Sue is an undistinguished dancer in an unremarkable nightclub in a flea-
bitten town. She is neither more talented nor more lovely than any of the other
dancers packed onto the stage alongside her, not to mention the countless
others like her cluttering the numberless stages and clubs across the entire
nation. To call them a dime a dozen would be a mathematical joke—a dime is
worth more than that. Yet Sue, like all the others, dreams of being a star. One
day she will be discovered, and take her rightful place in the gossip columns
and fan rags. That her unlikely dream is shared by gaggles of starstruck girls
never once impinges on her plans. Mistaking wishful thinking for manifest
destiny, she quits her job and buys a ticket to Hollywood. The Dream Factory
has that kind of allure, a power to overwhelm all logic with fairy-tale visions
of glamour and fame. As any classicist will tell you, a siren song is no good
thing. The call of Hollywood has lured numberless aspirants to their doom,
washed up on the rocky shoals of L.A.
The girl named Sue finds herself in such an inglorious dead-end, sling-
ing hash at a greasy spoon. She has by now forgotten Al completely, and set
herself to hooking up with various men chosen for their potential to provide
her with a comfortable future. By dribs and drabs she acclimates herself to
150 David Kalat

the idea that she can benefit by leasing her body out to the highest bidder.
Unlike Al, she never blames fate for her calumny; these are her choices, and
she embraces them.
Although Al is never reunited with Sue, in a way he sort of is. Vera and Sue
are kindred souls, separated only be a few degrees of ruination. Al, who never
really knew the woman he professed to love, cannot recognize Sue in Vera,
nor does he recognize in Vera the same coruscating cynicism that rules his
own outlook. Vera—tubercular whore and professional blackmailer—is no
more than a fun-house mirror reflection of Al and Sue’s worst, most defining,
qualities. As much as Al tries to position himself as an innocent victim of cir-
cumstance, this is the fate he has chosen. For him to loathe Vera and love Sue
in the same breath is to draw absurd distinctions, to split infinitesimal hairs.
Goldsmith sold Detour to PRC in 1944 with the proviso that he pen the
screenplay adaptation. It was his big break, his entree into the world of mov-
ies. In the years to come, Goldsmith would write a number of clever thrillers,
earn his keep, and win an Academy Award nomination. Sometimes the right
combination of talent and good fortune does produce happy endings after all
(Doody). He worked with Ulmer and PRC producer Martin Mooney to sum-
marize the story as a screenplay treatment in October of that year. The extent
of Mooney’s role in the process is opaque—neither Ulmer nor Goldsmith
showed much inclination to share the limelight with a mere pencil-pusher—
yet it was Mooney’s name on the sixteen-page treatment submitted to the
Production Code of America’s office for approval (Biesen 164).
Joseph Breen, the chief censor for the motion-picture business, replied that
PRC had to be out of its ever-lovin’ mind if it thought the PCA would give its
stamp to a dirty-minded story about prostitutes and murderers. Changes would
need to be made: Sue could not be seen to sleep around, and the movie could
not “reflect discredit on the motion picture industry” (Biesen, 164–65).
Ulmer and Goldsmith decided that the simplest solution to that dilemma
was just to drop the Sue subplot altogether and leave the story focused on Al
and Vera. Breen was anxious that Al not be seen to get away with anything
illegal and insisted that the “criminal antihero is absolutely in the hands of the
police with a guilty regretful narration” at the end (Biesen 164). Years down
the road, critics enamored of Detour would praise its oblique, ambiguous end-
ing. On screen, Breen’s “crime never pays” finale gets a twist, as it is unclear
whether Al is actually arrested or merely haunted by the fear of imminent ar-
rest. The literal reading of the scene, the one favored by the cramped imagina-
tions of censors, pales next to the horror of perpetual paranoia, a man hunted
by his own shadow. Either way, Al is punished something fierce.
“Fate, or some mysterious force, can put the finger on you or me for no
good reason at all,” Al says as the film grinds to its grim conclusion. This is
 Detour’s Detour 151

also, ahem, the last line of the novel—which grinds to the same grim, am-
biguous conclusion. Every detail credited to Ulmer’s genius—every quotable
line of dialogue, every plot twist, every cynical jab in the ribs—comes intact
from Goldsmith’s book. Ulmer’s “genius,” such as it is, seemingly lies in
faithfully translating the novel into flickering celluloid.
If this is true, then Edgar Ulmer was merely a conduit, not a creator.

DETOUR, VERSION 2.0

In 1992, the Earth shook: Detour was selected for the National Film Registry.
If you did not just gasp in astonishment, then you must need some additional
information. The National Film Registry selects twenty-five motion pictures
each year based on their cultural, historical, or aesthetic significance. These
films are then preserved by the Library of Congress as examples of enduring
American culture. In other words, it is a measure by which the United States
says, “This movie rocks!”
Although the only stipulated criterion for selection is that the motion pic-
ture must be at least ten years old, the fact is that the registry is not in the
habit of honoring low-budget thrillers, B pictures, Poverty Row quickies, or
any other category under which Detour might likely be filed. It was the film-
historical equivalent of Michelin handing out a five-star rating to a lone Mc-
Donalds franchise off the turnpike. “We don’t care for fast food, but hoo boy,
them burgers are sweet!” To a viewer in 1992 interested in seeing what all the
fuss was about, all this entailed was taking a five-dollar bill into a K-Mart
or a corner drug store and rifling through the bargain-video bin, lousy with
copies of Detour, each one sporting a different cover and different company’s
logo on the box.
This was the ignominious fate of this legendary film, abandoned and or-
phaned. PRC had long since gone out of business, and the B-movie market
had vanished altogether. Preserving and maintaining motion pictures is no
easy or inexpensive task—that is why the National Registry only bothers with
a couple dozen a year. Major media companies with a stake in the continued
exploitation of a film may keep its elements in some vault, but in the absence
of such economic incentives there is no reason to expect that a film will have
been kept around in any particularly good form. Detour had lapsed into the
public domain, leaving no media company with an exclusive right to its dis-
tribution. And so, no one had a solid incentive to keep it around.
In the intervening years, Detour’s exhibition on television and in second-
ary theatrical markets had ensured a healthy supply of 16 mm prints. Murky,
dupey, contrasty things, these amateur-gauge reels of film made the inexpen-
152 David Kalat

Figure 10.2. Detour 1992—A misbegotten remake that sheds light on

why Ulmer’s original has become a classic. Courtesy of David Kalat.
 Detour’s Detour 153

sive production look even crappier. Unimpressive though they were, these 16
mm reels were plentiful, and in the age of public-domain video, they would
guarantee a proliferation of poor-quality video copies.
Meanwhile, an individual collector had been spending his time and money
amassing a private archive of old movies. Wade Williams III is an oversize
sort of personality, the kind of man who unironically prints up his letterhead
with a threatening WWIII logo. He takes his hobby seriously, and woe betide
the fool who does not take Williams equally seriously. Where possible, he had
been buying up original negatives and copyrights. Detour’s copyright had es-
caped his grasp, but he had acquired an original 35 mm camera negative, and
rights to the book underlying the film. One was more valuable than the other,
but which one was which depended on your point of view.
In an environment of rampant video piracy, Williams was reluctant to use
the Detour negative to strike a high-quality video edition. Once it was out
in the world, he would have little protection from those who would try to
burn off copies of his work and sell it as their own; and the lack of copyright
status discouraged him from allowing the negative to be used. It was a white
elephant, an object of value that could not be exploited or enjoyed, merely
hoarded.
The book, however . . .
It occurred to Williams’s devious, scheming mind that he had a back door
to claiming ownership of Detour. He could undertake a remake, and copy-
right that. That the book contained an entire second storyline not used in the
1945 film helped justify the remake as artistically valid, while at the same
time Williams would show an almost slavish desire to pay homage to Ulmer’s
version. He would shoot in black and white (at least partially), using the same
minimalist techniques as Ulmer, and maintain the 1940s setting instead of
updating the film to modern times. (Williams once told me that he used the
same car that had been used in the original film. I didn’t at the time clarify
with him whether he meant the same model of car, or the exact same vehicle,
although I got the impression he meant the latter. I have never found any
evidence to support this claim.) Instead of shooting in widescreen, Williams
reverted to the 1940s full-frame standard—partially to mimic the original
cinematography, but also as an acknowledgment that his film was destined for
a life on video and cable TV. To top it off, Williams tracked down the son of
actor Tom Neal, who had played Al in the original, and cast him in his father’s
role. Tom Neal Jr. looks strikingly like his father, which gives the remake a
queer déjà-vu vibe.
Filmed in Kansas City, Missouri, Williams’s Detour is a clumsy, half-
formed wreck. Shot on video and given a chintzy synthesizer score, it gives
off the acrid air of an amateur production. The actors are awkward on cam-
154 David Kalat

era, giving theatrical performances better suited to the stage. Tom Neal Jr.’s
voice-over narration is badly spoken, as if a rehearsal read-through had been
recorded and used as is.
The new and unimproved Detour had its premiere and one-week run at the
Fine Arts Theater in Kansas City in February 1992, before moving on to home
video through VCI and cablecasts on HBO. The 1945 film on whose blue-
print it was modeled was winning accolades still, forty-some years after its
birth—winning the highest honor Congress would bestow on a movie—while
Williams’s Detour followed its inevitable slide into obscurity.
Williams’s mistake is not obvious. He did what seemed logical. He had a
time-tested story and a cinematic approach that had proved itself. He stayed
close enough to Ulmer’s vision to take few artistic risks, yet he added new ma-
terial and ideas into the mix to keep it from being a pointless exercise in hero
worship. If he had limited financial resources or actors of questionable talent
. . . well, these limitations had been Ulmer’s, too. All Ulmer had to do was usher
Goldsmith’s prose onto the screen; certainly anyone could do the same.
Evidently, this is not the case.
Looking coldly at the transition from Goldsmith’s Detour to Ulmer’s De-
tour one could draw the conclusion that Ulmer played little role in making
the film what it was. But a movie is so much more than just a filmed story,
and while it is true that many of the more obvious merits of Detour can be
credited to Goldsmith, this does not mean that Ulmer was not, in the shadows
and margins and subtle details, contributing less obvious values.

THREE DETOURS MAKE A RIGHT

In examining the differences and discrepancies between the three versions of

Detour, then, it is easy to see that there are successful choices and misfired
mistakes, and that history has adjudged Ulmer’s rendition to be the best bal-
ance between these extremes. There are substantial plot details, characters,
and lines of dialogue common to all three versions, and therefore these vari-
ables can be canceled out of the equation. Of what remains, some of Ulmer’s
choices were prescribed for him: the seamier aspects of the novel were for-
bidden by the censors from inclusion in the 1945 film, for example. Even
Ulmer’s famously parsimonious use of back projection and abstracted sets
were as much forced on him by circumstance as they were matters of choice:
the film was shot in June 1945, when wartime restrictions on location shoot-
ing would have forbidden much else (Biesen 165).
The legend goes that Ulmer cranked the picture out in six days. I dare you
to find a reference to Detour that does not repeat the six-day myth. Years later,
 Detour’s Detour 155

his daughter Arianné Ulmer Cipes pulled out PRC documentation (for a film
on Ulmer’s career); the documentation clearly states a generous fourteen-day
schedule—essentially the same production block that Universal had given
him for The Black Cat! (Palm 00:42:00). Pretending he had made it faster
and cheaper gave Ulmer a way to buff his image as a miracle worker, and
provided a handy excuse for any of Detour’s rougher edges. In fact, he had
little to apologize for—Detour’s rough edges, visible though they certainly
are, simply correspond to the lean prose style of the novel, which is written
as the literary equivalent of a low-budget quickie.
In his cast selection, Ulmer made inspired choices. Since the film even-
tually devolves into a two-hander, the casting of the two leads was critical.
As Vera, Ann Savage gives the performance of her life. Neé Bernice Lyon,
she was an army brat whose attempt to break into Hollywood initially re-
sulted in a frustration not unlike that experienced by Vera herself—she was
a failed actress who was left to sell her body when nothing else was avail-
able. The early 1940s found Savage working just unbilled walk-on parts.
Her primary line of business at that time was as a pinup girl, quite popular
with the troops—a gig that rewarded her most rudimentary physical assets
but said nothing about her talent. Detour represented a major break for
the struggling actress. “I had never had a good part like that,” she would
later say (Palm 00:39:00). In stark contrast to what had gone before, Ulmer
sought to conceal her glamour, hiding her beauty behind dirty makeup and
greasy hair. He encouraged her to scream and sneer, to disregard what was
ladylike. “I often tell young actresses—if you can play Vera, you can play
anything” (Palm 00:40:00). The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sci-
ences agreed, and in 2005 praised her as an “icon and legend.” Following
Detour, her career took off, with Savage often cast in femme-fatale roles,
costarring five times with Tom Neal.
Like Savage, Neal was given a role that connected to his own personality
and life. He was educated as a lawyer and a boxer—two professions in oppo-
site spheres, perhaps, but also just different ways in which to fight. There was
a simmering, seething anger in Neal, a latent violence that he held in check
(at certain times more than at others). In Detour he played a man driven to
self-destruction, and afterward he followed that maleficent detour to his own
doom. Neal’s first wife was an actress whose attention he did not fully com-
mand. They broke up, got back together, broke up again—and along the way
Neal flew into a jealous rage at a rival, beating the other man to a bloody pulp.
For this sin he was blacklisted in Hollywood. Having all but lost his career,
he then lost her, too. Neal’s second wife was claimed by cancer. By his third
marriage, Neal’s commitment to undying love was no longer seaworthy: he
shot this woman in the head, and was sentenced to prison (Muller 179).
156 David Kalat

Detour skirts around the biographies of its makers. Forged in the fire of
a writer’s frustration, it started off as a way for Martin Goldsmith to vent.
Goldsmith’s most personal novel would come to be seen as Edgar Ulmer’s
most personal film, starring actors whose lives flitted through a similar orbit.
The magic of Detour is in the curious circumstance by which Goldsmith’s

Figure 10.3. Edgar G. Ulmer—a maverick filmmaker whose films outshone their
humble origins. Courtesy of David Kalat.
 Detour’s Detour 157

angry screed turned out to be fully transferable—what was “personal” was

also universal. Wade Williams III’s mistake was in thinking that this unique
alignment of artists and opportunities could be reduced to a simple formula,
to be repeated decades later, to anything resembling the same result.
“I really am looking for absolution for all the things I had to do for money’s
sake,” Ulmer told Bogdanovich (603). It is a statement that could just as eas-
ily have been uttered by anyone else involved in this classic film. In Detour,
they found it.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Biesen, Sheri Chinen. Blackout: World War II and the Origins of Film Noir (Balti-
more: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 162–66.
Bogdanovich, Peter. Who the Devil Made It: Conversations with Legendary Film
Directors (New York: Ballantine Books, 1997).
Doody, Richard. “Foreword,” in Detour: An Extraordinary Tale, by Martin M. Gold-
smith (O’Bryan House, 2005).
Goldsmith, Martin M. Detour: An Extraordinary Tale (New York: Macaulay, 1939).
Grissemann, Stefan. Mann im Schatten: Der Filmemacher Edgar G. Ulmer (Regens-
burg: Paul Zsolnay Verlag, 2003), 21–30.
Knipfel, Jim. “Fate Stuck Out Its Foot,” NYPress, 11–17 November 1998, 12–14.
Muller, Eddie. Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir (New York: St. Martin’s Grif-
fin, 1998), 177–79.

FILM CITED

Edgar G. Ulmer: The Man Off-Screen (Michael Palm, director; New York: Kino
International, 2004).
 11
Fantasy and Failure in Strange Illusion
Hugh S. Manon

Desire is propped up by a fantasy, at least one foot of which is in the

Other, and precisely the one that counts, even and above all if it happens
to limp.
—Jacques Lacan, Écrits

Since its release in 1945, critics and fans alike have found it difficult to
identify the genre of Edgar G. Ulmer’s film Strange Illusion, and with good
reason. Initially billed as both a “psychological drama” and a “romantic mys-
tery,” the plot of the film is not so much a generic hybrid as an unpredictable
string of non sequiturs—abrupt shifts in narrative, soundtrack, and mise-en-
scène that seem designed to call attention to generic difference per se. Begin-
ning with its distinctive opening framing device—the cryptic, fog-enshrouded
dream of the film’s young protagonist, Paul Cartwright (Jimmy Lydon)—the
film’s first act plays like a noir amnesia film turned inside out. The problem is
not that Paul fails to recognize what is right in front of him—that his mother’s
suitor, Brett Curtis (William Wellman), is an insidious and perhaps murder-
ous villain. Rather, Paul’s crisis is that his dream has revealed the true state of
things all too clearly. Far from suffering a loss of memory, Paul knows things
that he cannot possibly know, and must convince others that his outrageous,
seemingly paranoid accusations about Curtis are nonetheless valid. Indeed,
the film’s major trope can be summed up in a single line, delivered by Paul to
his confidant, Dr. Martin Vincent (Regis Toomey): “This may sound kind of
crazy, Doc, but that dream is beginning to happen.”
As in an amnesia film, Paul’s conflict begins with the realization that he
is at one remove from the reality that surrounds him—a reality in which his

159
160 Hugh S. Manon

friends and family refuse to believe that the seemingly benevolent Brett Cur-
tis is anything other than what he appears to be. Unlike in an amnesia plot,
however, Paul is not hermetically sealed out of the truth of his circumstances,
but instead sealed in. He does not investigate; he only confirms, with all of
the expected answers dropping right into his hands. In terms of genre, then, if
the film is supposed to be a mystery, then why is the enigma so elementary,
so easily solved? If it is a romance, then why do both Paul and Curtis appear
so casually unconcerned with—and even allergic to—their supposed love in-
terests? If it is a suspense thriller, then what do we make of Paul’s immunity
to persecution, and the fact that his foreknowledge negates any real tension or
surprise, while guaranteeing that in the end there can be no twist? Moreover,
if (as many critics have argued) Strange Illusion is a film noir like Ulmer’s
other 1945 film, Detour, then why are the women Paul interacts with so virtu-
ous and decent, and why is the film’s ending so cloyingly optimistic?
Perhaps the most surprising of the film’s many generic and tonal shifts oc-
curs when Curtis, the film’s purported villain, is revealed to be exactly what
Paul suspects him of being: not only a serial perpetrator of so-called “perfect
crimes,” but also “the cruelest man in the world.”1 When Curtis arrives at Rest-
view Manor, a local sanitarium, for a moment the film shifts into full-on noir
mode, revealing both Curtis’s true identity as a legendary criminal mastermind
named Claude Barrington, and his collaboration with his former psychiatrist,
an equally insidious character named Professor Muhlbach (Charles Arnt). In
a clandestine exchange of dialogue, we learn that the two men are already
engaged in a plot to exact revenge on the family of the deceased Judge Al-
bert Cartwright—and especially his young wife Virginia (Sally Eilers), Paul’s
mother. Although the specific reason for Barrington’s revenge is left ambigu-
ous—having something to do with the deceased judge’s “meddling interfer-
ence”—their past history is clearly motive enough for Barrington to hatch an
impossibly risky plot: ingratiating himself with the Cartwright family, marry-
ing Virginia, killing her in some undetectable fashion, and then inheriting her
considerable fortune.2 Most implausible of all, Barrington’s sudden reappear-
ance confirms that, for him, to have murdered the judge and gotten away with
the crime was somehow just not satisfying; he now must abuse the dead man’s
family. If all this reads a bit like a soap opera, the film is that, too, as well as
a kind of Gothic romance, a 1940s teenpic, and a Shakespearean adaptation,
with Curtis playing Claudius to Paul’s Hamlet. The film begs not so much for
an accounting of the specific quality of these generic components, as for an
explanation of the impulse to “repeated genre-shifting” itself.
In the pages that follow, I argue that one way to rationalize the generic in-
stability of Strange Illusion is to understand the entirety of the film’s narrative
as representing the interior of Paul’s psyche—the daydreams of a young man
 Fantasy and Failure in Strange Illusion 161

who has himself perhaps watched too many movies. From the moment Paul
awakens at the film’s beginning, to the final sequence when he is knocked
unconscious—only to resume the dream, this time more optimistically—the
events we witness on the screen are not Paul’s objective reality, but his
elaborate fantasy. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, fantasy can be understood as a
framework of incomplete scenes, a landscape of imagined lack into which one
escapes in order to escape a confrontation with the Real of his or her desire.
In the words of Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, whose elaborations of the
Lacanian notion of fantasy are foundational to this project, fantasy “provides
the co-ordinates of our desire”; it “constructs the frame enabling us to desire
something” (Sublime Object 118). As I go on to explain, the psychoanalytic
conception of fantasy is useful not only in explaining Paul’s plight, but also
in contextualizing the distinct and occasionally bizarre techniques through
which director Ulmer, the infamous auteur of Poverty Row, puts his stamp on
Paul’s story. Indeed, the more tenuously artificial and cheap-looking Ulmer’s
techniques become, the more readily we may be convinced that the arrival of
Curtis/Barrington does not represent an invasion of Paul’s “real reality,” but
rather the central element in a fantasy frame through which protagonist Paul
Cartwright gradually learns how to desire.

IN (BETWEEN) DREAMS

Albeit an anachronism, the single film that does the most to illuminate the
formal and narrative strangeness of Strange Illusion is David Lynch’s Mul-
holland Drive (2001), a feature-length experimental narrative whose often
confusing plot can convincingly be explained as the elaborate dream of
Diane Selwyn (Naomi Watts), who for most of the film appears only within
the dream, as Betty Elms (also Watts). The problem, of course, is that the
viewer is likewise “inside” Diane’s dream from the moment the film begins,
and remains there for over two-thirds of the film’s running time, never ques-
tioning that Betty Elms is anything other than a “real” person.3 A similar
textual comparison is afforded by Robert Altman’s Images (1971), in which
the viewer, often without realizing it, is transported inside the psychotic
point of view of protagonist Cathryn (Susannah York). When Cathryn’s
now-dead ex-lover reappears at a country cottage, initially nothing indicates
to the viewer that he is an apparition, and this shifting between the two “lev-
els” of reality that Cathryn experiences fuels a number of horrific shocks as
the film unfolds. Recently, a number of more mainstream films, such as M.
Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense (1999) and Alejandro Amenábar’s The
Others (2001), have similarly manipulated the viewer’s perspective by locat-
162 Hugh S. Manon

ing the action wholly inside a false reality without any objective perspective
to provide context.4
All of the aforementioned films, however, benefit from their appearance in
an era in which audiences are more amenable to being unwittingly immersed
in unreality. Audiences are thrilled when, at the end of The Sixth Sense, it is
revealed that Dr. Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis) has been dead all along, and
that for an hour and a half we, like Crowe, have been unaware of our own de-
lusion. Strange Illusion, I argue, is equally manipulative (and equally unapol-
ogetic) in delivering the psychic interior of its protagonist packaged as objec-
tive reality. The difference is that our nostalgic view of the 1940s, coupled
with the “aw shucks” wholesomeness and youthful naiveté of Paul—whose
trusted perspective underwrites most of the narrative—effectively prohibits
us from assuming the worst: that the film is deluding us from beginning to
end. Particularly curious in this regard is the fact that the narrative never ac-
counts for how Paul could have dreamed Curtis’s actions and motives in the
first place. Moreover, once Curtis is recognized as Barrington and shot by the
authorities, the film simply ends, as if psychic detection were a common and
accepted practice and no explanation were required. The viewer is left to sur-
mise that it was all an uncannily accurate hunch on Paul’s part, or a perhaps
a hyperextended episode of déjà vu.
At the same time, owing to its repeated emphasis on Freudian theory (note
the volume of Freud cheated out toward the camera on Paul’s desk), we can
easily arrive at a second, pop-psychoanalytic reading of Paul’s prescience. It
is well-known that Ulmer was interested in psychoanalysis, and part of the
film’s topical appeal at mid-century derived from its invocation of Freudian
theory—the script’s nominal attempt to exploit what the film’s promotional ma-
terials clumsily label “the unexplainable subconsciousness [sic] and the inter-
pretation of dreams.”5 In Strange Illusion, the source of the protagonist’s crisis
is ostensibly Oedipal. As the film begins, Paul is in the process of discovering
that his mother, a widow of two years, has developed an interest in another man,
and that this interest could lead to marriage, thus obviating Paul’s status as his
mother’s primary partner. The result is Paul’s dream of an ominous male who
has come to take his mother away. Translated into waking life, Paul’s dream
appears to come true when Curtis appears on the scene to court Virginia, and
before too long he begins to resemble the master criminal Barrington (a pun on
“barrier,” which is what he threatens to become for Paul). Consequently, Paul
initiates an investigation to reveal Curtis’s true identity, thus overcoming the
(potential, new) father in order to regain access to the mother.
Paul’s visions can be understood as symptomatic of a family-wide denial
that has been going on since the judge’s death. Stirred up by the arrival of
Curtis, this repressed traumatic material slowly burbles out of the uncon-
 Fantasy and Failure in Strange Illusion 163

scious and back to the surface, albeit in a transformed way. This, of course,
represents the orthodox Freudian reading of the film, and an interpretation
that is not lost on the film’s writers. Freud’s theories are given voice later
in the film by Muhlbach, albeit in a Hollywood-ized form: “In some cases,
filial devotion to a mother goes beyond the borderline of normality. It can
frequently produce hallucinations . . . I believe it is your emotional aversion
to your mother’s remarriage which produces these neurotic symptoms.”
The problem here is that a hallucination, as we commonly understand the
term, is by definition at odds with reality, and far from a predictor of events
to come. Perhaps in Strange Illusion, as in the films by Altman, Lynch, Shya-
malan, and Amenábar, the problem is not that dreams are self-evidently en-
croaching on reality, but that the dividing line(s) between “objective” reality
and Paul’s distorted interior psychology has been camouflaged too well. In this
way, the viewer is left unaware that any such shift has taken place, or at least is
unclear as to what “reality” we occupy at any given point.6 In other words, the
“hallucination” Muhlbach describes is not an aberration within Paul’s psyche,
but instead a pervasive “other” logic of which Paul himself is the symptom. If
this hypothesis holds true (or at least cannot be easily dismissed), then given
its appearance in 1945 Strange Illusion must be considered far more radical
than the more contemporary films I have mentioned above.
Ulmer provides abundant indicators that the film’s opening and closing
frames are in fact Paul’s dreams—that he is really asleep. The rest of the film
is something else, but if this “something else” into which Paul awakens is not
reality, then what is it? To reiterate, my contention is that in a profound flaunting
of Hollywood narrative, generic convention, and common-sense oppositional-
ity, when Paul wakes up at the beginning of the film we are not transported into
his normal “objective” reality, but instead into Paul’s own highly idiosyncratic
subjectivity. But a crucial question immediately arises. If the body of the film
is really Paul’s fantasy, why then is it so dramatic, full of conflict, and psycho-
logically painful? The answer is that this is fantasy in a specifically Lacanian
sense—an imagined scene full of incompletion and inaccessibility which per-
mits the protagonist to continually redefine and reorient his desire.
According to Lacan, dreams and fantasies are neither synonymous, nor are
they unrelated; however, they are both bound up in the question of what, for
the human subject, constitutes “awakening.” Žižek notes that “the Lacanian
thesis [is] that it is only in the dream that we come close to the real awaken-
ing—that is, to the Real of our desire.” Žižek continues:

When we awaken into reality after a dream, we usually say to ourselves “it was
just a dream,” thereby blinding ourselves to the fact that in our everyday, waken-
ing reality we are nothing but a consciousness of this dream. It was only in the
164 Hugh S. Manon

dream that we approached the fantasy-framework which determines our activity,

our mode of acting in reality itself. (Sublime Object 47)

In such an arrangement, what we call “reality”—the symbolic landscape

into which we “awaken”—is to a greater or lesser degree always a fantasy, a
framework that exists to support our desire, furnishing us with a route toward
satisfaction but not with satisfaction itself. The dream is not, then, itself a
fantasy. Instead the dream is a kind of “near approach” to jouissance that we
never approach in reality, but which nonetheless predisposes us to certain
fantasies that keep our desire, and thus our “reality,” up and running. In a
strong sense, then, Paul’s predicament anticipates a line delivered by Eden
Lane (Barbara Payton) in Ulmer’s 1955 film noir Murder Is My Beat: “The
only way that I can wake up from this nightmare is to go to sleep.” For Paul,
the problem is not that he cannot wake up from a frightening dream, but that
he cannot go to sleep and thus exit his nightmarish, conflict-driven fantasy.
In the section that follows, I argue that such an interpretation is borne out not
only by what Paul says and does (i.e., the dialogue and actions scripted for
him), but also by the “strange” manipulations of film form brought to bear
by director Ulmer and his filmmaking cohorts. In other words, Paul’s engage-
ment on the plane of fantasy is set in high relief at the precise moments that
Ulmer’s style flares up.

DIME-STORE AESTHETICS

According to Frank Krutnik, Ulmer’s notorious film Detour is of particular

interest not because of the director’s ability to transcend budgetary limita-
tions, or make them disappear on screen, but rather because of his willingness
to embrace and even “play up” the clunky, at times cardboard, artifice that
appears in low-budget films almost by default:

The blatant coincidences around which the narrative turns, together with the
enclosed world of the film (exaggerated by its very low budget: the minimal
cast and settings, the use of stock footage), serve to de-emphasize realist denota-
tion and to suggest that everything within the film is a projection of the hero’s
psychic disturbance. (126)

This same unusual synergy persists in Strange Illusion, but with the added
benefit that the film’s narrative centers directly on its protagonist’s “psychic
disturbance.” In the previous section, I read against the grain of the film’s
framing device to establish Paul’s narrative as bearing the structure of fantasy.
In this section, I examine three distinct stylistic repetitions in Ulmer’s film,
 Fantasy and Failure in Strange Illusion 165

each of which both complements and helps to produce such a reading. The
formal manipulations I examine are as follows: 1) the use of cheap-look-
ing scale models as evidentiary sites, 2) the appearance of highly artificial,
unnaturally close rear projection as a signifier of Paul’s skewed relation to
reality, and 3) a combined use of camera movement and nondiegetic musical
cues to frame the story’s inciting incident. Such highly artificial manipula-
tions of film form, I argue, not only make viewers temporarily aware that they
are watching a movie, but also express the implausibility of what the film’s
protagonist supposedly experiences as real, creating a sense that Paul does not
participate in the film’s various encounters and discoveries so much as they
are privately screened for his benefit alone.
In Strange Illusion, scale models appear in two separate instances, each
of which relates to the death of Paul’s father. Common in both high- and
low-budget films of the period, Ulmer’s use of scale models would be insig-
nificant if not for the mutual associations they create. The first scale-model
sequence appears in Paul’s initial dream and depicts a delivery truck pushing
his father’s sedan in front of an oncoming train. It is a dimly lit and relatively
desolate country setting, suggesting that no one was around to see the inci-
dent. If we are not convinced that the train is a model, everything becomes
clear when the engine makes contact with the car. There is no explosion or
crunching of steel. Instead, the sedan is nudged along the railroad tracks with
all the violence of a salt shaker sliding across a kitchen counter. This lack of
large-scale inertia is our best clue that, despite the detailed rendering of the
models, nothing “really real” is happing here. Significantly, too, the perspec-
tive is never explicitly attributed to any character in the film; it belongs solely
to the mise-en-scène of Paul’s dream. Consequently, the sequence resounds
more as a schoolboy fantasy of what violent death must look like, rather than
anything approaching realism.7
The second scale-model shot appears near the end of the film, when Paul
and Muhlbach go to the roof of the sanitarium to try out the professor’s binoc-
ulars. Much of the scene’s tension derives from Paul’s recklessness: he walks
around with the binoculars held up to his eyes, paying no attention to the
edge of the roof and nearly stepping off. When Paul spots an abandoned farm
building and inquires about it, the professor’s facial expression reveals deep
concern, even suggesting that he would like to shove Paul off the roof to his
death. Whereas the train crash scene that Paul sees in his dream can only be
imaginary—revealing a scene that no one was there to see, and from a high-
angle vantage point that seems suspiciously impossible to occupy—the shot
through the binoculars decodes in precisely the opposite manner, as a real,
material discovery. Out there in the countryside is an abandoned building—a
perfect location to dispose of crime-scene evidence—and in the next scene
166 Hugh S. Manon

Paul and Dr. Vincent set out to explore it. The important point, however, has
to do with the palpable artifice of the tiny scale-model barn. Like the model
railroad we have already seen, the barn seems like a child’s toy, designed to
declare its own status as a fake. Framed with a binocular-shaped matte, the
shot of the barn likewise correlates with the high artifice of Paul’s dream
world, at the very least suggesting that, in this film, all bets are off as to what
is real and what is imaginary. Is Paul imagining that two years ago Muhlbach
was standing at that very same spot, watching through his binoculars as Judge
Cartwright was killed by the train? Is it possible that everything we see in the
film represents a retrospective fantasy launched from Paul’s own (now perma-
nent) room at the sanitarium? Perhaps the stoic, pipe-smoking Vincent is not
Paul’s family physician, but instead his personal psychiatrist?8 Or does Paul
demonize Muhlbach because he is Paul’s full-time psychiatrist, working hard
to extricate Paul from the ever-present fantasy frame he inhabits? It seems to
me that all these interpretations remain viable, provided we understand this
film not as striving for realism and failing, but as playfully enjoying the gaps
in its own aesthetic.
Related to Ulmer’s use of scale models is his highly artificial use of rear pro-
jection. As in The Sixth Sense, where a sudden temperature drop signals that a
ghost is present, Ulmer’s rear-projected scenery indicates that what we see is
not “Paul’s sight” in some quasi-objective sense, but rather “Paul’s vision”—in
other words, his fantasy. Film noir scholar James Naremore has remarked that
Ulmer “may be the only Hollywood director of the period—aside from Orson
Welles—to deliberately exploit the artificiality of back projection” (148). Such
an assessment applies not only to Strange Illusion and, obviously, Detour, but
also to a number of Ulmer’s other films. A particularly instructive instance of
rear projection appears in the second act of The Strange Woman (1946), after
Jenny Hager (Hedy Lamarr) informs Ephraim Poster (Louis Hayward) that
she wants him to kill her husband Isaiah (Gene Lockhart) on a river trip into
Maine logging country. As the party proceeds through the rapids in a canoe, a
highly artificial rear-projected backdrop sets in high relief the tense moment of
truth—an intent to murder witnessed only by the film’s audience. “High relief ”
is the proper term for it, too, since the images of the two key players, father and
son, appear “raised” against the not-so-real backdrop. They are spotlighted,
circumscribed in a snow globe of intrigue, not by the film’s lighting, but by
the rear projected unreality itself. Yet is this not precisely how Paul’s fantasy
appears at various points throughout Strange Illusion—as a snow globe viewed
from the inside, in which we are always aware of some vague, circumscribing
limit point, or edge, where the fantasy ceases?
In Strange Illusion, Ulmer’s use of rear projection is most remarkable in a
night scene in which Paul peers out a front window of the sanitarium. Paul
 Fantasy and Failure in Strange Illusion 167

sits on a windowsill and witnesses Curtis/Barrington, who has previously

stated that he never learned to drive an automobile, behind the wheel of a
black sedan, with Muhlbach in the passenger seat. As they pull away, Paul
notes the license number, yet the movement of his head appears out of sync
with the images in front of him, as if he is preoccupied or slightly dazed. This
mismatch between foreground and background action is only exacerbated by
the angle from which the rear-projected footage was shot; it makes Paul ap-
pear entirely too close to the sedan, as if he were hovering ghostlike in space,
just behind the car. My point, of course, is neither to critique this shot as “bad
filmmaking,” nor to suggest that the artifice is purely intentional. Rather,
we might more profitably explain this shot and others like it as successful
failures—moments at which formal flaws (occurring for whatever reason) di-
rectly complement the film’s scripted plot. In other words, although it would
be impossible to describe “in general” how a fantasy looks, Paul’s view out
the window captures precisely this sense of the ineffable in fantasy. The space
we see simply doesn’t “add up,” creating an uncanny sense that Paul’s per-
spective is not divorced from reality, yet not entirely married to it either.
Having interpreted the narrative of Strange Illusion as Paul’s extended
daydream, while suggesting that Ulmer’s embracing of artifice demarcates
both the “strangeness” and the limit points of the fantasy, it seems reason-
able to ask at what point, if any, Paul’s fantasy begins. To answer this ques-
tion, I contend that we need only identify the moment at which Ulmer’s
style becomes noticeable as such. Following the opening dream sequence,
the film’s first stylistic flourish occurs just after Paul awakens at Vincent’s
cabin. The two have decided to go fishing and are casually dropping lines
into an idyllic pond—a nice opportunity for relaxation, and perhaps also for
Paul to daydream. In the midst of this placid scene, a mysterious figure ap-
proaches. The tone of the nondiegetic music is ominous, and a left-to-right
tracking shot follows the man as he draws closer. When the camera pushes
in to a shot of the boat on the pond, we are delivered a strong sense of the
mystery man’s perspective, and the conventions of horror film lead us to be-
lieve something is horribly wrong. Perhaps he has come to eavesdrop on the
men, or even kill them. Then, just as abruptly, all is well. “Hi there,” the man
calls out, waving. Vincent returns, “Hiya, Mac. What are you doing down
here, spying on us? You old fox!” The tone of the music changes to gleeful
conviviality, and the voyeuristic camera movement stops. Mac (Vic Potel),
the game warden, has come to deliver a letter to Paul, and the contents of
this letter can be understood as the first of a series of highly unlikely, yet
equally concrete (in a word, surreal) details that constitute Paul’s fantasy.
Paul scoops a fish out of the water (trusty metaphor for the unconscious),
and they proceed to shore.
168 Hugh S. Manon

The letter is from Paul’s father, who died two years prior under mysteri-
ous circumstances. Paul explains the unusual situation to Mac as follows:
“Dad left a series of letters with the office of his estate. I get one every few
months.” Such a scenario begs the question: why would an apparently healthy
man leave letters of advice for his son when he had no reason to expect his
demise was imminent? Is the unlikely letter real to begin with, or a figment of
Paul’s fantasy? The thrust of the letter involves an admonition to Paul, which
he reads aloud to Vincent:

It will be your responsibility as the man of the family to protect your mother and
Dorothy by being constantly vigilant of their associates. I have always guarded
your mother, who is so much younger than I, for in my experience I’ve had
ample opportunity to observe the cunning of unscrupulous impostors.

The words directly recall the shadowy figure in Paul’s opening dream, a tall
man in a fedora whose face we cannot see, but who both Paul’s mother and
his sister Dorothy (Jayne Hazard) mistake for Paul’s father. Vincent responds:
“Fits right in with your dream, doesn’t it? A curious coincidence.” Curious
indeed, as one would logically imagine Paul’s dream to have followed a letter
such as this, rather than anticipating it, and in such literal terms. Although one
might endlessly speculate about which events in the film are fantasy (and to
what degree) and which represent a more objective reality, there is no better
place to begin than Paul’s receipt of the letter. Is the judge’s admonition what
sparks Paul’s fantasy, or is it the first major element in the fantasy itself? Ei-
ther way, these are the terms in which Ulmer’s film begs to be examined.

HAVE YOU MET LYDIA?

In the parlance of psychoanalysis, the term “fantasy” does not designate

the imaginary realization of an unrealizable desire (e.g., having sex with a
supermodel, winning the lottery), but rather the staging of a scene in which
lack itself appears. In his book Looking Awry, Žižek explains the purpose of
fantasy:

Fantasy is usually conceived as a scenario that realizes the subject’s desire. This
elementary definition is quite adequate, on condition that we take it literally:
what the fantasy stages is not a scene in which our desire is fulfilled, fully satis-
fied, but on the contrary, a scene that realizes, stages, the desire as such. The
fundamental point of psychoanalysis is that desire is not something given in
advance, but something that has to be constructed—and it is precisely the role
of fantasy to give the coordinates of the subject’s desire, to specify its object, to
 Fantasy and Failure in Strange Illusion 169

locate the position the subject assumes in it. It is only through fantasy that the
subject is constituted as desiring: through fantasy we learn how to desire. (6)

If the film as we experience it is Paul’s fantasy, a crucial question remains: in

what specific way is he learning to desire? Or, more concretely, in the final
analysis what does Paul take to be the object that will satisfy him? Although
the film seems to suggest that his mother’s safety and happiness is Paul’s pri-
mary goal, this interpretation overlooks the deferral of romance between Paul
and the relatively minor character Lydia (Mary McLeod), who professes an
infatuation with Paul early in the film. Moreover, in the film’s closing image
it is Lydia and not Virginia who promenades into the future with Paul, and
this telos suggests that Paul’s fantasy has more than anything primed him to
desire the normative, heterosexual union that appears in the closing seconds
of so many classical Hollywood narratives.
Despite her paucity of screen time, the character of Lydia nonetheless
serves three major functions in the film. First, Lydia appears early on express-
ing an obvious romantic interest in Paul, only to be ignored when Paul notices
that his father’s portrait has been removed from its prominent location above
the downstairs fireplace and relegated to an upstairs study. In this instance,
she is a marker of Paul’s increasing obsession with his mother’s newfound
romance, and his possible mental disturbance. Second, Lydia appears in the
Cartwright’s swimming pool as an object of Curtis/Barrington’s visible lust.
The significance of this scene becomes clear only later, when Lydia reveals
to Paul that during that same afternoon at the pool, Curtis, unseen by any of
the other guests, “swam underwater, got a stranglehold on [her] and started
kissing [her].” Finally, as I have described above, Lydia appears in the film-
ending dream sequence, locking arms with Paul and walking off toward the
horizon and a hopeful future together.
Given this trajectory, I want to suggest that in the final analysis it is Paul’s
union with Lydia, and not solely his relationship with his mother, that the
film’s lengthy fantasy works to resolve. In other words, the entire procedure of
suspecting Curtis to be an evil mastermind, researching his background, volun-
tarily entering an insane asylum, and, finally, proving that Curtis is Barrington
and that he killed Paul’s father is a roundabout way for Paul to come to sexually
desire Lydia (and women in general) as “she who needs to be protected.” The
film is abundantly patriarchal on this count, and the fact that Lydia functions as
a kind of junior counterpart to Paul’s mother is precisely the point. Lydia needs
to be desired by the lecherous criminal other, and then protected from him, in
order to finally be desired by Paul. In other words, Paul does not need Lydia
to replace his (barred, inaccessible) mother, but rather needs for her to take up
a position analogous with Virginia’s—becoming a woman who, according to
170 Hugh S. Manon

the posthumous letter Paul receives (or fantasizes receiving) from his father,
needs to be guarded and protected with constant vigilance. When Curtis ar-
rives on the scene, the logic of Paul’s deduction is juvenile: a man has come to
replace my dead father, therefore he must have killed my father. In a decidedly
noir convolution, it is precisely the fact that everyone is so infatuated with the
benevolent Curtis that confirms his guilt in Paul’s eyes. Like every other failed
noir plot, Curtis/Barrington’s scheme is “perfect, too perfect,” and Paul’s theo-
retical question to Curtis about the possibility of committing a “perfect crime”
only underscores the paradox.9 Yet this sense of undetectable perfectionism is
precisely what makes for a perfect fantasy frame.
To be clear, then, Barrington is the primary object of Paul’s fantasy. Corre-
spondingly, more than any other person, object, or event in the film, it seems
reasonable to assert that Barrington does not, in any objective sense, exist.
Cunning to a fault, Barrington is nothing but a conduit for Paul’s desire for
Lydia, a catalyst that permits him to pair up with her in a socially acceptable
way. In Enjoy Your Symptom, Žižek agues that

Psychoanalysis sustains . . . the exact opposite of the usual, commonsense

opinion according to which fantasy figures are nothing but distorted, combined,
or otherwise concocted figures or their “real” models, of people of flesh and
blood that we’ve met in our experience. We can relate to these “people of flesh
and blood” only insofar as we are able to identify them with a certain place in
our symbolic fantasy space, or, to put it in a more pathetic way, only insofar as
they fill out a place preestablished in our dream—we fall in love with a woman
insofar as her features coincide with our fantasy figure of a Woman. (5–6)

By fantasizing, in appropriately juvenile, cartoonish terms, what he would

do if he were an expert criminologist like his father, Paul comes into his own
desire, fully assumes it, and can thus proceed into a heterosexual coupling
with Lydia. In a strong sense, Barrington’s behind-the-scenes admission early
in the film is exactly what Paul needs to hear: “The boy’s as persistent as his
father was.” Coming out of the mouth of the world’s greatest criminal, such
a compliment is as pure a schoolboy fantasy as we are likely to witness; yet
the comparison of Paul to his father as a man of Law is exactly what permits
Lydia to assume her position as protectable, and thus desirable. In many ways,
Paul’s is the quintessential mid-century heterosexual male fantasy.

CONCLUSION: DOING THE MATH

While Paul’s patriarchal quest for justice is precisely what sets the stage for
his coming to desire Lydia, her pursuit by Barrington serves a secondary
 Fantasy and Failure in Strange Illusion 171

function—one that allows Paul to reconcile another remarkable aspect of his

father’s desire, and assume it as his own. I am referring specifically to the
striking youthfulness of Paul’s mother Virginia, whom both of her children
refer to simply as “the Princess.” Although never mentioned in dialogue, the
numerical age of the film’s various characters is a matter of some concern,
since in a worst-case scenario their respective ages test the very limits of
biological possibility. Paul is an American law student, which makes him at
least twenty-one or twenty-two (actor Lydon’s real-life age in 1945), and his
looks and mannerisms suggest he could not possibly be older than twenty-
five. Also odd is the fact that Virginia is described as “so much younger”
than the judge. Assuming she is thirty-seven (the same age as Eilers), and
that Paul is neither adopted nor a child from a previous marriage (something
the film scrupulously avoids mentioning), Virginia would have been preg-
nant with him at around age fifteen.10 Our clues to Judge Cartwright’s age
are even more obscure, since he does not appear as a living character in the
film, and the only image presented of him is his looming oversized portrait
above the mantelpiece. Painted at least two years before the story begins, the
portrait of the judge makes him look around sixty, which suggests he was
forty or so when Paul was born. All of this is speculative, of course, and al-
though we can hypothesize endlessly about the unspecified ages of fictional
characters, such speculation does have its limits. There can be no question,
for instance, that in the person of Virginia, the judge married a (very) young
woman, almost certainly less than half his age. Yet is this not precisely the
aspect of Curtis’s character that Paul (and presumably the film’s viewer) find
both startling and loathsome: that he is an older man attracted to young girls?
Perhaps it is this mathematical problem of Paul’s own birth, including the
possibility of his conception in a lecherous affair, that the protagonist cannot
bear, and which his fantasy of Barrington seeks to reconcile.
An even more interesting arithmetical problem occurs, however, between
the film’s opening dream and its parallel at film’s end. In the opening
dream, the frame is divided by an ominous silhouette whom we later find
out to be Curtis/Barrington. In the closing dream, this figure has been van-
quished, and as the film fades to black we see two equally black silhouettes
proceeding toward the camera. Visually recalling the earlier scene, the film
again asks its viewer to “do the math”: one has been subtracted, and two
appear. In what sort of logic can we say this: one minus one equals two?
The answer is the logic of psychoanalysis itself, provided we understand
Curtis/Barrington in his role as barrier or blockage. Once the barrier is
recognized, dealt with, and thus removed from the (fantasy) scene, a couple
forms. Yet the couple cannot proceed as such without this blockage having
been surmounted. In other words, in order to commence coupling, Paul
172 Hugh S. Manon

needs to fully assume his desire, which is not at all to say his satisfaction.
Only through Paul’s encountering the blockage as a site of lack, and fanta-
sizing a way to deal with it, can Lydia occupy her position as “beyond-the-
problem”—in other words, as desirable. The act of subtraction becomes an
addition, or at least a kind of connection.
Whereas critics have tended to view the film’s optimistic, even saccharine
ending in Paul’s dream (“Look, Mother, we can see ahead!”) as out of sync
with the majority of the film’s conflict, such a reading overlooks the film’s ab-
solute final image. In the final shot, Vincent comes on screen to lead Virginia
away, and she is replaced at Paul’s side by Lydia. United at last, they proceed
forward; but instead of approaching a sunny horizon, their image gradually
darkens and goes black—a strangely uninverted parallel with Barrington’s
image in the film’s opening sequence (see figure 11.1). If Paul has indeed
learned to desire as his father desired, the inky blackness of Paul’s and Lydia’s
silhouettes must be read not as a final, conflict-ending resolution, but as a
pure repetition of the barrier that brought them together, an ongoing fantasy
which, as it unfolds through the years, will inevitably require more fantasies,
and more barriers.

Figure 11.1. One minus one equals two—the concluding frames of Strange Illusion
(1945).
 Fantasy and Failure in Strange Illusion 173

NOTES

1. The description appears in the film’s pressbook as part of a suggested tagline

for theatrical exhibitors: “Women dreamed of his kisses! But a boy’s dream revealed
him as the cruelest man in the world!”
2. The plot hatched by Barrington and Muhlbach is equivalent in audacity to the
outrageous scheme concocted by Vera (Ann Savage) in Ulmer’s Detour. Not only does
Vera insist that Al Roberts (Tom Neal) continue to maintain the identity of the dead
Charles Haskell Jr. (a lost heir who stands to inherit a fortune), but she also wants Al
to masquerade as Haskell in front of his own family. Like Vera, who is convinced that
the family will fail to notice that the false “Charles” does not look the same, or recall
any of the details of his own personal history, Barrington seems to think he can persist
in a loveless marriage, without ever being pressed on his own past history, and ulti-
mately murder his wealthy new spouse without so much as an eyebrow being raised.
3. Lynch’s Inland Empire (2006) is much the same in this regard. Moreover, all
the films I mention here owe a considerable debt to Maya Deren’s famous experimen-
tal short Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), wherein the series of images we receive is
framed with what seems to be a more objective perspective from “outside” the dream-
scape—a perspective which only comes at the end.
4. Although the connection is most obvious in the case of The Others—which
centers on a woman and two young children living in an isolated mansion—in terms
of structure, the literary progenitor of all the films I mention must be Henry James’s
The Turn of the Screw (1898). In James’s novella, we view the story’s events through
the eyes of a narrator whose truly pathological unreliability remains (arguably) uncon-
firmed until the very last sentence.
5. The phrase appears in the film’s pressbook under the heading “Sparkling Array
of Stars in PRC Drama.”
6. Even a film so unabashedly surreal as the Old Dark House parody Sh! The Oc-
topus (William C. McGann, 1937) in the end gives a nod to the viewer, revealing that
its incomprehensible plot has all been a dream. To omit such an acknowledgement, as
I believe Strange Illusion does, is to invite the very kind of cognitive confusion that
classical Hollywood cinema seeks to avoid.
7. The scale-model sequence of the train crash also appears at the midpoint of the
film, when Paul has a flashback to his earlier dream; however, no new footage has
been added. For my purposes here, the content of Paul’s abbreviated flashback does
not require further interpretation.
8. It is unclear throughout the film how Dr. Vincent is related to the Cartwright
family; we know only that his sister lives somewhere in town, near the Cartwright
estate. The film’s pressbook indicates that he is the “family physician” and “an old
family friend,” and although we can infer this from the film, the connection is never
explicitly stated. In many scenes he seems like a ghost himself, magically popping
into view whenever Paul needs to confide in a father figure. Vincent never suffers in
the film, and despite his active involvement in the pursuit of Barrington, he is never
in danger. Except for a couple of brief exchanges of dialogue with other characters, it
is as if he exists for Paul alone.
174 Hugh S. Manon

9. Numerous film noirs employ this same wry plot device, in which two charac-
ters publicly discuss the topic of “the perfect crime,” while the audience knows that
one of them is in the process of committing just such a crime. For examples of this
motif in films released around the same time as Strange Illusion, see Conflict (Cur-
tis Bernhardt, 1945), Fear (Alfred Zeisler, 1946), and The Stranger (Orson Welles,
1946). For a psychoanalytic reading of film noir’s revision of the myth of the perfect
crime, see Manon, 34–39.
10. The borderline impossibility of the various characters’ respective ages has its
parallel in the film’s dialogue. In a lavish dinner scene, Curtis/Barrington pokes fun
at Virginia’s skills at arithmetic, telling the gathered guests that “she subtracts by
counting backward on her fingers.” The result, he says, is her conclusion that “ten
minus five equals six.” Given her son’s age, perhaps Virginia is accustomed to such
“creative accounting.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Krutnik, Frank. In a Lonely Street: Film Noir, Genre, Masculinity (New York: Rout-
ledge, 1991).
Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink
(New York: Norton, 2006).
Manon, Hugh S. “Some Like It Cold: Fetishism in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity,”
Cinema Journal 44, no. 4 (Summer 2005): 18–43.
Naremore, James. More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1998).
Žižek, Slavoj. Enjoy Your Symptom: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (New York:
Routledge, 1992).
———. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992).
———. The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989).
 12
The Naked Filmmaker
Bill Krohn

During the ’30s and ’40s, Edgar G. Ulmer was not merely invisible, but
masked. The films he made during the fifteen years after he was blackballed
as a director for the majors were as personal as his one film for Universal, The
Black Cat; but like that film, which was made within the norms of Universal’s
horror productions, they expressed personal qualities within two distinc-
tive—and distinctively different—support systems: the ethnic communities
with which Ulmer identified himself during the last half of the ’30s, and the
B-movie studio where he spent most of the ’40s, Producers Releasing Corpo-
ration (PRC). One task of critics in recent years, because of the rediscovery of
the ethnic films, has been to try to reconcile these two faces of Ulmer.
But there are still two decades—the ’50s and the ’60s—which remain virtu-
ally unexplored. As usual, this has a lot to do with distribution; but the PRC
films remain relatively unseen outside specialized circles, too. The real obsta-
cle to appreciation of these films is that Ulmer’s first two decades have become
the property of people who are more interested in the mask than in the man.
This is obvious in the case of the Yiddish films, which have benefited from
restorations and screenings conducted by institutions passionate about Yiddish
cinema in general; but something similar has happened for a larger audience to
whom Ulmer means, above all, the PRC films. The centrality which cinephiles
in America and Europe alike accord to those films has at least as much to do
with the love of B films in general as it does with Ulmer.
But while there is no contradiction between the production constraints
Ulmer assumed and a high—even excessive—degree of self-consciousness
in the films that resulted, there are distinctions of quality to be drawn, and
in this respect I would say that the ’40s was a less creative period for him

175
176 Bill Krohn

than either the ’30s or the ’50s. After an astonishing start with Tomorrow
We Live, which was made independently and picked up by PRC, My Son The
Hero, Girls in Chains, Isle of Forgotten Sins, and Jive Junction have little to
recommend them beyond the fact that Ulmer made them. It was only after
achieving a certain amount of power within PRC that he was able to make
five masterpieces—Bluebeard, Strange Illusion, Detour, Club Havana and
Her Sister’s Secret—where the genres adopted are subverted as creatively as
Yiddish, Ukrainian, African American, and Navajo cultures are in the films
of the ethnic period.
By contrast, I count ten masterpieces in the ’30s and seven in the ’50s,
where the only films that fall below that level are two shorts—Genevieve
de Brabant and the pilot for Swiss Family Robinson—in which producer
interference and inexperienced actors sabotaged projects that are, even then,
considerably more interesting than, say, The Wife of Monte Cristo. If we add
Ruthless, Carnegie Hall, and Pirates of Capri, films Ulmer made while he
was breaking free of PRC (which had in any case ceased to exist as such), and
two late masterpieces, Beyond the Time Barrier and The Cavern, we have a
very high assay of gold to dross for the period when he was functioning as a
true independent, without the disguises that earned him, in the ’30s, the so-
briquet of “Director of the Minorities” and, in the ’40s, the title “King of the
Bs”—which afterward stuck to him like the coat of Nessus.
The aim of this chapter is to sketch the field to be explored, limited some-
what arbitrarily to the films released (with the exception of the pilot) in the
’50s. Much spadework still remains to be done, because Peter Bogdanovich’s
definitive Ulmer interview broke off for reasons of health, never to be re-
sumed, on the threshold of that decade. My sources, identified by letters
when cited in the text, are conversations with Shirley Ulmer (S) and Arianné
Ulmer Cipes (A); family letters archived at the Herrick Library; an unpub-
lished interview with Bertrand Tavernier by Michael Wilson (BT); critical
studies by Bret Wood (B) and Tag Gallagher (G); contemporary reviews by
François Truffaut (FT) and Jean Domarchi (D); and interviews by Tavernier
and Luc Moullet (T/M). The “Past Service Record” Ulmer wrote after he
stopped making films (U) supplies an unimpeachably accurate chronology
for this period.

THE MIRACLE OF ST. BENNY

Too many critics have assumed that the themes of Detour are all Ulmer
had up his sleeve—this survey will proceed from other assumptions. I still
remember seeing outraged fans of Ulmer, the master of film noir, storming
 The Naked Filmmaker 177

out of a screening of St. Benny the Dip (1951) at UCLA, despite the fact that
the look of the film is not that far from the New York scenes at the beginning
of Detour; while even its plot (three crooks trapped into running a skid-row
mission by the clerical collars they have put on as disguises) seems to express
the theme of entrapment by fate which that brilliant act of self-mythification
imposed on critics as the theme of Ulmer’s work, and life.
But if we look at how St. Benny was made, important differences begin
to appear. Actually filmed in New York, unlike Detour, St. Benny achieves
a miraculous fusion of sets and real locations. Ulmer had already filmed on
New York locations for Carnegie Hall, made a year before Jules Dassin and
Stanley Donen did the same thing, and New York at least was aware of him by
now—a caricature of him directing St. Benny on a crowded New York Street
was spread over two pages of the New York Times during production. He
had initially come back from Hollywood (U) to finish shooting So Young So
Bad (1949), a more ambitious version of Girls in Chains produced by Harry
and Eddie Danziger, two wealthy producers (not to be confused with Oscar
Dancigers, Bunuel’s Mexican producer) who were then just starting their own
career. It is unclear how Ulmer met the brothers, but after So Young they of-
fered him St. Benny, which he took because of a love for the stories of Damon
Runyan, which had been imperfectly consummated in My Son, the Hero.
The screenwriter of St. Benny was to become a lifelong friend to Ulmer.
Described by one reviewer as “the Theodore Dreiser of the detective novel”
and by Arianné Ulmer as “a typical Jewish socialist,” John Roeburt was a
denizen of Greenwich Village who wrote hard-boiled detective stories. His
script for St. Benny, written under Ulmer’s supervision, is a mixture of humor
and drama as seamless as Ulmer’s blending of New York streets with forced-
perspective sets (a specialty from his days as a production designer) that
open pockets of dream and reminiscence in a Runyonesque tale of scoundrels
redeemed by charity. Lionel Stander, making his last film before the blacklist,
was handed some of the best lines, but the most beautiful is spoken by an
anonymous hobo who leaves a suitcase full of money at the mission before
committing suicide: “I’ve been a shadow on the Earth.”
Much of St. Benny takes place at night, which makes possible the alchemy
by which Ulmer fuses reality, soundstage, and dream; but the result has noth-
ing to do with film noir and everything to do with the magical realism of two
F. W. Murnau films he worked on, Sunrise and Tabu. The film’s night mood
also grew out of John Roeburt’s reported habit of wandering the city streets
at night (A), like the bishop and his assistant Wilbur, who go wandering every
night in hopes of finding the three fugitives—three men in a city of six mil-
lion, Wilbur complains, only to be told that before he can find the three, he
has to first find himself. “Four men to find in a city of six million,” says the
178 Bill Krohn

bishop, whose air of perpetual distraction makes him one of the most believ-
able Christian mystics ever put on screen. “That improves the odds consider-
ably, doesn’t it, Wilbur?”
“Just my lousy luck. Of all the cars that came along, I had to get in that
one,” whines Roberts in Detour—St. Benny the Dip turns that point of view,
which is not the filmmaker’s (G), inside out. Ulmer had always been fasci-
nated by Roman Catholicism, but was kept from expressing his interest by
the prejudices of Shirley’s Jewish parents (A). The story of a pickpocket’s
redemption, St. Benny the Dip stands midway between Robert Bresson’s
Pickpocket and the streetwise sentiment of Pickup on South Street. When
I commented to Shirley that the scene where Stander comes home to the
wife he had abandoned showed an extraordinary feeling for the lives of poor
people, she commented that Ulmer could do that “because he had been so
poor himself.”

THE MAN FROM PLANET MURNAU

The film Ulmer spent the rest of 1950 making, The Man from Planet X
(1951), introduces us to three Hollywood professionals who worked with him
throughout the decade: Aubrey Wisberg and Jack Pollexfen, two independent
producers, and Ilse Lahn. Lahn was Ulmer’s former (Viennese) girlfriend,
Arianné’s godmother, and an agent at the Paul Kohner Agency, which repre-
sented émigré filmmakers (e.g., Wilder, Wyler) and blacklisted writers during
the ’50s. She was Ulmer’s agent after he went freelance and the line producer
of Murder Is My Beat (written by Wisberg) and The Daughter of Dr. Jekyll
(written and produced by Wisberg and Pollexfen, who performed the same
functions on Planet X). She introduced these two “Hollywood characters”
(S) to Ulmer, who persuaded them to push back their start date to give him
time to prepare the picture properly, doing substantial rewrites on the script
before starting the six-day shoot; painting the glass painting of the rugged
tower where much of the action was set; and supervising postproduction (U).
The scenes inside the scientist’s castle were filmed on sets left over from the
Hal Roach Company’s Joan of Arc, obtained with the help of Mrs. Samuel
Goldwyn, a regular Ulmer supporter (A). Although it started production after
Howard Hawks’s The Thing, Ulmer’s Planet X was the first of the wave of
’50s science-fiction films to make it into theaters. Made for $41,000, accord-
ing to the autobiography of its star Robert Clarke, it was picked up by United
Artists and grossed $1.2 million.
Like The Black Cat, The Man from Planet X is haunted by memories of
Ulmer’s Expressionist past, in particular Murnau’s Nosferatu, a film that he
 The Naked Filmmaker 179

told Cinefantastique he only saw after it was finished. The most obvious allu-
sion is the glass painting of the castle’s tower, which according to Clarke was
the first thing that greeted him and his costar Margaret Field (the mother of
Sally Field) when they went to Ulmer’s house before the start of production.
When Clarke looks up at the tower in the film, we see a second tower sprout-
ing asymmetrically from its top—the observatory of Dr. Elliot, the father of
Field’s character. The shot recalls the hero’s first glimpse of Count Orlock’s
castle in Nosferatu, which also has an asymmetrical, hornlike appendage
sprouting from its top.
To heighten the impact of their spaceman, the producers did not credit the
actor playing him, creating a mystery that has only recently been solved: it
was a small actor named Pat Goldin (A), who spent most of his time com-
plaining, according to Clarke. Did Ulmer suggest this strategy? He certainly
knew of the mystery surrounding Max Schreck, the actor who is designated
in the credits of Nosferatu as having played Count Orlock—in fact, he deep-
ened it when he told Cinefantastique that he had heard that the character was
really played by Hans Ramo, a screenwriter even more obscure than Schreck.
The resemblances and differences between the mask worn by Goldin, which
Ulmer designed, and the makeup of the actor in Murnau’s film are particularly
interesting. It is as if Ulmer had squashed Orlock’s face to produce a smooth,
rounded surface like an African ceremonial mask, turning the huge eyes to
slits while retaining the pointed protuberances of ears, nose, and chin, made
less prominent by the enlargement of the head. A light inside the spaceman’s
helmet gives him his own portable Expressionist lighting effects, which con-
tribute greatly to the mask’s eeriness.
Field, the first to see the visitor, says, “It was as if the face had been dis-
torted by pressure.” Later, when Clarke sees the extraterrestrial ship with its
lights flashing on and off through the fog, he notes that it looks like “a giant
diving bell,” to which Dr. Elliot replies that the difference between “space”
and water is just a matter of density. To ensure that we get the point, his next
line is a complaint about the “everlasting fog that passes for climate” on the
remote Scottish island where he has set up shop to observe the imminent
approach of Planet X near to Earth. The fog blankets every exterior scene,
like the omnipresent night in St. Benny, masking the poverty of the sets and
creating a dreamlike ambience which suggests that our planet, for the inhabit-
ants of Planet X, is like the bottom of the sea. (Nu Gel, the substance used to
produce the fog, made everyone on the film sick.)
When Ulmer told Cinefantastique that he had inverted “un lieu commun”
in Planet X, he was talking not about the conventions of ’50s science fiction,
which this film predates, but about the conventions of the horror film going
back to Nosferatu. His reversal of the meanings of Nosferatu affects single
180 Bill Krohn

images (the ship plowing through the fog, which in this case brings salvation)
as well as the plot, which appears at first to be completely conventional: like
Karloff in The Black Cat, the alien in Planet X is one of Ulmer’s variations
on the basic Murnau plot, in which a sinister figure (Count Orlock, Tartuffe,
the father in City Girl, the priest in Tabu) threatens a happy couple’s union.
This aspect of the plot is underlined by the film’s opening, which takes place
just before the climax, as Clarke’s voice-over broods over the fact that “it’s
been 48 hours since they took her.” When the flashback recounting events up
to this point is over, he finds Field a hypnotized prisoner inside the space-
ship—to what end we are never told. Even the alien’s hypnotic powers are a
technological version of Count Orlock’s: a beam of light emitted from the top
of the ship that enslaves the will.
But despite appearances, the alien is benign. Suspicious of humans at first,
he changes when Clarke saves his life, putting away his weapon and spreading
his hands to show that he is unarmed. After that he follows his benefactors
home like a lost puppy, only to be tortured by Elliot’s disreputable assistant,
Mears, who plans to use whatever scientific knowledge he can extract from
him to become rich and powerful. Only then does the alien kidnap the heroine
and enslave men from the nearby village to build an earthen rampart around
his ship as protection, while waiting for his dying planet to come close
enough for his people to escape, following a directional beam from his ship,
to a world where they can survive. Mistrustful police and soldiers destroy him
and his ship, condemning to death by freezing the other inhabitants of Planet
X, which is glimpsed in a stunning sequence as it approaches the Earth and
recedes: “A being arrives from a faraway plant . . . looking for a new world
where he can live,” Ulmer told Cinefantastique. “Sent as a scout and coming
as a friend, this being immediately finds himself confronted by the persecu-
tions of a scientist from our planet.”
“Scientist” refers to Mears, who is the equivalent of Renfield, the real-
estate agent in Nosferatu (“The real estate agent Renfield was a strange
man, and unpleasant rumors circulated about him.”). Mears’s past trans-
gressions—“He should’ve gotten twenty years,” says Clarke—are also only
alluded to: all we know is that he “upsets” Field, who wants him out of the
castle. In keeping with Ulmer’s systematic inversions of Nosferatu, Mears is
the alien’s tormenter, not his slave—his misdeeds put the visitor on the de-
fensive, provoking humanity to destroy him, and with him the possibility of
knowledge that “might have been mankind’s greatest blessing,” as Clarke says
at the end. “Or its greatest curse,” he adds, exemplifying the confused vision
of all the human characters. Immersed in fog that is as dense as the sea to the
“scout” who visits them (the fog of the material world, for those who insist on
a Gnostic reading), they can only see his features distorted by the weight of
 The Naked Filmmaker 181

an oppressive atmosphere that “passes for a climate,” which keeps them from
recognizing the face of their savior.

KING OF THE As

The other pole of Ulmer’s career in the ’50s was Europe. As Arianné ex-
plains, when he returned there to make Pirates of Capri Ulmer suddenly
found himself working with “A” talent again, so throughout the decade he
kept going back, struggling to get projects off the ground in Germany, Italy,
France, and Spain. The first after Planet X was supposed to be The Queen’s
Mark, a costume picture for the Danzigers. Lured to Spain with that promise,
he found himself instead making Babes in Bagdad (1952), a comedy about
a revolt in a harem starring stripper Gypsy Rose Lee and Paulette Goddard.
He took the project on because he was again promised The Queen’s Mark as
his next; similar promises enticed him to produce the mysterious German
film The Perjurer in 1956 and to take over directing L’Atlantide from Frank
Borzage. Ulmer spent over a year making Babes at a studio in Barcelona,
also directing a Spanish version, Muchachas en Bagdad, that was nineteen
minutes longer. The only extant prints are a black-and-white 16 mm print of
the English-language version struck for TV, and a restoration of the Spanish
version in 35 mm, with some reels in color and some in black and white. I
hope someone unearths the French version someday (Les mille et une filles
de Bagdad), which may have been what Truffaut saw and described apprecia-
tively as “Voltairean high comedy.”
Ulmer wrote to Arianné while preparing Babes that he was calling in
“Cousin Roeburt,” who had worked such wonders with St. Benny, to rewrite
the dialogue, citing as a model the gangsters who find themselves playing sup-
porting roles in a Shakespeare play in Kiss Meet Kate (L). Only one character
in Babes, the villain’s henchman, actually speaks with a Brooklyn accent—he
becomes almost touching when he is ordered to kill everyone after the rob-
bery of a trading caravan, including his own men. Reassured when he learns
that “everyone” doesn’t include him, he says humbly, “Thanks chief—for a
minute I thought I was done for, too.” This kind of inspired nonsense buoys
a tale which Truffaut called “Voltairean” because of its theme (harem wives
liberating themselves from their tyrant husband by outwitting him using the
arts of illusion, deployed by a magician named Omar—Ulmer?), and because
of a climactic episode in which the tyrant is transformed into a beggar whom
no one recognizes, until he begins to believe his new identity himself—an
enchanting episode which particularly impressed Tavernier. Ulmer illustrates
the theme of illusion with shadows and reflections in water while the various
182 Bill Krohn

tricks are being played, and the ballet of the man-fish trapped in the great
net sums up the feminist plot, with the net remaining in place throughout the
last sequence so that the humbled tyrant’s renunciation of his harem can be
filmed through it.
For his first color film, Ulmer designed sets using a limited palette to make
the most of the limitations of two-strip Cinefotocolor technology. (He is cred-
ited as the film’s production designer.) Contrasted gradations of dark red and
aquamarine, as well as black and white, paint a “Bagdad” where visual motifs
from the entire Middle East cohabit deliriously. One has to conclude from his
remarks in an interview done while filming L’Atlantide (T/M) that, like Orson
Welles and Allan Dwan, Ulmer still preferred black and white, but adjusted
by doing more long takes when obliged to work in color:

In a black-and-white film on a normal screen, you have to tell the story with
many short shots. The dialogue doesn’t matter. What matters above all is the
image. . . . That fragmentation is not only a practical advantage, but above all an
artistic one. You can give a visual rhythm to the film, as you cannot do with the
“ten-minute take.” A long take remains theatre, even when the camera moves.

Studying the impressive formalism of Muchachas helps us put in perspec-

tive the broken rhythms of Ulmer’s next color experiment, Geneviève de
Brabant, which he shot but didn’t edit. The episode is part of a three-episode
film (intended for theaters, but also as a pilot for a TV series, according to
Arianné) produced by Victor Pahlen and starring Hedy Lamarr as an actress
in a traveling theater troupe who plays, on successive nights, Geneviève, the
Empress Josephine, and Helen of Troy. Loves of Three Queens is the only
film Ulmer ever walked off of, after endless problems with Lamarr, when
her rich husband bought the production from Pahlen and the director found
himself working for his impossible star (A). The film, on which Ulmer re-
ceived an “associate director” credit, was finished by Marc Allegret. Ulmer’s
fragment about a peasant-turned-queen condemned to death by her husband
after being falsely accused of adultery by a man who desires her himself
has been rightly praised for its medieval simplicity (G). My regrets about it
are twofold.
On the one hand, despite the fact that Ulmer, true to his theory of color
filmmaking, had frequently substituted camera movement in and out of
long masters for editing, the editor stuck with the job of putting the pieces
together botched it. On the other hand, knowing that Ulmer had a large hand
in all phases of preproduction on the remaining episodes, I deeply regret
that he only filmed this one, which has a distracting campy subtext because
of Lamarr’s sexual notoriety on and off the screen. She is more interesting
 The Naked Filmmaker 183

as Josephine and Helen, in episodes that redeem historical “bad girls” by

invented backstories. Jospehine, it turns out, cuckolded Napoleon because he
loved History more than he loved her. He divorces her to marry Marie Louise
of Austria and produce an heir, leaving her devastated at the end of her epi-
sode, like Helen at the end of hers. In Helen of Troy Menelaus, wanting war
with Troy for economic reasons, asks his wife Helen to seduce Paris while he
rallies his allies, then uses her elopement with the man she has come to love
as a pretext for the war. When the besotted Menelaus takes her back after the
death of Paris, her last words—“I pray that no woman will ever be as desolate
as I”—throw an ironic light on the happy ending of Geneviève de Brabant,
when the husband who condemned Geneviève to death takes her back after
realizing his error.
These martyred women, sisters of the enslaved women in Babes, pave the
way for those in Ulmer’s other ’50s films. Loves of Three Queens (aka Eternal
Femina) would also have added to this theme a more serious play with the
idea of illusion than what we have in Babes: Because of lack of coverage, the
editor was obliged to preserve Ulmer’s editing plan, which shows us close-ups
of the saintly heroine only as she is seen through the eyes of the people (the
audience, whom we also see watching at the beginning of the theater perfor-
mance) and the eyes of four men—her maligned and murdered male friend,
her husband, her executioner, and the accuser Golo, who sees her face one
last time in a vision when he looks into a pool before dying. Geneviève is an
image—her curse, like Helen’s, is her beauty, and how it is reflected in the
eyes of her admirers. And all three women are played by a rather promiscu-
ous actress who refuses at the end of the film to be bought by a wealthy man
because she prefers the freedom of life on the stage—a feminist version of the
ending of The Golden Coach, made the previous year.

ANNUS MIRABILIS

The time lost with Pahlen and Lamarr was soon to be redeemed. On 14 Feb-
ruary 1954, Ulmer wrote to Arianné, now studying at the Royal Academy of
Dramatic Art in London, that he was scouting locations in preparation for two
films: The Bandit, which would start shooting on 15 March, and The Long
Chance, which would start almost immediately after, on 22 April (L). The
first film was brought to him by one of his European connections, producer
Gaston Hakim, but was sold to an American producer and released as a pickup
by Universal in 1955, retitled The Naked Dawn, because Hakim had run out of
money (A). The second film, produced by Lahn and written by Wisberg, was
called Murder Is My Beat when Allied Artists released it the same year.
184 Bill Krohn

Another way that Ulmer found access to “A” collaborators in the ’50s was
through the blacklist, because of his connection with the Kohner Agency.
He told Bogdanovich that Alvah Bessie wrote Ruthless; and, thanks to the
researches of Tavernier, we know that Julian Zimet wrote The Naked Dawn
and Dalton Trumbo The Cavern (BT). From the scattered references to Zimet
in Hollywood Exile—a blacklist memoir by his friend Bernard Gordon—we
can infer that he lived in Mexico while writing his novel The Young Lovers,
and The Bandit probably belongs to the same period. Ulmer never met Zimet
and, according to two sources (BT, A), he filmed his script without changing
a word—a claim which, if true, is understandable: it is a wonderful script.
Zimet’s source, he told Tavernier, was “Chelkash” (1894), one of Maksim
Gorky’s early stories about tramps. Although contemporary detractors of
Gorky saw the story as glorifying the romantic tramp and bandit Chelkash in
contrast to Gavrilla, the greedy peasant he hires to help him pull off a rob-
bery, English critic Andrew Barratt argues convincingly in The Early Fiction
of Maksim Gorky that Chelkash is a destructive nihilist of the kind Gorky
describes in a famous letter to P. Kh. Maksimov (December 1910):
I love people who are active and vigorous, who value and adorn life, even if only
a little, by a small something, if only by the dream of a better life. In general,
the Russian tramp is a character more terrible than I succeeded in saying; this
man is terrible first and foremost in his implacable despair and in the fact that
he negates himself, expels himself from life.

Zimet’s script, in which Chelkash becomes the bandit Santiago (Arthur Ken-
nedy) and Gavrilla the Native American peasant Manuel (Eugene Iglesias),
keeps some of the perverse master-slave relationship that the seemingly ami-
able Chelkash imposes on Gavrilla, as well as Gavrilla’s blind struggles to
assert his own dignity in response. Moments like Santiago’s contemptuous
gift of the stolen money, followed by Manuel’s promise to “pray for him every
day,” are taken from Gorky’s tale, as are the moments when Santiago’s envy
of Manuel shows through.
But Zimet introduces a third character not found in his source, Manuel’s
wife Maria (Betta St. John), who has been sold to Manuel by the patron to be
treated like a farm animal, making her a poor cousin of the Babes in Bagdad
and of Helen of Troy, who was sold as a slave to Menelaus. Maria attracts
Santiago until he befriends Manuel, and after the robbery and Manuel’s first
attempt on Santiago’s life, she begs the bandit to take her away with him. He
resists until Manuel, ashamed after Santiago saves his life, confesses that he
planned to kill him. As in the short story, this sudden expression of Manuel’s
buried goodness provokes Santiago’s rage, and he decides to leave with Ma-
ria. “If Santiago rejects him, it is because he has the brusque revelation of a
 The Naked Filmmaker 185

cowardly, greedy soul at the very moment when it is another Manuel who is
speaking to him.” (D). Jean Domarchi was closer than he knew to the truth
when he compared The Naked Dawn’s “sudden changes of heart” to Dos-
toevsky—Gorky’s story is more reminiscent of Dostoevsky than of Marx.
Zimet’s Santiago has seen two revolutions fail, and when he sends a trans-
formed Manuel and Maria off to pursue a third way that will be better than
his own nihilism and Manuel’s peasant greed, we can only imagine what that
would be. Ulmer told the Cahiers du cinéma that he endorsed the ending im-
posed by Universal in part because he “fell in love” with Eugene Iglesias:
Manuel is the real hero. Of course, Kennedy tries to revolt to preserve his moral
integrity, but his revolt comes from an egocentric vision of the world, and he
uses the money he steals only for his own pleasure, not to change a world living
under oppression. Manuel, however, will discover true happiness, and do more
good in the world than the bandit.

Only an examination of production records will show how this ending—more

hopeful than Gorky’s and probably Zimet’s—actually came about; but even
without knowing where Zimet’s script came from, Ulmer understood it at
least as well as Zimet understood Gorky, so that many of the best things in
the film seem to come from the Russian source. Santiago’s love for Maria,
for example, is an equivalent for the one redeeming trait Gorky allows his
bandit, his love of nature as embodied by the sea. When we first see her fetch-
ing water from the river (a necessity until Manuel finds water in the dusty
hole he is digging), and later when we admire her bare legs as the water of
her bath runs down them (standing next to a chicken), she embodies the pos-
sibility of a reconciliation between alienated Man and Nature—which first
appears in Ulmer’s work in Green Fields and only resurfaces in Geneviève de
Brabant, achieving here its apotheosis through the linked symbols of Woman
and Water. But Murnau’s “nosferatus” also recognize that beauty and yearn to
possess it, and Santiago finally turns out to be one of them.
Another subject for further research is the question of how, and in spite
of what interference, the stunning formal qualities of The Naked Dawn were
achieved. Arianné remembers, for example, that Universal insisted on cutting
close-ups into the first dance sequence in the cantina, which appears to have
been shot as two linked long takes, and the appreciative close-ups of Santiago
and Manuel do feel false; but the real tour de force in the cantina illustrates
Ulmer’s remarks about the “artistic advantages” of montage: at the moment
Santiago extends an invitation to the dancer (the fabulous Charalita), the
lighting changes (rose and yellow fill lights appear out of nowhere), and a
sexual and musical rhythm is created out of brief shots built around images
of female and male legs—a visual theme that begins with the legs of the ban-
186 Bill Krohn

dits and their horses seen under the railroad car during the credit sequence,
and climaxes with the Bunuelian eroticism of water streaming down Maria’s
naked legs standing next to the chicken.
The film’s most moving scene also appears to be composed of two long
takes, this time linked by a brief series of shot-reverse shots: Santiago seduces
Maria with his tales of Vera Cruz (plan-sequence 1), then reacts with horror
when she asks him to take her with him (shot-reverse shots), telling her that
his life is anything but romantic and Vera Cruz, a plague sore (plan-sequence
2). Again, although Tavernier remembers the sudden reversal as happening in
one uninterrupted shot, the shot-reverse shots, the rhythm imposed when the
camera pans to exclude Santiago or Maria from the frame, and the cutaways
to the one and the other reclining in the off-space show that Ulmer has not
forgotten the lesson of Murnau: “To say the opposite of what one shot says,
you need another shot that completes and reverses what the other one began.”
(Ranciere 45). Except that in this scene, thanks to spoken words, music, and
colors that seem cosubstantial with Kennedy’s and St. John’s astonishing per-
formances, the pupil has surpassed the master.

BEYOND DETOUR

The Naked Dawn is the apogee in Ulmer’s work of a certain classicism; in

Murder Is My Beat, made almost simultaneously, he has already become a
modern filmmaker. Wisberg’s script returned Ulmer to film noir, with much
less money than he had to spend on Detour, but the two films couldn’t be
more different. Detour is a flashy, ironic, and rather heartless German avant-
garde film of the ’20s or ’30s; but in Murder Is My Beat, Ulmer invests a
whole array of illusion-busting devices with contemporary meaning, to cre-
ate a stripped-down version of cinematic modernism with a beating heart at
its center.
The film portrays the gradual disintegration of a cop (Paul Langton) as-
sailed by doubts about a case he thought he had solved, then about his own
ability ever to solve it. Even though hero and heroine are redeemed by the
ending, Murder Is My Beat is as harrowing as Vertigo in its portrayal of
l’amour fou (the cop has fallen for a woman, played by Barbara Payton, whom
he helped convict of murder), and in its treatment of the theme of illusion that
we first saw in Babes in Bagdad, whose humbled tyrant also goes from not
knowing who the woman sitting in front of him is to not knowing who he is.
When certainty about the woman named Eden, which was the anchor for Ray
the cop’s sense of identity, blows up in his face, all certainties dissolve. (The
film was based on a story called “Dynamite Anchorage.”)
 The Naked Filmmaker 187

Ulmer was excited about the technical possibilities of the new, sensitive
black-and-white Pan X film stock and the small, portable lights he used for
the first time on Murder, but he did not exploit them to achieve location real-
ism. Rather, the new techniques freed him to build sets that could be filmed
from all angles (A), enabling him, for instance, to include ceilings in the
scenes where Ray is talking to his boss—symbolizing the Law whose ser-
vants they are. Certainly the new stock made possible the beautiful series of
shots of Ray wading through a snowstorm to capture Eden. In this paroxystic
sequence, Ray’s face becomes a tiny black circle, and his trench coat trans-
forms him into a duplicate of the white-skirted, black-faced figurine that was
the murder weapon—the first of many duplicates that will proliferate as the
mystery deepens. The effect is the opposite of realistic, as Ulmer emphasizes
by adding animated snowflakes when Ray draws near his goal.
Rather than using his new flexibility to shoot on location, Ulmer filmed
all the exterior scenes in the small town where Ray goes to solve the murder
against glaringly obvious back projections, within which we can read the
names of many nationally known consumer products: emblems of a society
built on illusion, whose leading citizen is a philanderer and a murderer. Ul-
mer even undercuts the reality of the only genuine exterior in this part of the
film, the motel where Ray’s boss Bert finds him in the opening sequence. In
a seedy long shot of a nondescript bungalow, Bert peeks in the window at
his quarry; but this window has curtains on it, while the window Ulmer cuts
to when he moves in for an over-the-shoulder shot is uncurtained. Through
that second window, filmed on a soundstage, we see Ray lying pensively
in bed, before Ulmer cuts again to take us inside for a close-up view of his
worried expression.
This first series of ruptures in the fabric of reality sets up a formal and
thematic opposition: an external world composed of back projections, stock
shots, and depersonalizing long shots set against the intimacy of the interiors
where all the scenes between Eden and Ray take place. When they spend their
first night together, Ulmer cuts away twice to show the cabin snowbound in
darkness, reinforcing the growing intimacy between the cop and the fugitive
after the electricity goes out and Ray lights candles, noting that the clock on
the mantelpiece has stopped, too. Their voices grow hushed and keep breaking
off, letting us hear the wind outside before they resume the endless coq à l’âne
(she doesn’t know that the man she struck is dead) by which two strangers are
coming to know each other, and falling in love without acknowledging it.
In the scene on the train when Ray is taking Eden to prison, after she has
seen the man she is supposed to have killed on the train platform, Ulmer
keeps cutting to the roaring train wheels to show the external world racing
inexorably to a grim conclusion, while Eden pleads softly with Ray to believe
188 Bill Krohn

her. “When a man begins to doubt that what he represents as right must be
right,” Ray’s voice tells us, “he’s beginning to come apart at the seams.” After
a few days as fugitives, they will both start to doubt that what she saw (an-
other rear projection) was real, leaving them with nothing to trust but their
feelings, which they finally give in to in a joyless motel room like the one
in Detour: when they kiss for the first time, the score (superb as always in
Ulmer’s films) stops, as if any scrap of the illusory garment cinema spins for
reality (majestically deployed in the “Vera Cruz” scene in The Naked Dawn)
would distort the truth of a passion Ray has felt ever since he opened the door
of the cabin and saw Eden inside.

BEYOND THE FIFTIES

Ulmer made two films in 1956. The first, which he produced, was his first
German film since People on Sunday, The Perjurer, about which I have been
able to discover nothing except that Ulmer had his first heart attack and Ari-
anné was arrested as a spy during the location scout (A). Then Lahn called
him back to Hollywood for the last of his collaborations with Wisberg and
Pollexfen, The Daughter of Dr. Jekyll. The most influential words ever writ-
ten about Ulmer, in Andrew Sarris’s indelible 1968 manifesto The American
Cinema, were about this film:

Anyone who loves cinema must be moved by Daughter of Dr. Jekyll, a film with
a scenario so atrocious that it takes forty minutes to establish that the daughter
of Dr. Jekyll is indeed the daughter of Dr. Jekyll. Ulmer’s camera never falters
even when his characters disintegrate.

I think we can assume Ulmer was aware that the title was a giveaway. Clearly
we know what the big surprise is going to be from the moment “Janet Smith”
(Gloria Talbot) arrives with her fiancé George Hastings (John Agar) at the
mansion of her guardian, Dr. Lomas (Arthur Shields)—so much so that
Ulmer can skip the scene when Dr. Lomas gives Janet the bad news and cut
directly to her announcing to a stunned George that she can’t marry him.
Everything is known in advance in The Daughter of Dr. Jekyll—as in ancient
tragedies and some examples of present-day theater influenced by the theories
of Brecht—including the fact that kindly Dr. Lomas, not Janet, is the were-
wolf that is killing off the locals.
First of all, we see Lomas’s distinctive silhouette in a precredit shot of
“Hyde,” and when he turns to address the camera, the makeup is skimpy
enough that Shields would be recognizable to a six-year-old as the monster
when he appears later, spouting good-hearted Irish blather to cover his equally
 The Naked Filmmaker 189

obvious intentions. In addition, the scenes of “Janet Hyde’s” nighttime mur-

ders are superimposed over the face of Janet lying in bed and dreaming. Even
as we share her vision of herself as a bloody-clawed, white-robed wraith stalk-
ing innocents in the forest, we see that she is watching the action—dreaming
it—at the same time we are.
The sense that everything is known undergirds a visual style that again
uses sensitive stock and portable lights for purposes alien to the canons of
cinematic realism. With the exception of shots of a miniature mansion and
Janet’s nightmare visions, the film takes place in a real L.A. house, paving
the way for the implausibilities that Bret Wood catalogs disapprovingly in a
recent study:
Staging the narrative in bright, spacious sets . . . Ulmer allows Daughter to
flounder, with no effort made to conceal such anachronistic details as cheap
casters at the base of Jekyll’s sliding bookcase, lamps and fire-places with
electric bulbs inside, and the sight of cars passing on a busy highway beyond
the sets.

Ulmer’s “baring of the device” in Daughter distracts Wood from a stylistic

choice that he appreciates in Strange Illusion, where the bright daylight world
of Paul’s home and environs is the lie, and the dark nightmare world of his
dreams is the truth (B). Ulmer used ultraviolet film to shoot Janet’s eerie
night visions—one of which reproduces a lakeside idyll from Murnau—with
a night look that could never have been achieved with filters.
There are moments like this in the ethnic films, but in The Daughter of
Dr. Jekyll the mythos of Murnau emerges intact and undisguised from the
series of revisions which repressed it in the ’50s. In The Man from Planet X
the nosferatu appears evil, but turns out to be benign; in The Naked Dawn the
nosferatu is charming and lovable, but turns out to be evil; and in The Daugh-
ter of Dr. Jekyll the nosferatu’s feigned goodness is a mask for evil that fools
no one but the characters. In all three films the happy couple survives his
depredations, but only The Daughter of Dr. Jekyll allows the audience to see,
with no concealment or deferral (every detail of those brightly lit rooms—in-
cluding the lights—is sharply reproduced by deep-focus photography), the
smiling face of lust and greed at work.
Ulmer would revisit the Murnau mythos once more in the ’50s, with an
original variation of his own—a maternal nosferatu, inspired no doubt by his
own mother—in The Naked Venus, a nudie produced by Gustav Hakim and
filmed in four days on sets and California locations. I have nothing to add
to Tag Gallagher’s appreciation of this powerful film except to point out that
it contains the first example of a film-within-the-film in Ulmer’s work since
Diagnostic Procedures: a voyeuristic collection of scenes in a nudist camp,
190 Bill Krohn

filmed by two unsavory private investigators for use as a lying document

during a divorce trial. Gallagher is right to ignore the fact that the heroine
is finally reunited with her feckless husband. Like Geneviève de Brabant’s
reunion with the husband who condemned her to death, this happy ending is
one more film illusion by which Ulmer, and the alert spectator, can no longer
be duped.
If there is a period in Ulmer’s work that is truly bleak, it is the last one,
in which his innate Gnosticism comes to the fore, producing as final state-
ments versions of the two Gnostic myths transmitted to later ages by Plato:
the “Myth of Atlantis” from the Timaeus and the “Myth of the Cave” from
The Republic. But the groundwork for these terrible last works was laid in
the ’50s.
Before The Naked Venus, Ulmer made a thirty-minute pilot for a televi-
sion series based on The Swiss Family Robinson (1958), which never sold.
The wooden performances of the children in this short film sank it despite
the efforts of their dialogue coach, Arianné (A); but Ulmer used his luxuri-
ant Mexican locations to sketch the idea of Nature as a beautiful prison, an
idea that would receive its definitive expression in The Cavern (1965). In
fact, Ulmer first prepared The Cavern in 1957, and put more of that prepara-
tion than anyone probably realized at the time into this fascinating television
oddity—just as he made L’Atlantide (1961) first as Beyond the Time Barrier
(released in 1960, filmed in 1959), a science-fiction film about a postnuclear
underground society where the idea of The Daughter of Dr. Jekyll is taken to
its logical conclusion: since the tragedy has already happened, no catharsis,
no feeling, is possible for the characters.
But no one who loves cinema can fail to be moved by The Daughter of Dr.
Jekyll, which I love more every time I watch it. Detour will always be the dar-
ling of critics, as The Naked Dawn is of cinephiles, but it is The Daughter of
Dr. Jekyll whose influence on Ulmer’s filmmaking descendants, like Andrew
Repasky MacElhinney (A Chronicle of Corpses), promises to endure into the
new century.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Domarchi, Jean. “Un nouveau romatisme,” Cahiers du cinéma 58 (April 1956).

Edgar G. Ulmer Collection, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture
Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, Calif.
Eisenschitz, Bernard, and Jean-Claude Romer. “Entretien avec Edgar G. Ulmer,”
Midi-Minuit Fantastique 13 (November 1965): 1–14.
Gallagher, Tag. “All Lost in Wonder,” Senses of Cinema, at www.latrobe.edu.au/
screeningthepast/firstrelease/fr0301/tgafr12a.htm.
 The Naked Filmmaker 191

Krohn, Bill. “The Naked Dawn: Production, Sources, and Mise-en-Scène,” in Edgar
G. Ulmer: Essays on the King of the Bs, ed. Bernd Herzogenrath (Jefferson, N.C.:
McFarland, 2009), 215–24.
Moullet, Luc, and Bertrand Tavernier. “Enteretien avec Edgar G. Ulmer,” Cahiers du
cinéma 122 (August 1961).
Ranciere, Jacques. La fable cinématographique (Paris: Seuil, 2001).
Sarris, Andrew. The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929–1968 (New
York: E. P. Dutton, 1968).
Tavernier, Bertrand. Interview by Michael Henry Wilson.
Truffaut, Francois. “The Naked Dawn,” Arts 559 (1956), reprinted in Les films de ma
vie (Flammarion, 1975).
Wood, Bret. “Visions from the Second Kingdom,” Video Watchdog 41: 22–32.
Conversations with Shirley Ulmer, Arianné Ulmer Cipes, and Jay Cipes.
 13
The Political and Ideological
Subtexts of The Naked Dawn
Reynold Humphries

The action of The Naked Dawn concerns primarily three characters: the
middle-aged Mexican bandit Santiago (Arthur Kennedy) and a young
Mexican couple, Maria (Betta St. John) and Manuel (Eugene Iglesias). In the
film’s opening scene, Santiago and his companion Vicente steal merchandise
from a train stationed in a border town. Vicente is shot by the railway guard
and dies in Santiago’s arms soon after. After hiding the loot from the rob-
bery, Santiago encounters Maria and accompanies her back to the little farm
owned by Manuel. Visibly attracted to the wife, who is not indifferent to him,
Santiago nevertheless chooses to undertake the social and moral education
of the husband. Having been paid for the merchandise, which he stole in or-
der to line the pockets of the corrupt shipping agent for the railroad, Guntz,
Santiago steals the rest of the man’s money when the latter tries to cheat him,
then spends much of it lavishly during a night that he and Manuel spend in a
cantina. However, the young husband, tired of poverty, considers that money
must be saved not spent, and plans to kill the bandit in order to live better. At
the last minute he cannot do so. His wife turns against him when she discov-
ers what he had planned, and she leaves with Santiago. However, they turn
back when Guntz and two colleagues arrive and try to hang Manuel. Santiago
shoots Guntz but the man succeeds in wounding him fatally before dying.
Santiago insists that Maria and Manuel stay together, and they ride off. The
last shot is of the dying Santiago.
Summed up thus, The Naked Dawn sounds rather banal, yet it is not. Two dif-
ferent plot summaries are included in the entry on the film on www.imdb.com;
and, while one is close to the summary I have just offered, the other (much
shorter) includes a highly problematic sentence: “Exposed to money, the fast

193
194 Reynold Humphries

life, and Santiago’s anarchistic philosophy, Manuel (formerly simple and hard
working) is in serious danger of being corrupted (and Maria is not immune
either).” I interpret this as meaning that Santiago is a corrupting influence on
Manuel, who is presented positively otherwise; and that Maria is also open
to corruption because of Santiago. I consider that this perverts totally both
the manifest level of the script and its various implications; and that, once
we delve into the film’s subtexts, we can deduce that this comment turns
the “real” meaning of The Naked Dawn upside down, in a manner which is
profoundly ideological. Much closer to the truth is an anonymous “user com-
ment” on the same site that calls Manuel “ambitious” and a “naive, greedy
young man.” Let us start, then, by considering a certain number of elements
provided by the script.
It soon becomes clear that The Naked Dawn’s key themes, discussed be-
tween the three main characters and, hence, explicitly elaborated on the level
of the script, are love and money—in other words, the things that, according
to the ideological clichés, make the world go round. When Santiago first
comes across Maria, we see her from his point of view: she is squatting by
the side of a river. Santiago is patently attracted to this pretty young woman,
and, for reasons that soon become clear, she is hardly indifferent to him.
What is striking, however, is the way Ulmer insists on the cross round her
neck, exposed in such a way that it cannot but draw our attention not only
to the cross itself, but also to Maria’s bare shoulders. Similarly, a large cross
hangs on the wall in the home of Maria and Manuel, or, to be more precise,
on the wall just beside their bed. In the context of the film the symbolism is
polyvalent. There is a possible clash between desire and the Catholic vision
of married love, but there is also the notion of strictly gendered roles within
the family: the husband provides food and lodging via his work, the wife her
body as housewife and bearer of children. It is hardly surprising, then, that
Santiago hopes the couple will be blessed in the near future with many chil-
dren. Again, in the context, this can be seen as a cliché trotted out by Santiago
to please the young woman, while simultaneously suggesting he finds her
sexually attractive.
It is the way Ulmer chooses to shoot scenes in the farmhouse involving
Santiago, Maria, and Manuel that starts to reveal the film’s critical stance over
questions of love, marriage, and money. Two crucial scenes involve Santiago
and Maria on the one hand, and Santiago and Manuel on the other. Santiago
shows a great interest in the tortillas Maria is making by hand and deplores
the poor quality of those produced by machines. Maria informs him that she
was sold to Manuel, who needed a woman to make tortillas, along with the
land which the couple now farms. The former owners were a wealthy family
who treated her like an animal. Since there were three sons, it is reasonable
 The Political and Ideological Subtexts of The Naked Dawn 195

to suppose that the formula “like an animal” is meant to be interpreted along

both class and sexual lines. She existed to satisfy their carnal lust and was
therefore reduced to having the use-value of a donkey or a piece of merchan-
dise. Indeed, even less value than that: she was “thrown in” along with the
land in order to make the offer more attractive.1
This scene is shot with Maria on the left and Santiago on the right, Ulmer
framing them together in the middle ground. When Manuel enters and offers
Santiago some alcohol, both framing and composition change. Ulmer frames
the two men in the foreground, which excludes most of the room, unlike in
the scene between Maria and Santiago. Nor is there any crosscutting to show
Maria going about the task of preparing a meal while the two men drink and
talk. Maria has been simply excluded from the frame and is reduced to an off-
screen existence. Ulmer’s mise-en-scène here underlines the wife’s secondary
status, while at the same time hinting that Santiago, who has been perfectly
at ease treating Maria as an equal, returns happily to a universe that is male
dominated. If later events show that Santiago is far more conscious of Maria’s
rights as a human being than Manuel is, here Ulmer gives the impression that
Maria, as a woman, has to fight for recognition, for the right to share on an
equal footing a world where men take for granted their superiority. Arguably,
her offscreen role here is the equivalent of her status when owned by the
family.
One sequence in particular highlights Santiago’s ambivalence toward
women. As indicated in the summary, Santiago has hidden the booty from
the railroad robbery that opened the film. Manuel now accompanies him to
the border town where the robbery took place, where Santiago hands over the
booty (wristwatches) to Guntz, the railroad shipping agent. When Guntz re-
fuses to hand over all the money promised in exchange for the stolen watches,
on the grounds that Vicente is dead, Santiago resorts to a simple expedient: he
threatens to hang Guntz unless the latter gives him the combination of the safe.
Santiago then proceeds to spend a considerable sum of money with Manuel at
a cantina, where he pays a local dancer to perform for them. That she is not
only a dancer is clear from the way she exhibits her body and throws herself
at Manuel. The sequence is badly directed. Ulmer does nothing to curb the
dreadful overacting of Iglesias, perhaps because he is also content to give a
genuine pro like Arthur Kennedy minimal instructions, relying on his experi-
ence as one of Hollywood’s finest character actors.2 The scene does, however,
serve a multitude of purposes. There is surely a parallel between the dancer
and Maria, although the two women are very different. The implications of
prostitution here take up Maria’s bitter references to her adolescent past (both
she and Manuel are barely twenty). Where one woman cooks and has sex as
a dutiful wife, the other dances (and has sex) to please the male clients. The
196 Reynold Humphries

young wife was sold and had no choice; the dancer sells herself and has no
choice either, despite her joie de vivre. She openly assumes her status as a
body on show and her pleasure at this does not modify the criticism implicit
in the parallels drawn between her and Maria. More important, perhaps, is the
role played by money, which is to become the film’s dominant theme.
The theme, of course, has hardly been absent up till now: Santiago and
Vicente steal to live. Indeed, the theme of exchange would sum up best the
role of both money and sex in the film. Santiago (in the presence of Manuel)
exchanges the stolen watches for cash, then throws much of it around in order
to celebrate his success and offer Manuel and himself, by proxy, the favors of
the dancer (the film carefully avoids any suggestion of sexual “impropriety,”
a factor to which we shall return presently). Similarly, Manuel has exchanged
cash for the farm (and Maria), a farm where Maria has no choice but to
work as a wife and housekeeper.3 However, following on from the cantina
sequence, Manuel starts to show unease at Santiago’s attitude toward money.
Although he is quite happy to get blind drunk on tequila, be passionately
kissed by the experienced dancer (“experienced,” clearly, in more ways than
one), and, finally, receive his share of the money (Santiago giving Manuel
what he would in other circumstances have given to Vicente, a genuinely
comradely act which I shall discuss below), Manuel does have problems with
money; and the film uses this to introduce the question of conflicting social
values and what is a crucial, but far from obvious, theme: that of betrayal.
In order to situate these aspects of the film, it is necessary to return briefly
to the cantina sequence. A further element is the ambiguous behavior of San-
tiago: is he deliberately trying to get Manuel seduced by the dancer? If so,
is that because he wants to seduce Maria and reckons this will be possible
only by getting Manuel out of the way? However, this dimension disappears
as from the moment the two men leave the cantina, for we never see the
dancer again. Moreover, Santiago’s generosity toward Manuel has not gone
unnoticed: three Americans in the cantina attempt to rob the pair but underes-
timate Santiago, to their cost. It is therefore revealing that Maria should take
Manuel to task for accepting Santiago’s money. I would suggest this reaction
is unconscious: she sees in the gift (there are no strings attached) a repetition
of how she found herself to be a young wife, with Santiago standing in for the
wealthy landowner. The fact that Santiago is neither wealthy nor a landowner
(it is, precisely, Manuel who is the landowner, and who continues to treat
Maria as if she were still some chattel) cannot overcome her bitterness. We
can interpret Maria’s reaction as an example of an ideological discourse of
which the subject is an effect: for Maria, women cannot transcend their role
as wives and bearers of children, but she is sufficiently liberated to speak her
mind. She is promptly beaten by Manuel for daring to criticize him, which
 The Political and Ideological Subtexts of The Naked Dawn 197

can only confirm her negative view of men and her own social function. All
she can do is go about her chores.
It is in this context that we can best understand the way Ulmer insists on
crosses; the question transcends completely that of religion and repression.
Manuel condenses in his attitude toward money two ideologies: that of the
church and that of capitalism. If there is no question of Manuel sleeping with
the dancer, then it is because the script is not interested in using this form of
“betrayal” in order to facilitate a relationship between Santiago and Maria.
This latter relationship comes about for other, more explicitly social reasons,
and it is these that the film’s script has been at pains to introduce gradually
and implicitly in order to avoid The Naked Dawn becoming a film with a
“message.” Manuel’s status as husband and provider leads him to assume
he has all the rights. Significantly, he introduces Maria to Santiago with the
eloquent formula: “This is my woman.” Fundamentally, nothing has changed
for Maria: she has exchanged one master for another, which means that she is
part of a system of exchange determined outside her control. In his attitude to
money, however, Manuel falls under the sway of a specific aspect of capital-
ism: its “puritan” dimension. Thrift must take precedence over spending and
pleasure; money must be saved or invested, or else it will be wasted. It is for
these reasons that he turns against Santiago after the cantina sequence, which
represents the return of the repressed and consequently provokes a profound
sense of guilt on Manuel’s part at having been, literally, so carefree. Manuel is
a willing slave to the ideologies that underpin his actions and words, so much
so that he tries to kill Santiago in order to get his hands on the rest of the
money. Crucially, he asks Christ to help him, promising to make a contribu-
tion to the church. In other words, he is trying to buy a place in paradise and is
thus behaving simultaneously like a good Christian and like a good capitalist,
endowed with a pronounced sense of private property.
Manuel may be a Mexican peasant, but he bears a striking resemblance, ideo-
logically speaking, to a lower-middle-class American husband determined to
climb the social ladder! One aspect of the script speaks volumes when it comes
to attempting to ascertain just what is going on in a film where, for all intents
and purposes, very little happens; where there is little action or drama; and
where words speak louder than actions. For The Naked Dawn is a very strange
film indeed, a foreign body within the genre of the Western. That aspect is ge-
ography: where does the film take place? The answer is simple: a border town.
But just how simple is that answer? Presumably Santiago and Vicente carried
out their robbery on the American side of the border: both the shipping agent
and the railroad guard are Americans, and the cantina is frequented by both
Americans and Mexicans. We can also conclude that Manuel’s farm is located
some considerable distance from the border: a long drive in his broken-down
198 Reynold Humphries

truck is necessary to reach the town from the farm. However, nothing is made
of crossing over from the Mexican side to the American side and back again:
not only do Santiago and Manuel frequent the border town, but Guntz and his
cronies drive down to Manuel’s farm so that Guntz can get his revenge by hang-
ing Manuel. As we shall see now, the border town is a signifier whose meanings
open the film out into the terrain of politics and history.
The Naked Dawn makes no attempt to distinguish between the two sides of
the border. This is hardly surprising, given that California used to belong to
Mexico, until American patriots, early examples of the likes of John Wayne,
decided otherwise (“Remember the Alamo”). Thus the region is represented
in a way that homogenizes it, and I would argue that this has most interest-
ing repercussions ideologically. There is a definite anti-imperialist thrust to
the film’s script here: a border town is as far as the Mexicans can go, but the
Americans penetrate deeper into Mexican territory and expect to get away
with a lynching. Clearly Guntz and his cronies have problems with geogra-
phy: they behave as if they were in the deep South. We shall return presently
to the question of American imperialism, but let us return first to the role of
the family in the film. I have referred to Manuel’s broken-down truck, which
is a relic from the 1920s or 1930s. The Naked Dawn, however, is set at the
time at which it was made, 1955, and Guntz’s car obviously belongs to this
period. Why should this be important?
One American academic, evoking such changes in postwar America as
birth-control devices, has pointed out that
many scholars and observers at the time feared that these changes seriously
threatened the continuation of the American family. Yet, the evidence over-
whelmingly indicates that postwar American society experienced a surge in
family life and a reaffirmation of domesticity that rested on distinct roles for
women and men. (May 9)

This information is relevant for The Naked Dawn. We can notice that, if re-
ligion is represented as a daily force in the lives of the young couple, the be-
havior of Manuel is perfectly in keeping with the values at work north of the
border. In other words, the script is creating, via the couple, a state of affairs
which, from an ideological standpoint, could be that of any young American
couple. Thus Americans—and in particular young American women—could
recognize themselves in the lives of Maria and Manuel, despite the ethnic
difference. The fact that both Santiago and Maria are played by Americans
further erases the notion of difference. As a result, it is gendered roles, class,
and economics that predominate, rather than “Mexicanness.”
This, of course, does not mean that Mexico has been wiped off the map. On
the contrary, the script highlights the country’s politics and history. In order
 The Political and Ideological Subtexts of The Naked Dawn 199

to place this in the context of the making of the film—which is, after all, a
Hollywood production—I wish to draw attention to a further passage in the
volume quoted above:

From the Senate to the FBI, from the anticommunists in Hollywood to Mickey
Spillane, moral weakness was associated with sexual degeneracy, which alleg-
edly led to communism. To avoid dire consequences, men as well as women
had to contain their sexuality in marriage where masculine men would be in
control with sexually submissive competent homemakers at their side. Strong
families required two essential ingredients: sexual restraint outside marriage
and traditional gender roles in marriage. The issue of sexuality was central to
both. (May 99)

Apart from the first sentence, this could be a comment on the couple in The
Naked Dawn, on the place of Santiago, and on the role of the dancer in the
cantina sequence. Just as the bandit makes no attempt to help Manuel betray
Maria’s trust in her husband, beyond being kissed by the dancer, so he does
not betray Manuel by attempting to seduce Maria. She, however, puts on a
new dress in Santiago’s presence in an obvious attempt to please him. Manuel
is absent. Both Maria and Manuel are tired of poverty, but their reactions and
behavior are diametrically opposed: he tries to kill Santiago in order to get his
hands on the rest of his money, whereas she turns away in disgust from her
husband and begs Santiago to take her with him. Manuel chooses the road to
theft, even homicide, thus placing himself in the same category as men like
Guntz, whereas Maria, who considers she has nothing to lose because she is
still a sort of slave, chooses what she sees as freedom with Santiago.
He is tempted but refuses, and it is here that we can see at work what the
summary quoted above calls his “anarchistic philosophy.” The formula is
clearly used negatively, and wrongly so. Santiago refuses any and every sys-
tem of domination and knows full well that Maria will simply submit to him,
a much older man, in the imaginary belief that he has given meaning to her
life and she to his. Santiago is down-to-earth: “I would tire of you within a
week.” Hardly gallant, but at least honest, which is more ethical and not sex-
ist. Although Santiago changes his mind after Manuel’s attempt to kill him
and rides off with Maria, leaving Manuel in a state of childlike collapse, he
does not abandon him to be lynched by Guntz, and he dies saving Manuel so
that the young couple can be reunited. As he dies, we hear the words he spoke
to the dying Vicente.
In Vicente’s death scene, Santiago tries to reassure his only friend: when he
dies he will be welcomed into paradise by Saint Peter and will find there the
plot of land he was denied in life. Vicente, a profoundly religious man, simply
laughs. For he knows full well that the last years of his life have been led as
200 Reynold Humphries

the result of the betrayals of which he has been a victim. As Santiago says to
him, “you have been wronged,” rejecting explicitly the Christian notion of sin.
The long death scene exists for the script to provide the spectators will all the
information they need to interpret what follows.
In a few exchanges Santiago and Vicente go back over their lives together,
and their discussion is an eminently political one. They both participated
actively in the Mexican revolution but were denounced as “traitors to the
revolution” because each wanted his own plot of land. Then came the counter-
revolution: the generals promised land but betrayed everyone, as a result of
which Santiago and Vicente became bandits. In Santiago’s words, “we took
a little of what they promised us.” It very soon becomes clear that the script
is evoking a precise historical event in order to make a political comment
on revolution and betrayal. During the discussion Santiago refers to Pancho
Villa as if they had known him. But if they had fought with Villa, both would
now be old men: some forty years separate the struggles led by Villa and the
time of the film’s action.4 The revolution being referred to implicitly is surely
the Bolshevik Revolution and its disastrous aftermath under Stalin: enforced
collectivization is the element chosen by the film to illustrate betrayal and
disillusion. The script is asking: is it counterrevolutionary to want to own and
farm land? Certainly private property was not in itself considered counterrev-
olutionary by Marx, for whom the public ownership by the proletariat of the
means of production in an industrial society was the key issue in the march
toward socialism. But The Naked Dawn is not concerned, at least superfi-
cially, with such a society, and the betrayal of the former revolutionaries by
the generals who imposed a counterrevolution finds in the action of the film a
precise parallel. Just as the generals obviously kept the land for the privileged
bourgeois elite, so in the contemporary Mexico of The Naked Dawn a wealthy
landowner sells a small plot of land to Manuel, who has worked in the United
States in order to be able to buy it. The Naked Dawn is therefore concerned
with the betrayal of a collective movement and its attendant hopes, but also
with the ways in which modern society repeats those betrayals.
As I stated above, Vicente laughs scornfully when Santiago tries to reassure
him about the afterlife by stating he will have a plot of land in paradise. Since
Vicente is a religious man, he must believe in paradise, and so his laughter
must mean something else. He is surely laughing because he understands that
Santiago is falling again into the trap set by the counterrevolutionary gener-
als: they promised land later, then betrayed their promise. Vicente may believe
in life after death, but he knows full well that owning and farming a plot of
land is not the same as having a place at God’s right hand. Nor does the notion
of a peasant owning and farming a plot of land exclude the collective, where
peasants can exchange between themselves what each needs to feed, clothe,
 The Political and Ideological Subtexts of The Naked Dawn 201

and generally provide for his family. The script seems to be implying that any
genuinely communist movement (in the Marxist sense) risks being betrayed
by those with either no understanding of the issues or no interest in applying
after the event the values that went into making the revolution a success. In
America in 1955 this can only mean a denunciation of Stalinism and, by ex-
tension, the American Communist Party. The question of betrayal, however,
goes far beyond Stalin’s betrayal of the Bolshevik Revolution.
The alert reader will have noticed that I have referred to Ulmer on a num-
ber of occasions when discussing the significance of an aspect of the mise-en-
scène, whereas I have otherwise limited myself to evoking “the script.” This
has been deliberate on my part, since I have chosen to follow the film through
to its conclusion in order to elucidate a certain number of themes and sub-
texts. Ulmer as director interested me inasmuch as he took certain decisions
concerning the filming, whereas up till now the identity of the screenwriter
was of no concern. What mattered was the question of themes: the family and
gendered roles, money and betrayal. Of particular importance was the charac-
ter of Santiago: he refuses to abandon Vicente, to leave the naive Manuel to
his own (de)vices, to deceive him with Maria, and, finally, to lead her up the
garden path in the same way as Manuel led her up to the altar. Although the
credits list Nina and Herman Schneider as the screenwriters, we now know
that they were fronting for screenwriter Julian Zimet, one of Hollywood’s
blacklist victims from 1951.5
Although Zimet chose to live in exile in Mexico, it would be unwise to in-
terpret the function of Mexico in The Naked Dawn exclusively in those terms.
One aspect of the film’s action, however, does suggest that Zimet had in mind
the relation between the two countries and the predicament of the exiles. The
refugees from Hollywood joined other refugees who had been made welcome
in Mexico: those from fascist Spain and Stalinist Russia.6 They had to be
careful not to get involved in local politics and had constantly to be on the
lookout for attempts by the United States government to make life unpleasant
for them. We would therefore be justified in interpreting the end of the film,
where Guntz and his two cronies take a trip to Mexico to seek out Manuel and
Santiago, as Zimet’s way of indicating just how easily the American govern-
ment, via the FBI, could operate south of the border.
Even more pertinent, I would suggest, is the theme of betrayal, where The
Naked Dawn subtly raises the question of the hearings into communism in
the movie industry that had started up again in February 1951. It was now
no longer a question, as in October 1947, of giving the Right the chance to
settle scores with the Left over union battles going back to the 1930s. When
the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) returned to the
attack in 1951, the rules of the game had changed radically. Now the person
202 Reynold Humphries

summoned to appear had a choice: either to refuse to answer questions about

his or her Communist Party past and acquaintances, or to answer such ques-
tions. The former choice meant taking the Fifth Amendment to avoid self-in-
crimination: the CP was not an illegal party, but HUAC explicitly refused to
grant it the status of a party, seeing it as a “conspiracy.” This, in turn, meant
immediate blacklisting by the studios. Once one agreed to say that he or she
had been a member of the CP but no longer was, this was only the beginning.
The witness then had to name those who had shared this tainted past life in
order to be granted absolution and hence the right to continue to work in
Hollywood.7
In his script Zimet carefully avoids suggesting that a fictional character is
based on a real-life one. Rather, he sketches in the conditions under which
sticking by a comrade, on the one hand, or knifing him in the back, on the
other hand, became a matter, if not of life or death, but of working or becom-
ing an exile. Manuel’s readiness to kill Santiago and to ask Christ for help
in exchange for money for the church thus finds a parallel in the decision
taken by many members of the movie industry to destroy the careers of many
friends and comrades (not necessarily members or former members of the CP,
it might be added) in order to continue to “farm” their own particular “plots of
land” within Hollywood. Thus Santiago’s consistent rejection of any form of
betrayal must be interpreted as standing in for the courage of those who stood
up to HUAC and remained faithful to old friends and the political struggles
that had brought them together in more ethical and committed times.

NOTES

1. In our sophisticated societies, it has always been common to sell, say, a sports
car with a seductive young woman draped over the hood. We can also take Santiago’s
remark about industrial tortillas as a reference to burgeoning fast-food joints.
2. Kennedy was at home in Westerns, as his work with Anthony Mann (Bend of
the River, The Man from Laramie) and Nicholas Ray (The Lusty Men) testifies.
3. Ulmer’s mise-en-scène during the sequence in the cantina even suggests that
the dancer is better off socially than Maria (and perhaps financially too). As we
have seen, the framing in Manuel’s home excludes Maria, whereas Ulmer crosscuts
between the two men (sitting together at a table, exactly as in the farmhouse) and the
dancer performing. She may be a spectacle, but she receives more attention and, es-
pecially, appreciation than Maria. As we shall see, it is thanks to Santiago that Maria
can break free.
4. It was left to Sam Peckinpah to represent this period in The Wild Bunch
(1969).
5. The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) first investigated
communism in Hollywood in 1940, but the hearings that paved the way for black-
 The Political and Ideological Subtexts of The Naked Dawn 203

listing took place in October 1947. HUAC returned in early 1951. Zimet was never
investigated; he saw what was coming and left for Mexico in 1951. Many blacklist
victims were to live there: Dalton Trumbo of the Hollywood Ten (blacklisted after the
hearings of 1947), John Bright, Hugo Butler and his family, and others. See the inter-
view with Zimet in McGilligan and Buhle, 723–48. He discusses The Naked Dawn on
pp. 733–35. He chose the Schneiders as they were family. For information on Mexico
as the home to blacklistees, see the volumes by Anhalt and Rouverol (the widow of
Hugo Butler). Ulmer had already worked with a future victim of the blacklist: Gordon
Kahn, who wrote Ruthless (1948). He was also to become an exile in Mexico. On
Ruthless, see Humphries, “Logic.”
6. We must not forget that Trotsky found a haven in Mexico until a Stalinist agent
murdered him there in 1940.
7. For an exhaustive discussion of the ritual of naming names, see Navasky. For
an introduction to blacklisting, why and how it came into existence, and its effects,
see Humphries, Hollywood’s Blacklists.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anhalt, Diane. A Gathering of Fugitives: American Political Expatriates in Mexico,

1948–1965 (Santa Maria, Calif.: Archer Books, 2001).
Humphries, Reynold. Hollywood’s Blacklists: A Political and Cultural History (Edin-
burgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008).
———. “The Logic of Contradiction and the Politics of Desire in Ruthless,” in Edgar
G. Ulmer: Essays on the King of the Bs, ed. Bernd Herzogenrath (Jefferson, N.C.:
McFarland, 2009), 159–70.
May, Elaine Tyler. Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New
York: Basic Books, 1988).
McGilligan, Patrick, and Paul Buhle. Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Holly-
wood Blacklist (New York: St. Martin’s, 1997).
Navasky, Victor S. Naming Names (London: Penguin Books, 1980).
Rouverol, Jean. Refugees from Hollywood: A Journal of the Blacklist Years (Albu-
querque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000).
 14
A Grave New World

Cast and Crew on the Making

of Beyond the Time Barrier
Robert Skotak

It may be more mere coincidence than deliberate choice, or the result of some
mysterious cosmic alignment, that found one of Hollywood’s most notori-
ously “underground” filmmakers exploring realms beneath the earth in three
of his last five films—Beyond the Time Barrier, Journey Beneath the Desert,
and The Cavern. But there is something appealingly appropriate about Edgar
Ulmer winding up in worlds hidden from the sun, rooting around in dark
places where story and locale could be played off of each other with peculiar
symmetry and resonance.
In particular, Beyond the Time Barrier was the grimmest, cheapest of
the three, as well as one of Ulmer’s most schematically accomplished
films. The director dotes on the reciprocally repeated facets of this under-
world, in plot structure, physical structure, and theme. The film is a bit
like a fable, complete with its lesson, a kind of technological Wizard of
Oz tale of journey; change; and, finally, return, as an older—quite liter-
ally—and wiser version of oneself. In this case, the trip originates in a
here-and-now “Kansas,” and it lands its hero in a temporal Oz populated
by useless wizards.
As in Fable, some “big picture” realities about life must be learned or
overturned. So it is here that the presumed safety of our world is an illusion.
For Ulmer, the telling is affected by means of a brooding state of mind: Time
Barrier clearly tries to create this in its overcast grays and blacks. To call it
“a meditation” would be overstatement, skirting pretension. But, pretentious
notion or not, Ulmer touches on at least three elements—Fate, Faith, and
Duty—with some sincerity, amplified by his handling of tone, his physical
scheme, and the earnestness of his effort.

205
206 Robert Skotak

In looking at the how and why of the film’s making, one learns that a per-
vasive sense of fear provided Ulmer with the impetus to graft an Old World,
vaguely Slavic weight onto what could have otherwise been, in the hands of
a less dedicated filmmaker, a phoned-in job. His characters wander among a
seemingly endless series of inverted monolithic pyramids that bring to mind, in
their coldness, isolating places as diverse as the modern parking garages, stor-
age vaults, and cemeteries. To accomplish the creation of even such a minimal-
ist environment on the film’s nearly nonexistent budget was to require a miracle
of resourcefulness from this most inventive director and his crew.
In spite of its minor miracles—and though made with the participation of,
among others, an Academy Award–winning art director, a legendary makeup
artist, a world-class stunt coordinator, and some top character actors—Beyond
the Time Barrier has been long ignored. Some vast flaws—an embarrassingly
amateur performance; special effects created, it would seem, with paper cut-
outs; and some ludicrous makeup applied in the absence of the maestro Jack
Pierce—seriously cloud any attempt at a fair viewing.
Beyond the Time Barrier could not, in all seriousness, be called a “classic,”
or even a “minor classic.” It is neither remotely a landmark nor is it negligible.
It doesn’t fall easily into the “guilty pleasure” category. It is too grim and
humorless. Nonetheless, it has some classic elements, some striking moments
and tableaus, a unique experimentation with design, and a heartfelt, to a fault,
sincerity in its message.
Ulmer brought to it his own individuality and a commitment to make
the most of little, ending with an artful hand off of melodrama to meaning.
Ultimately, it was his fight for a visual symmetry, one that could reasonably
interplay with “content,” that enabled him to place his hero at the emotional
vertices of Fate, Faith, and Duty without pretense—no mean feat for a tiny B
movie ostensibly about jet planes, monsters, and the atomic bomb!
In a process initiated by the writings of Myron Meisel in the early 1970s,
Ulmer’s film has been rehabilitated to some extent, primarily in recognition
of its thematic relevance to the director’s supposed, overarching “cinema of
despair,” which developed as his reputation grew. But no detailed look into
the how of its making—how the wide variety of factors, both people and
circumstances, came together to be imprinted with Ulmer’s stamp—has ever
been undertaken. What follows is an attempt at remedy.

THE TALE

For those unfamiliar, Major William Allison, an air force test pilot, played
by Robert Clarke, throttles his experimental X-80 suborbital jet on a flight to
 A Grave New World 207

the fringes of outer space. The flight is a success, and more than that: Allison
not only breaks all speed and altitude records, he jumps out of the year 1960
and sixty-four years into the future, though he doesn’t even realize it for an
astounding amount of time. After discovering widespread desolation and an
empty solar installation on the ground, he is taken prisoner by people of the
year 2024.
Much of the tale revolves around Allison’s confused wanderings among
these subterranean survivors-of-terrible-disaster. With few exceptions, every-
one in this underground citadel has been rendered deaf, mute, and/or sterile
by a worldwide “cosmic plague” in which the ozone layer, destroyed by
atomic testing, is allowing harmful cosmic radiation to bombard the earth.
Various groups of survivors each have their own plans as to how best to use
this intruder for their own purposes. Some view him as a “Scape”—one who
has escaped contamination—who therefore offers the possibility of being
bred with the leader’s young and still-fertile granddaughter. Others—a group
of scientists, fellow time travelers from the past—want to seize Allison’s
plane to escape this doomed world for selfish reasons.
Allison manages to regain his plane and return to his own time as chaos
breaks out in the form a violent rebellion of homicidal mutants who have
been released by the scientists. Allison’s escape is at a price: the time shunt-
ing has subtracted years from his life, and he returns an ancient, withered old
man shaken by prospects of humanity’s fated future. Bedridden and dying,
he pleads with the Pentagon officials to prevent it, leaving them stunned and
frozen. But moments before a hopeless fade-out, salvation is glimpsed as one
official sagely observes, “Gentlemen, we’ve got a lot to think about.”
Ulmer’s film had its humble beginnings years earlier, in the not-so-humble
Wild West of the cold war era—the golden age of the atom, radiation, and
fallout, when atomic bombs and guided missiles were being blasted into the
once-upon-a-time pure desert air of the American Southwest with noncha-
lant regularity. It was then—the early 1950s—that a decorated former Naval
photographer, Arthur C. Pierce, was taking the first steps away from image
making and toward the written word. Hoping to jump-start a potential career
in motion pictures, he took the plunge in 1954 and developed a lengthy—and,
in retrospect, astute—screen treatment dramatizing his concern with the even-
tual consequences of this unchecked testing of atomic weapons. His passion
for science led him to a science-fiction approach: his hero would be a test
pilot who inadvertently breaks through time, “the last barrier”—also the title
of his story—and stumbles upon a radiation-devastated future and the last
dying remnants of humankind.
As a novice writer, not well connected in the business, he knew he’d have to
steer his story toward a lower budget and keep things appropriately straight-
208 Robert Skotak

forward, for mass-audience appeal. Believing he’d done all the right things,
Pierce was disappointed to find there were no takers. “The Last Barrier”
wasn’t to catch a glimpse of sunlight for another half-dozen years.
Happenstance would finally connect Pierce’s dust-gathering concept with
Ulmer in the fall of 1958. The link would be actor Robert Clarke, the B-pic-
ture leading man who had starred in Ulmer’s The Man from Planet X in 1950.
He and Pierce happened to share the same accountant secretary at the time
the actor was looking for a script to follow up his own independent film, The
Hideous Sun Demon. Hearing this when their paths finally crossed, Pierce im-
mediately thought of his yellowing “Barrier” treatment. He met with Clarke,
who outlines the story:

It was a very fortuitous meeting that Art and I had. I recall that as soon as I
began to read his story, I thought, “Gosh, this’d be an excellent follow-up to Sun
Demon,” because it was current; it had the element of the atomic bomb problems
well written into it. It had a unique ending—which, frankly, was a bit of a steal
from The Lost Horizon. And it had a lot of exploitable things about it, which I
wanted. By that, I mean [a story] that wouldn’t require the services of a highly
paid star, but could go out on its own like The Man From Planet X, which hadn’t
required a well-known actor, but was successful strictly on subject matter.
Art’s story was quite up to date. It had these elements which could be highly
advertised. It seemed to me to be well thought-out and well constructed. Art was
a great one for detail and getting into the actual “science fact” of it.

Says Pierce:

Science and science fiction had always appealed to me. When I decided I wanted
to write in this area, I decided I had to develop a philosophy and approach. To
me, there are two basic kinds of science fiction, one where the science is based
on fiction and one where the fiction is based on science, and it was [the second
category] that appealed to me. I had no science background [I had primarily a
technical background], so I had to dig pretty deep. I read pure science a great
deal. If your fiction is based on science, then you have some of the work done
for you, and you can go on to say something about the real world with some
credence.

Among Pierce’s real-world concerns were the effects of radiation on the popu-
lation, the biological time bomb that might be released—a theme that also
interested producer Clarke—and the potential for weaving these elements of
particular cold war era concern into a realistic fabric.
Pierce was engaged by Clarke to turn his story into a screenplay, the writer
notes, “for peanuts! Six hundred dollars.” In fact, Pierce was to struggle
throughout the development of the screenplay: “Unfortunately, I was so poor
 A Grave New World 209

I had to write the script by candlelight! I had had my electricity shut off! At
least I wasn’t using an electric typewriter at the time. When it got dark, man,
I had a stick on this side and one on the other . . . writing [about all this tech-
nology] by candlelight!”
A perfectly odd beginning for an Edgar Ulmer film. Time travel by candle-
light.

ENTER ULMER

The fall of 1958 could have offered up a dozen reliable budget directors to
helm Clarke’s project, such for-hire stalwarts as Edward L. Cahn, Nathan
Juran, Gene Fowler Jr., or Arnold Laven, any of whom would have turned
in a workmanlike translation from page to screen. But fate, in the form of a
small number of degrees of separation, helped Clarke’s project toward a less
mundane outcome: While working with Pierce to develop the screenplay,
Clarke happened upon an old acquaintance, veteran production manager
Lester Guthrie. The two had worked together a decade earlier on The Man
From Planet X, a film that had—if nothing else—demonstrated the efficacy
of atmosphere writ large when applied to science fiction, both from an artistic
and practical viewpoint.
Guthrie urged Clarke to take “The Last Barrier” to John Miller, Guthrie’s
current employer, a man who had recently formed a motion-picture invest-
ment company. Miller was looking for properties to produce: He had already
arranged for the funding of two as-yet-undetermined films via his association
with a wealthy ex–military major named Robert Maden. Maden had raised
$225,000 from investors in Texas, but he and Miller needed viable material to
produce. Clarke got his script into Miller hands.
Miller quickly grasped the potential in the Pierce-Clarke screenplay. Rock-
ets, monsters, and time travel. He submitted it—along with Jack Lewis’s The
Amazing Transparent Man and an unnamed third script—to the money group
in Texas. “The Last Barrier” was immediately picked as the best of the lot,
and a budget of $125,000 was allocated toward production, pending selection
of a director. The smaller amount of $100,000 was assigned to the second
script chosen, The Amazing Transparent Man. The two films were to be shot
back-to-back, both to be produced in the Dallas–Fort Worth area.
After the very first skim of Pierce’s script—with all of its ambitions and
technical and visual challenges—Guthrie collared Clarke flat out: “If you
want to get the most out of this picture, I would highly recommend Edgar
Ulmer!” Ulmer had slowed his output somewhat in recent years and was
available. Says Clarke: “Edgar’s ability to get more out of a script, and put
210 Robert Skotak

more on the screen for less money [than anyone else] was very well known.
He’d already done that on Planet X.” Indeed, the ambitious, highly successful
earlier film had been shot in six days for under $40,000!
Clarke knew he’d be a fool to not jump at the chance.
Like the investors, Ulmer found the script full of potential visually, in-
triguing with a few novel twists, if not quite ready to shoot; and he signed
on to direct not only Pierce’s script, but also the smaller Amazing Trans-
parent Man—knowing, going in, that the time-travel story needed a lot of
“shaping up.”
Ulmer’s involvement clearly and quickly helped skew the project away
from what could have been nothing more than standard Saturday-matinee
fare. Under his guidance, it darkened gradually toward something overcast
and forlorn, a tale in which it might or might not be Too Late. Therein,
gloomy elegiac overtones lay, nascent, waiting to be unveiled by the hand—
and eye—of the director.
A number of elements on the raw pages no doubt appealed to Ulmer’s
impulses to viscerally depict not only impending chaos, but certain defining
images and “strangeness,” per se: Allison’s disorienting discovery of the air
base in a sudden shambles moments after take off; the mad laughter of the
caged subhumans crawling about their dungeon; the reasoned yet confusing
plotting and counterplotting of the future people; the doom-laden air hang-
ing over the citadel; its silence before the chaos of the mutant revolt and the
stillness following it; the Supreme’s grief as his last hope is destroyed; and
the humorlessness and unrelenting downwardness of the story arc. Amidst the
naïveté and the melodramatic development, here was a lone figure, Allison,
a modern “everyman”—aided now by technology—feeling his way through
blind alleys and wheel-spinning cul de sacs, a character who could be shown
with some sympathy.
When asked about her husband’s attraction to worlds like the one of Time
Barrier, Shirley Ulmer—his script supervisor and “springboard” on this and
many of his films—points to his, to her, emotional core: “Edgar was a bleak
visionary. The moors. Bronte. Brooding. This was Edgar. He always, always
had to go emotionally to the most serious places.” Essentially abandoned by
parents and family as a youth, he fell into the realm of thinkers and question-
ers. Great minds of avant-garde and expressionistic exploration in cinema
and theater mentored his formative years: Reinhardt, Murnau, Lang. Add to
that the numbing madness of World War I, that cruel, dehumanizing hell into
which men had been pitched. Such intellectual and chaotic intensity could
scarcely not have informed his youth, laying before him not just the possibili-
ties of the theater of the absurd but the temptation to succumb to life as such
a theater. Or at least to live at its brink.
 A Grave New World 211

“This is a harsh thing to say,” confesses Shirley Ulmer, “but I believe the
line between genius and sanity and insanity is very, very fine. Edgar certainly
was a genius, and that fine line was [definitely] there.” But she insists—and
many might sense this upon viewing his vast filmic output—he was deeply
religious, philosophically. She draws a correlation between her husband’s
personal credo and the conclusion of one of his films: “Remember the last
line in Ruthless?—‘Keep searching.’ That was his message. He was always
trying to keep the door open. Searching.” And that message, she insists, crops
up again in Time Barrier’s last line, “We’ve got a lot to think about”—and this
drew Ulmer toward the story.
This particular script was premised on the real dangers to the planet of the
rampant spread of atomic radiation. This, according to both his wife and his
daughter, Arianné, he feared with great concern at the time. This fear had
grown deeper roots in Ulmer by the late ’50s, spurred, initially, by his work
on Damaged Lives (1933). By Shirley Ulmer’s account, the need to wear lead
aprons while she and her husband were in the presence of the invisible par-
ticles instilled in him a lifelong apprehension of radiation and “the Bomb.” It
should come as no surprise then that Ulmer—frequently viewed in the critics’
arena as a man gripped by the notion of how “unseen forces” might act upon
and complicate the fate of his characters—would be drawn to the dramatic
impetus of forces working at the unseen atomic level, which could impact the
entirety of humankind.
Beyond the overt, direct carnage atomic weaponry had been shown to
produce, Pierce’s script opened up areas less apparent, even to a prophetic ex-
tent—raising, if in no great detail, the issue of the potential destruction of the
earth’s ozone layer and what that would mean for the human race. His character
General Karl Kruse—a fellow time-traveler-by-accident in the story—posits an
interesting variation on global warming issues currently in debate. Pierce had
thought a great deal about the problems of radiation and pollution for many
years: “I knew about the ozone layer and its [vital] purpose,” he explained in
the late 1970s. “In my script, I called the result of its destruction the ‘cosmic
plague.’ I used that theme in three other films. It was a real concern of mine.”
Though Pierce confessed that no one knew at the time of his script—the
1950s—what effects aerial contamination and atomic testing would ultimately
have on the ozone layer, his instincts held that it was extremely vulnerable and
subject to destruction, with potentially dire consequences for life on earth..
Though polar opposites in most ways—the science-leaning Pierce a long
way from Ulmer’s “dark Romanticism”—Pierce’s themes, at least, were close
to Ulmer’s heart.
In the era of M.A.D.—mutually assured destruction—in which the United
States and the Soviet Union found themselves matching stockpiles bomb
212 Robert Skotak

for bomb, missile for missile, in an effort to maintain an apocalypse freeze,

Ulmer could view Pierce’s tale as a little fable of Man struggling to move
forward in a world where much action negates most other action, where Man
is seeking a path to break free of a claustrophobic Grand Impasse.
For two months prior to production, in early 1959, Ulmer chopped away at
the script at a series of meetings with Pierce, Clarke, and production manager
Guthrie, trying to bring it “into his own,” emphasizing certain beats, subtract-
ing all traces of humor, and looking to give it shape and style. Working with
Ulmer was no small ordeal, Pierce recalled. He was pushed and prodded
through endless requests for changes in dialogue, tone, structure, and charac-
terization. In later years, Clarke pointed frequently not only to Ulmer’s talent,
but to his belligerence and intensity in the creative areas. “At times, Edgar
was very hard to work with. He could be a real son of a bitch . . . Along with
his enormous talent, he had an enormous ego to match!” At one point, exas-
perated and fed up by Ulmer’s unending requests for rewrites, Clarke recalled
Pierce jumping up from his chair and angrily snapping his pencil in two under
Ulmer’s nose, barely containing a physical attack. Ulmer was irritated, but ap-
peared, according to Clarke, relieved at having provoked such emotion in the
normally even-keeled writer.
Years later, Pierce didn’t recall the incident, but confided, “Edgar was a
tyrant! And he was ponderous in an old-fashioned way. Everything with him
was ponderous!” adding, in the next breath, enigmatically, “But I liked him.
He was marvelous.”
Arianné Ulmer Cipes—Ulmer’s daughter and Clarke’s costar in the film,
under the stage name Arianne Arden—provides some insight into such inci-
dents: “Dad would deliberately enrage people if he thought that was the only
way to get to somebody, to bring them out. First he would try to do it in a nice
way, but if he was hitting a brick wall and just wasn’t getting ‘the juice,’ he
would say, ‘O.K.’ and go after them and [force it] out.”
A comparison of the earliest drafts with the final reveal Ulmer’s darker influ-
ences. The scene in the pit with the mutants takes on an almost abstract quality
with Ulmer. The villainous captain is given sympathetic moments. There is
a greater emphasis on the competing factions in the future and the growing
disorientation of the unwilling time traveler, and an expansion of his final mo-
ments with the Supreme, underlining the hopelessness following the final riot.
Ulmer also saw fit to break away from Pierce’s straight linear telling, re-
formatting The Last Barrier into a three-act “present—flashback—present”
structure: Major Allison takes off, disappears off radar, and returns only mo-
ments later, after which he tells his story—his adventure in the future—via
flashback. Only the closing shots reveal the “shock”: the pilot’s face, which
was that of a young man in the morning, is now—a few hours later—ancient
 A Grave New World 213

and wrinkled because of his passage through time. The new structure put the
audience into a more passive, “helpless” position that emphasized the fractur-
ing of time for the purposes of greater subjectivity.
Throughout the rewrite, Ulmer struggled to add “meat” wherever he could.
His attention was drawn to the great potential for invention presented by a
peculiar pattern a study of the script revealed: all of the action and conflict
revolved around “threes.” Test pilot Allison moves through three distinct time
periods to confront a threesome that holds sway over the world of 2024—the
Supreme, the Captain, and the Supreme’s granddaughter—who, in turn, are
opposed by three scientists—Professor Bourman, General Kruse, and Captain
Markova. Allison is then caught in a baffling interaction between three mutu-
ally opposed factions—the ruling party, the scientists, and the mutants. His
actions are set against three phases of time—past, present/future, and a poten-
tial altered past. Even his test flight is laid out in three stages, and there are
three mathematical factors involved if Allison is to reverse his time-jump.
Each point is a facet, a fracture of a greater piece that Allison must put
together to move forward. Here was something Ulmer could explore through
storytelling, science and design, threes-within-threes, and a potential over-
arching stylistic device that could form a uniquely Ulmerian uniting principle.
Out of this arose one of Ulmer’s more visually bold moves, the attempt to
translate the intellectual theme of threes into the physical environment of the
production, to reflect story conflict in the film’s very physicality. Means of
such amplification immediately presented themselves, a few by good fortune
and coincidence, and they were embraced by Ulmer. For example, the inter-
ceptor jet that Pierce and Clarke had selected to represent the experimental
X-80 of the script was Convair’s highly advanced F-102a, noted for its broad,
three-point delta-wing aerodynamic. Its cockpit, composed of subsets of tri-
angles and angles, made for a suitable “time capsule” for the hero. Even his
helmet—the MA-3, the most advanced high-altitude, impact-resistant, fringe-
of-space military headgear available—could be used to frame Allison’s face
in its notably triangular visor for long stretches of screen time.
Building on this to near obsession, Ulmer changed the young heroine’s
name from “Terrene” to “Trirene.” He would later order up scene transitions in
the form of a triangle, the cumulative effect of which was a kind of endlessly
echoed motif of complementary subsets within subsets suggesting, long before
the theory had been widely put forth, the fractal nature of all things. Certainly it
was a principle that likely would have gone completely unexplored by the vast
field of for-hire directors working in even less-dim budgetary recesses of film
at the time, and one that indicated Ulmer’s personal involvement.
Regarding the extent to which Ulmer considered Time Barrier close to him
or “serious,” Ulmer Cipes notes,
214 Robert Skotak

This film fell midway between earning a living and [issues close to] his heart.
He certainly didn’t set out to do films like Jive Junction and Girls in Chains at
PRC [from his heart]. These were not films he would’ve personally pursued:
They were assigned. But he did set out to do Time Barrier . . . He found science
fiction challenging. He found it philosophically interesting. He found that—like
theology and religion—it could be used to examine [big] issues, that now you
could do the same thing through science fiction, and it provided you a tremen-
dous scope of possibilities.

Like the literature of fable and allegory, and like Dickens’s Christmas Carol,
the eye of modern science-laced fiction allowed one even to see, as needed,
across time and space; to witness the future consequences of one’s actions in
the past; and, like Scrooge, to become informed about alternate possibilities,
even “second chances.” Through technology, destiny might be challenged.
With time travel, Ulmer could take on Fate itself.

NOTES FROM THE UNDERGROUND

For reasons traceable to a misinformed guess on the part of one writer in the
early 1970s, it has long been reported that Ulmer’s stylized citadel was noth-
ing more than a “found” location, that the film had been put into production
in haste to take advantage of a standing “futuristic exhibit” at the Texas Cen-
tennial Fairgrounds. While it is true that shooting took place at the famous
Fair Park, no such “exhibit,” often referred to in print, ever existed: the fair-
grounds merely provided a huge, empty building to house the construction
and assembly of the large, ambitious sets, which were designed and wholly
fabricated for Beyond the Time Barrier (and which, it should be noted, served
in redressed form as the basis for Ulmer’s attic set in his subsequent film, The
Amazing Transparent Man).
It is in the visualization of Time Barrier’s sets that Ulmer’s attempt at plot-
image-theme symbiosis came alive: Pierce’s initial script had described 2024
as a world of rounded tunnels and circular chambers. Aside from the practical
considerations—curved shapes being notoriously expensive and time-con-
suming to construct—Ulmer reportedly wasn’t excited by the idea. What he
was particularly interested in finding, according to Pierce, was a design that
could also be used to tell the story, that could do so inexpensively, and that
was based on scientific principles..
Harkening back to the halcyon days of German expressionism, as well as
the Russian avant-garde constructivist movement, the cold realities of the
story’s future suggested sharp edges and maze-like wanderings to Ulmer.
Angularities. Rectilinear forms and angles offered great visual prospects
 A Grave New World 215

for the “moderne,” and had the potential for creating a dialogue between the
physical and the three-point story motifs, the latter leading ultimately to an
obvious geometric counterpart, the triangle. As such, the three-sided tem-
plate, as a physicality, opened the door to innumerable applications, including
doors!—and walls, mirrors, passageways, and entire rooms. And there was a
science to it.
In one of the rare on-record accounts from Ulmer about the film—possibly
the only one—a near-obsession with the shape, in the glaring logic of it, is
apparent:

The triangle is one of the most important figures in geometry and in higher
mathematics. The triangle is essential in buildings, [in a] bridge or a tunnel,
where it is a basic element. I think that in the future, everything will be built in
the most economical form, the most scientifically practical. That is why I chose
the triangle, the same as [between] scenes. The sets and settings were based on
the triangle. I wanted to use that shape as much as possible . . . With respect to
Beyond the Time Barrier, I [perhaps] overdid myself with the settings. (Eisen-
schitz and Romer 6–7, my translation)

His latter observation may have met with disagreement from champions of
style and artifice; for this was, for once, a small science-fiction movie that
actually had a style!
Ulmer Cipes recalls: “The minute Dad had the triangle idea, it went from
there. I can remember him sitting and showing [me and Mom] a lens and how
a lens opens and closes in a camera, and his saying, ‘That’s the way I want the
triangles to open and close as a door, like an iris.’ He saw it as that.”
To transform Ulmer’s ideas into physical reality, Clarke and the director, in
a particularly wise move, sought out the services of accomplished Academy
Award–winning art director Ernst Fegte. The German-born designer was a
smart choice in many ways. As the art director of Hollywood’s first major
science-fiction film, Destination Moon, he had displayed remarkable inge-
nuity and resourcefulness in the face of that film’s modest budget and huge
challenges. Years under contract in the ’30s and ’40s at Paramount had gained
him wide-ranging experience on subjects as varied as Frenchman’s Creek
(1944)—for which he won his Academy Award—and the ghostly classic The
Uninvited (1944). The fact that he was well-versed in German expressionism
made him a kindred spirit with Ulmer, and put them both on the same page
aesthetically, as well as in practical matters. Fegte explains:

I had known Ulmer from Joseph Urban days. He used to be a draftsman for
Urban in New York. A fellow Viennese, Urban was, and Ulmer was with him
for many years as his sort of right hand. He had a lot of talent. Urban as the
216 Robert Skotak

Viennese designer for the Metropolitan Opera, needed such a man, and Ulmer
did a beautiful job for him . . .
I worked very closely with Ulmer. That was the same kind of association I
had had with George Pal [on Destination Moon]. We were just like this [crossed
fingers]. Time Barrier had all been pre-staged. I knew what had to take place
from a production point of view and from the staging point of view, and Ulmer
went along with these ideas. He thought it was great at the time. And if we didn’t
have much money, we had fun.
Destination Moon was made like you make a class “A” picture. In other
words, what money had to be spent had to be spent to make a good production.
But Time Barrier, that was a different production altogether. Here the money
was tight.
You had these survivors living underground sometime in the future; the people
who had survived had to live there because of radiation [on the surface] . . . So you
had your cast in all these underground chambers and tunnels in the story. And the
question became “what does this place look like?” and, from a production point of
view, “how do we create it?” Remember, we didn’t have any money!
Now, in the script, what was described were these sort of “caves” carved
out so people could live in them. Stone caves. I don’t recall exactly, but Ulmer
wanted something different, more interesting than rocks, rock walls. He talked
about this idea of “geometric sets” he had. Geometric sets. He wanted a look
based on triangles that he could use for his lighting, to get all kinds of lighting
effects and so on . . .
I thought not just about triangles, but pyramids somehow. And how you
could use four-sided pyramids to create a lot of different opportunities for sets
using—or repeating—just one basic shape. So we talked it over, and he liked
it. I made a small study model. Then he had the idea to invert them, so I then
took this four-sided pyramid idea and made twelve of these things in miniature
with upside-down pyramids, resting on their points. And Ulmer went for it. He
added some panels that would open up as you needed to get from place to place
[and so on].
What we did to make these: He wanted to make them lightweight—which
they had to be, really—so they were just wood frames covered in muslin. I made
twelve of them, big pyramids, all out of thin framework covered in stretched
muslin and painted . . . We put those together in the big warehouse building
at the fairgrounds in Dallas, which was big as a soundstage. The local crews I
used, well, they got through it, but they had a hard time. [Those pyramids] would
interlock: We clamped them, as I recall, together at the top, and the whole bunch
would stand on their own. Would, essentially, be self-supporting. That simple.
And since [they were] light, we could carry one away, or two, with the grips,
open up the space or maybe make a room. . . . And that’s how we did that, our
“future world.”
So from the basic set of twelve inverted pyramids, everything was made, all
the different chambers could be made. By rearranging these things and regroup-
ing them.
 A Grave New World 217

When I designed this [Time Barrier set], I really went back to what I could
remember of Cabinet of Dr. Caligari—which was a fabulous movie—and things
of that nature. The look of these films—the lighting and the sets. Expressionis-
tic, yes. And Beyond the Time Barrier conveyed a feeling, the emotions exactly.
That’s what I tried to do here in a modest way, but I just didn’t have the money,
and when I think of all the sequences that took place in this key set that I had,
it was amazing that I could change it into something else. Shifting around the
props and curtains and all the kinds of different pieces I used to make it look
different each time!

Here, in 1959, Ulmer was taking inspiration from the earliest traditions of
motion pictures and early-twentieth-century theater, stylistic minimalism, or
representation. This approach not only allowed Ulmer a means to depict his
scientific and aesthetic scheme, but solved his budget challenges. A Zen-
stroke of which Ulmer’s mentor, Max Reinhardt, might, with justification,
have been proud.

Figure 14.1. Bleak faces, grays, and shadows: Ulmer’s “sad” future. Courtesy of the
Robert Skotak collection.
218 Robert Skotak

Figure 14.2. Test pilot Allison (Robert Clarke) in space-bound “time cockpit.” Cour-
tesy of the Robert Skotak collection.

CASTING

Casting had to be handled in two parts: The larger speaking roles were cast
out of Los Angeles. Secondary parts—military personnel, citadel extras,
and the mutants—were handled in the Dallas–Fort Worth area. As to these
smaller parts, individuals were invited for tryouts at small theaters there,
the casting sessions overseen, according to Don Flournoy (who was part
of the Dallas cast), by Baruch Lumet and his young, not-yet-famous son
Sydney.
Ulmer Cipes recalls that her dad had made an arrangement with the Paul
Kohner Agency, which represented him, for the casting of three key parts:
Kruse and Bourman—the renegade scientists—and the Supreme. Respec-
tively, the roles were filled by the Hungarian Stephen Bekassy, the Dutch
John Van Dreelen, and Vladimir Sokoloff, a Russian. Their distinct accents
must have projected, to Ulmer’s mind, something of an Old World quality onto
this new world, another means of creating disorientation and sudden change
for the pilot; for clearly the speech patterns of the future are far removed from
 A Grave New World 219

Figure 14.3. Futuristic-cubistic “dungeon,” imprisoning mutant rebels. Design by Ul-

mer and Ernst Fegte. Courtesy of the Robert Skotak collection.

the flat, colloquial dialogue of Allison’s preflight associates. It is as if he has

landed in a foreign land, which, indeed, any sudden jump out of time would
appear to be to the “jumper”!
Ulmer cast his daughter in the role of the duplicitous female scientist, Cap-
tain Markova, again reaching for a “foreign” feel. She explains:

My father said that I had a European quality, because I’d spent so much time
growing up there. [This quality] may be in my patterns of speech or something.
But there is a slight edge of something “foreign” about me. And he felt I was
kind of a cross between Gale Sondergaard, whom he adored and had worked
with, who could be marvelous and “evil,” and Hedy Lamarr. So that was the
persona he was creating, the character [he was] creating for this film.

She adds her belief that her father had come up with the character name, since
“we’d lived for a time in the apartment of [dancer] Alicia Markova, right about
the time of St. Benny the Dip.” Aside from the name, the dancer was to sug-
gest an approach to Time Barrier’s “Markova” to Ulmer in other ways.
They eventually found their female lead in the person of Darlene Tompkins.
The eighteen-year-old multiple beauty contest winner possessed not only the
220 Robert Skotak

Figure 14.4. Ulmer characters dominated by geometries. Shapes parallel three-way

plot points. Courtesy of the Robert Skotak collection.

appeal and mime skills necessary, but she was available and affordable. It
turned out to be an ideal choice. In spite of little experience and virtually no
on-set rehearsal time, Tompkins would later be singled out in reviews for her
commendable job. The “full bloom of youth” she radiated stood her in good
stead, as Clarke later observed, as a futuristic Eve to his Adam.

THE FAIR SETS

Following several months of production meetings and script revisions, the

production packed up and headed for Dallas. A truckload of futuristic items
from local prop-rental houses departed from Los Angeles in late March 1959,
and made its way to the Texas Fair Park to greet a crew gearing up for the
shoot.
Hollywood had arrived—or at least a contingent of science-fiction/film-
noir renegades!
Working out of inexpensive motels to save money, the principals shuttled
daily to the sprawling fairgrounds where the majority of the film was to be
 A Grave New World 221

Figure 14.5. Pilot hand and piano keys: A striking visual-audio discord. Courtesy of the
Robert Skotak collection.

shot. Guthrie had arranged for use of one of the fair’s largest—and, with an
inaugural date of 1904, oldest—pavilions, the Centennial Building, to house
all the ambitious set construction and photography.
Fegte had arrived several weeks in advance of Ulmer and the Los Angeles
group, and he had immediately hired a handful of local carpenters and put
them to work constructing the sets. The Centennial Building’s cavernous
94,000 square feet and 30-foot ceilings provided ample room for the giant
erector set. On this echoing “soundstage,” any question as to the film’s the-
matic form would be glaringly clear: triangles and triangles and pyramids ev-
erywhere, taking shape, dotted by the occasional orb and plane, all eventually
to be enshrouded in great, billowing curtains of military-surplus parachutes,
hung about to dampen the sound. “The pyramids,” explains Clarke,

were actually put together in the building right there; Fegte, knowing that they
had to be moved about during filming, kept that in mind during their construc-
tion. Ulmer went down about a week ahead of [the rest of us]. Being a multi-tal-
ented type of person, he wanted to know as much as he could about the layout of
the sets so he could pre-plan his shooting. He was [after all] very much involved
222 Robert Skotak

Figure 14.6. Remains of the day, courtesy of a fortuitous abandoned airfield, Ulmer’s
“found set.” Courtesy of the Robert Skotak collection.

Figure 14.7. Pilot Allison, promising change of Fate, proffers Faith. Courtesy of the
Robert Skotak collection.
 A Grave New World 223

Figure 14.8. Trirene (Darlene Tompkins), Major Allison (Robert Clarke), and The Su-
preme (Vladimir Sokoloff). Courtesy of the Robert Skotak collection.

with the production design. He was in complete agreement with the concept of
the inverted pyramids. He knew that they were to be mobile, and that gave him
peace of mind insofar as planning his shots.

Shirley Ulmer adds:

The sets in Time Barrier were something else. Edgar used to get excited when
he’d get a set built. He’d call me up and say “Get over here! You’ve got to see
this”—and I’d seen it from its inception, so it was exciting for me too—but he’d
almost had an orgasm on this one! He was like a kid with a toy!

“Dad loved Ernst Fegte,” Ulmer Cipes recalls.

The [triangles] had wheels on the bottom . . . The sets were being changed hour
by hour. You could change them during lunchtime! All of it was orchestrated. The
changes were all designed for each day’s work . . . Fegte and Dad did work together
on moving things, but most of the production decisions came from Dad and the
cinematographer. It was not only pre-staged, but heavily rehearsed, like a ballet.
224 Robert Skotak

Figure 14.9. Decontamination chamber: Time traveler finds himself the focal point of
opposed factions, angles, and options. Courtesy of the Robert Skotak collection.

A model of futurism, form, and efficiency, tongue and groove. Amplifying

the notion of “three,” the sets were a ubiquity that was to make Time Barrier
one of the most shaped, visual transliterations of intellectual-conceit-turned-
image ever applied to an erstwhile ’50s “throwaway” picture. It was a far cry
from Pierce’s stone caves and round tunnels, but it still evoked a sense of the
subterranean in its cubistic collection of vertices, which implied buttressing
stalactites and weight overhead.
The ideas behind the sets were clear even to those brought in just for a few
days of extras work. Malcolm Thomson was a drama student from Southern
Methodist University. As a guard who was to wind up skewered on the busi-
ness end of Markova’s knife, the Ulmer-Fegte construction left him with a
strong impression a half century later:

I have no idea which building was used to build the sets, but what was built
there was mind-boggling! Even then I was a design freak and a bit inclined to
futuristic speculations. I knew at that age—19—about Caligari, about Murnau,
Eisenstein and Pudovkin. And in that set—in Dallas of all places—I felt part of
the scenographic world. That was inspiring.
 A Grave New World 225

THE SHOOT

To allow Fegte and his small crew time to finish set construction, exterior
sequences were scheduled first. Filming began early on Wednesday, 8 April
1959, with veteran cinematographer Meredith Nicholson behind the camera.
First up was Allison’s landing at and exploration of the devastated Sands Air
Force Base. Under appropriately heavy overcast skies, the crew set off for the
ramshackle remains of what once was Eagle Mountain Marine Air Base, a
410-acre site located on the edge of Eagle Mountain Lake in Tarrant County,
some eighteen miles outside Dallas.
The wet tarmac, leafless bare trees, and low, gray sky provided a suitably
dreary backdrop for Ulmer’s frame and the test pilot’s confused wanderings.
Allison finds the remains of his commander’s office, a shattered section of
highway, and overturned vehicles.
This first day’s work would eventually provide one of Ulmer’s more con-
centrated mood pieces. The director picked out interesting details. A dilapi-
dated piano left in the wreckage provided a “found moment.” Ulmer has his
pilot stumble against it and strike a fittingly dead chord. In the silence and
hollow wind, it evokes emptiness as successfully as might costly effects. Says
Clarke:
We moved around there pretty freely. The runway was pretty much grown over
with weeds and grass, but the control tower, what was left of it, was still there.
We shot in an area that was maybe a half-mile or so. Edgar picked out some of
the best remaining aspects of the base as it was then. I thought he did an excel-
lent job of covering it and getting the most out of it production value-wise.

It was in this type of grim environment that Ulmer’s inclinations toward immi-
nent collapse and thresholds of destruction could and did thrive. Other images
included the following: a severe up angle holding the time traveler against the
crumbling control tower; a wind-blown street as shot from a gliding dolly; and
a caved-down officer’s desk. In a chancy move, Ulmer had Nicholson shoot a
“lock-off ” of the Eagle Mountain control tower with Clarke moving through,
framed to allow for the possibility that the sleek F-102a Delta Dagger jet
(which could not be landed on the overgrown runway) could be split-screened
into the shot later—a type of risky, time-consuming effort usually avoided by
more budget-nervous directors.
Having been blessed with good, cold “bad weather” on a perfect “set,” Ul-
mer had moved through his first day freely, creatively. That would not be the
case as the crew moved onto the highly classified Carswell Air Force Base
in Fort Worth for three days of work on the film’s “bookends”—Allison’s
take off and emergency landings; his arrival and meeting with his superior,
226 Robert Skotak

Colonel Martin; the arrival of Pentagon officials; the briefing and hospital-
room scenes; and the climactic, face-to-face meeting of the officials with the
suddenly aged pilot.
Work at Carswell required special clearances for the entire crew, the as-
signment of special badges, and strict observation of restrictions. Some of the
military’s most advanced planes and the latest ground-to-air computer-man-
agement systems were installed at the base. Not surprisingly, the sequences
shot there reflect the limitations and have a visually flat and “by the numbers”
appearance.
Nicholson was able to photograph the parked F-102a from a matched angle
to complete the second side of the split-screen shot begun at the abandoned
airfield the previous day. Fortunately, the weather had remained consistent, or
the composite could never have been assembled. For the film, the jet would
now appear in the same shot with the wrecked control tower and Clarke,
though existing in actuality some twenty miles apart.
At every step, Ulmer sought production value and realism whenever he
could squeeze it in, even when barely possible. Says Clarke:
We were very excited about [trying to get] a B-36 as it was taxiing along. We
were so hopeful that the actors playing the officials from the Pentagon would
get their dialogue correct and that their car would move just the way it should
so the camera could get the plane taxiing in the background. And it worked. We
got lucky.

A local historian, intimately familiar with Carswell’s history and the making
of the film, pointed out, as if common knowledge, that beefed-up security
measures had been taken with the cast and crew because of the small bod-
ies that had been brought to the base from Roswell, New Mexico, in the late
1940s! Ulmer, had he known, no doubt would have tried to get those into his
frame too.
Guthrie had arranged to complete the casting begun in Los Angeles with
tryouts to be held at the Knox Theater in Dallas. Readings were held to select
the remaining speaking, bit, and extra parts.
The popular Top 40 DJ from Dallas’s KILN radio station, Ken Knox, was
chosen to handle the largest non-L.A.-based role, that of flight commander
Colonel Martin. His dry Texas accent was a fairly accurate foreshadowing of
later Houston Space Center mission-control patter.
Cast members were also drawn from area drama clubs and local TV sta-
tions. Ulmer tapped Don Flournoy and Thomas Ravick, two young “little
theater”/TV actors, to play the two mutants with speaking parts.
On Monday, 13 April, the crew moved into the Fair Park Centennial Build-
ing for the remainder of the production. First up were scenes in the Supreme’s
 A Grave New World 227

chamber, the largest of the citadel sets, which was dominated by a huge, tri-
angular “all-seeing eye” view screen, and which included several large plinths
serving as the Supreme’s “power desk”; several of Eero Saarinen’s famous
tulip chairs; a big moon-ball light hovering overhead; and not much else.
Minimalism is Ulmer’s order, both an aesthetic and budgetary choice. Noth-
ing adorns. It is a study in Feng Shui Moderne, where angles and spheres are
balanced and reduplicate. There is no warmth, and there are no decorations.
The lack of secondary dressing is deliberate: there are no papers or books,
wall outlets, or reminders of “outside” of any kind. The only recollections of
the past—several portraits—are filed away. Other than the chairs, there is no
other concession to human sentiment or amenities.
Aside from the big overhead “moon,” Ulmer’s secondary geometric
theme—the circle—occurs in the form of three orbs that are conspicuous on
the leader’s desk, which seem to be placed there either for their magisterial
implication or to suggest some mystical import. They are opaque and black,
like crystal balls that have been shut off or have no future to tell.
Allison is interrogated by the ruling triumvirate—the Captain (Red Mor-
gan), the Supreme, and Trirene. It is a long and fruitlessly circular confronta-
tion. By the end of it, neither Allison nor the rulers have a clear idea of why
he is here, how he got here, or what should be done with him. Can he be
trusted?
Progress was slow the first day. The building was unheated, and a frigid cold
quickly took its toll. Park officials had to be called in to thaw the bathroom
pipes. Some crew members became ill. And the chamber sequence—thirteen
and a half pages of long takes—tested the producer side of actor Clarke.
Even decades later, he remembered vividly the discomfort and tension he felt
during the scene, the impact of each and every delay weighing on him and
the tiny budget—blown lines, camera miscues, lighting problems, unwanted
background sounds. And then there were the major concerns over the perfor-
mance—or nonperformance—of the actor playing the Captain: Boyd “Red”
Morgan had been hired to help choreograph the fight scenes and handle stunt
work. Both he and his brother Stacey—hired for the same reason—were
considered among the best stuntmen working in the field at the time. Red
Morgan, however, was no actor, at least not for the kind of interaction and
dialogue required for the interrogation scene. His visible discomfort, flat de-
livery, and inappropriate “western” accent grated on and seriously undercut
the actors playing opposite him. Says Clarke:

Red Morgan was hired mainly because he was a stuntman and Les Guthrie gave
him the part, but insisted Red be paid on a kind of [one price] basis, as both a
stuntman and as an actor in order to save money. We couldn’t afford what Red
228 Robert Skotak

usually got even as a stuntman alone! He was a good stuntman, [but] I don’t
think he professed to be a very good actor. And, of course, he had the accent
that really didn’t fit . . . He just didn’t have the ability to give that part what it
needed. And it’s too bad.

Clarke on film indeed appears as uncomfortable at times in the scene as he ac-

tually was—perhaps, ironically, as is appropriate from a dramatic standpoint,
considering the scene’s content. Ulmer Cipes comments: “Red was impos-
sible. Dad tried to loosen him up, but with a limit on retakes, it just could not
work.” And there were neither time nor funds to dub his part. The fortunes of
low-budget film production!
Both Clarke and Ulmer were also conscious that this was Tompkins’s first
time in front of a feature motion-picture camera. By her own account, Clarke
helped lead her through some of these scenes. Clarke observes,

Darlene was a sweet young gal and was trying very, very hard to do a good job,
which, without dialogue, was a difficult assignment . . . And we thought she did
a good job of portraying this “mutant” with a sweetness. She was demure, she
was pretty, and she didn’t overdo it. Edgar was very kind to Darlene. She was
new to the business, and he was very patient with her.

Unlike in the case of Morgan, little performance was demanded of Tompkins

on the first day, and she appeared relaxed. As a winner of twenty-one of the
twenty-five beauty contests she had entered, Tompkins had training in poise
on cue, though, she recalled, the “no more than three takes” general rule did
create pressure. Added to that, she’d had a minor personal, behind-the-scenes
disaster that day: As, perhaps, a concession to the “bobby-soxers” in the au-
dience—but certainly a questionable one, given the setting sixty-four years
in the future—the crew had decided to alter her hair into a ponytail. “The
hairdresser,” Tompkins recalls, “without asking, had grabbed a handful of my
own natural hair and cut it off in the back and replaced it with that ponytail
‘fall.’ It was terrible. I couldn’t believe she did that.”
Clarke found it helpful, as an actor playing a major dialogue scene with
two “novices,” to anchor himself with veteran character actor Sokoloff. The
Stanislavsky-trained Russian proved a wise choice by Ulmer. Sokoloff ’s half-
century experience as an actor ensured a high degree of professionalism and
the gravitas Ulmer wanted for the part. This was not cookie-cutter casting
of what could have become, as was typical of the time, a well-worn science
fiction character type—the cold, steel-fisted ruler. With age, along with what
one observer called a “beatific” sweetness, etched in his every pore, he not
only anchored Clarke, but radiated the ennui and the sadness that Ulmer had
brought, appropriately, to the story: The Supreme and his granddaughter were
 A Grave New World 229

to become the heart of the future; any joy that might have otherwise existed
was drained away by the dread realization that, for humankind, there was no
going back. The Bomb had reigned over all.
Sokoloff had much to draw upon in conveying Ulmer’s sense of loss. His
wife had died some ten years earlier, leaving him alone. He had no other
family or relatives, and he carried a heavy air of melancholy about him. His
physical appearance was aided by the artistry of another Hollywood legend
who’d been brought in by Ulmer, Jack P. Pierce. The makeup genius Ulmer
had worked with on his first major film in the United States, The Black Cat,
Pierce had been the sole creator of some of the most famous motion-picture
“creature” icons of the twentieth century, among them the original Franken-
stein’s monster, the Wolfman, Dracula, and the Mummy. Unceremoniously
dumped by Universal after decades of sterling service when they “modern-
ized” in the late ’40s, Pierce had eventually turned to independent produc-
tions, such as Time Barrier.
Pierce handled all the character makeups on the film. Morgan’s “Captain”
became something of a “Dr. Morbius,” the noteworthy character portrayed by
Walter Pidgeon in Forbidden Planet. He fitted Sokoloff with a silvery hair-
piece, not only to further age him, but to suggest long exposure to radiation;
this was matched by a pallid complexion, evocative of weariness, a waning
of life. Loss.
Day 2 in the citadel began in the “pit.” Arthur Pierce’s script called for Al-
lison to be thrown into a slimy dungeon full of grotesque human mutations,
providing Ulmer with room for stylish horror. A fight breaks out. Allison is
able to overcome the creatures and, threatening to break the arm of one of
them, gleans fragments of information. Little of it makes sense: They con-
sider Allison a “‘Scape,” someone who “ran from the plague.” What plague?
The responses raise more questions than answers. These creatures—or their
type—left to starve aboveground, psychotic and twisted, repeat over and over,
“We’ll kill all of you.”
The Captain’s guards reappear and free Allison. Trirene has convinced the
Supreme that he can be trusted, and he is allowed to be free.
In staging the sequence, Ulmer and Fegle abandoned the standard notion
of an Alexandre Dumas style creaking dungeon, creating instead a trap-like
confluence of lines, angles, and shadows, the film’s most overtly expression-
istic set. Metal bars crisscross like a Picasso-spun spider web. The mutants’
clawed hands shadow onto the triangled walls. The actors in the pit chortle,
Renfield-like, and scurry up the stairs, bald human rats.
The scene is played at a certain madhouse pitch, a study in exaggeration and
tableau, with an overemphasis in delivery and posture unusual in the late-1950s
SF-horror cycle. “To Edgar, everything was larger than life,” Shirley Ulmer
230 Robert Skotak

commented when asked about the scene. “He embroidered everything, his stag-
ing, everything. He really and truly saw everything bigger than it was, including
this. He projected that [idea], and his actors felt it, his cameraman felt it.”
Playing the dungeon scene as something “bigger” than it was, staging it as
a mental snake pit, Ulmer could correlate atomic testing with insanity.
But what should have been a successful culmination was seriously marred
by production problems. The “pit” turned out seriously underpopulated. Nine
mutants “able to fight” were originally to be hired to fill the scene; but for lack
of money or time, only four actors—Flournoy, Ravick, and two nonspeaking
extras—were brought in for the sequence. Hardly the threat to the entire citadel
the script intended. Worse, the required “monstrous” bald-head makeups are
completely unconvincing. Again, for reasons unknown, Jack Pierce was not
available to apply and blend the makeups he’d tested with great success prior to
production. In place of Pierce’s seamless bald application and the distorted ears
of the script, the production’s hairdresser was pressed to apply cheap, costume-
store rubber bald caps, which were wrinkled, ill fitting, and poorly blended.
Flournoy, who was to speak the lion’s share of “subhuman” dialogue in the
pit, gave it his best, bad makeup and all, delivering lines with intensity—half-
mad with rage, half in delirium. Now a respected dean at a major university,
he comments on this odd film experience with mixed feelings: “At the time . . .
I was on the production staff at WFAA-TV, Channel 8 in Dallas–Fort Worth,
mostly directing [commercials]. I had graduated from SMU with a baccalaure-
ate degree in Fine Arts as a theater major. I had been in many plays.”
But he was a bit unprepared for the more extreme realities of this particular
low-budget film production:
Given [this] theater background, what surprised me about Time Barrier [was
that] there was no rehearsal and very little run-through prior to shooting. I recall
being shocked that they were going to take the mutant scene in the pit without
much more than a brief, on-the-spot explanation of what the scene was going to
look like. It was even harder because none of us ever saw a full script, just the
pages we were working on.
I do recall trying to quickly work up a character based on what they were
telling us . . . [but] I [also] remember little about my makeup, except that I
was working at the TV station at the time, trying to balance schedules, getting
quickly into and out of mutant character. The makeup was a mess, a greenish-
brown color, as I recall, something like axle grease. Jack Pierce was not involved
in anything having to do with the mutants.

Says Clarke:
The mutants were “little theater” actors and certainly were capable of being in
these scenes, playing the mutants like half-crazed human beings. Yes, I was very
 A Grave New World 231

concerned about the bad appearance of their makeup, but there was nothing we
could do about it by that time . . . I just hoped that the lighting was subdued
enough to cover the obvious. [Those bald heads] looked like bathing caps cov-
ered with makeup. Unfortunately, they showed. It was probably the poorest part
of the movie.

It was fortunate that screenwriter Pierce had flown in to his native Dallas and
dropped in to watch filming that day, as he volunteered to help fill in the nonex-
istent mutant “crowd.” Covered in green-goo makeup, he added his body to the
scene in progress, in what he called his “Hitchcock cameo.” There was another
plus: Pierce was bald and didn’t need the help of a fake rubber cap. The man
who had written the scene would become its only believable “mutant”!
For years he wondered what had happened to the other “Pierce” on the
film, the makeup expert capable of making the mutants truly memorable,
and realistic.
He never found out. Nor did anyone else.
That day was also the first day Arianné (“Arden”) Ulmer worked, in the role
of the femme fatale, Captain Markova. Her director father and script supervi-
sor mother gave particular attention to the performance of their “Markova”—
she tiptoes stealthily off after spying on the Captain; moves among the dark,
triangular rows; stabs a guard; and, like some fanatic revolutionary, frees the
mutants: “Hear me, fellow prisoners. You’re free. The citadel is yours. Hear
me, mutants. Come out of your pit of death. Our time of vengeance has come.
Follow me, soldiers of revenge. I’ll lead you to the Captain. To food. To free-
dom!” Says Ulmer Cipes:

Part of the reason Dad wanted me to do this film was to help me out with some
footage that would assist my agent with my screen career. I had been trained in
ballet and had also been trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in Lon-
don, and with Stella Adler in New York. All of my movements were to be cho-
reographed, mostly by me, with the approval of Dad and Meredith Nicholson,
the cameraman. This was also true of the ending [the mutant riot], to maintain
the same tone throughout the film.

This concern for tone was true, certainly, not only for her movements, but in
her line delivery as well, carefully matched to a “plan.” In calling out to the
mutants, she explains that her speech “was meant to be rather an inspirational
tone, which I tried to achieve using the rhythm of the St. Crispin’s Day speech
from Henry V . . . [from one] of our favorite personal recordings that were
available after the release of [Laurence Olivier’s] Henry V as a film.”
This proactive stance toward specific line delivery was somewhat out of
character for Ulmer, according to Clarke:
232 Robert Skotak

Edgar was not the kind of director like, say, Ida Lupino, who I’d worked for a
couple of times, who’d get into it as an actress or actor. Edgar was more con-
cerned with the camera movement, or whether the scene sounded right, or if there
was too much dialogue or whether this should be cut, etc. He was great on story,
great on keeping the picture moving—the pace—on keeping the camera moving
to create perspective, to give the impression of a much bigger picture than just
doing little head and shoulder shots and staying in one camera position.

True, line delivery was less a concern than the physical travel of the camera
to create space and shape within the frame, as well as the transitory dynamics
of objects and people across and through the frame. A case in point was that
cat-like, tiptoed prowl of Markova’s, dagger in hand, en route to liberating the
mutants. Ulmer Cipes notes,
Dad mostly choreographed the rhythms of my movement . . . not that much with
my lines, really. The movements, however, were very carefully choreographed.
[Since] I had a background in ballet, Dad knew he could utilize me that way. He
knew what foot I was going to land on and where the camera could be, where
the light could be, in particular in the “knifing” routine.

She describes another key to Markova’s character:

My hairdress in the film is a ballet dancer’s hairdress. At that time, ballet danc-
ers didn’t leave their hair loose. They always wore it in a chignon or braided and,
of course, the braid [which I had] was very Russian-looking. This again was the
anti-Russian feeling, which is a joke, because my parents, when I was a child, were
very pro-Russian at the time that the Russians were partners with the U.S. during
the war, before things turned around. We were always sending bundles to Russia
to be helpful. So Dad had an affinity for Russia. He had been there and knew the
Slavic world . . . so he was very much at home with Russian culture and music.
But the bugaboo at that moment—the making of Time Barrier—was defi-
nitely anticommunist.

Both Ulmer’s daughter and wife emphasize the preeminent place music and
sound held in his work, the audial aspect dominating his visuals at times but,
by and large, always subservient to the total “form.” Markova’s approach to
the mutants’ lair and their subsequent liberation derives much of its effec-
tiveness from the barely repressed “bedlam” beyond the dungeon bars. The
maniacal laughter and shrieks of his extras, thickened and layered through an
“echo chamber” in post, not only explains the need for the pit, but dramati-
cally foreshadows the mad vengeance to come. Says Shirley Ulmer:

The laughter was Edgar’s idea. It was put into the script. He needed that “bed-
lam” effect for when [Markova] was talking down the steps to the mutants. He
 A Grave New World 233

made them talk hysterically. I remember him talking to Arianné [about this] at
the time. He said, “Just a minute, darling. We’re going to put a sound track in
there. It’ll be like the sound of insects.” Edgar “heard” things like that as well
as visualized them.

Which is why scenes like this in the film play larger than they are, tilting to-
ward the representational through an accumulation of self-reinforcing visual
and audio brushstrokes.
The five-and-a-half-page pit scene—Allison’s interrogation, the fight, the
stabbing of the guard, and the liberation—was, remarkably, set up and shot
entirely within four hours! Next, the “dungeon hallway” became, with a quick
re-dress, a tunnel leading off the decontamination chamber, for earlier scenes
of Allison’s arrival. Then into the chamber itself, as neat a re-creation of sci-
ence-fiction pulp illustration as one could imagine. Ulmer moves through the
action quickly, encapsulating in tableau Allison’s sudden Kafkaesque role,
centering him in a convergence of angles, and strapping him inside an over-
size bell jar, the focal point of an unspeaking judgmental circle that is armed
with a mystery ray. He is a radioactive pariah, a futuristic boy in a bubble. As
with the pit, the combined efforts of art director Fegte and cinematographer
Nicholson, under Ulmer’s hand, have created a stage of shadows and shapes
that, if cheap, establish the territory with visual shorthand. One gets, in an
instant, that this is the future; that it is hard, oppressive, and technological;
and that fate seems to orbit between the new captive and the young woman
who intervenes to free him.
The intersecting lines defined by lit and unlit planes help place, group, or
separate characters like chess pieces, the very superstructure that shapes their
world focusing their importance as well as insignificance.
Achieving the lighting effects was a major challenge for Time Barrier’s
cameraman, Nicholson. Before this, he’d worked with the second unit on the
epic chariot race in Ben Hur, where he had his pick of crew, equipment, and
monetary resources. Here, every one of those things was nearly nonexistent,
and every penny was in question. Ingenuity, instead, was the call of the day.
Nicholson comments on his interplay with Ulmer:

We didn’t have drawings. There wasn’t time for that! What we did was, we
stayed late and talked it over in the evening. We’d go over all the angles and
carefully work it out with Ulmer the night before. I liked him because he always
knew what he was going after.
Those sets were simple, but you could move them around and make one set
look like a lot of different places, with lighting too. And I really tried to re-light
them in different ways to create greater changes yet. We’d use soft light [as in
the woman’s bedroom] and hard light for other scenes. For that [mutant] pit,
234 Robert Skotak

Edgar wanted me to light that to create a “spooky” effect. For a lot of this, I had
to take the fresnels off my lights to get those hard shadows, but then we’d need
a lot more light.

This was to cast, for instance, the shadows of the mutants’ clawing hands up
onto the walls.
Shirley Ulmer notes that the film’s stark “cubistic lighting” came from
earlier days in her husband’s career. “Edgar was executing Schüfftan’s ideas
on this picture. This expressionistic look could never have been done in color;
Time Barrier could never have been shot in color, artistically.”
The production went into extended hours on day 8 with nine pages of
long-winded expository dialogue, falling mainly to Bekassy and Van Dreelen.
Here, in the engineering lab, they lay out the complex back-history of the
world since 1960, as well as the “how” of Allison’s sixty-four-year time jump.
It was a very stressful day, and the stress is visible in Clarke’s uncomfortable
performance, as in his earlier scenes with Morgan. The problem this day was
as follows: Bekassy had difficulty remembering his dialogue, due in part to
the lack of rehearsal time. “We did maybe ten or twelve takes,” Clarke recalls.
“That was a lot since we usually did no more than three! [Stephen] was wor-
ried sick he’d blow a line and delay the schedule,” especially during one of
Ulmer’s extended dolly setups. Considering the film’s budget, pushing the
schedule was never an option. Falling behind would mean script pages would
be torn out to make up for lost time, and Ulmer, by all counts, would never
have stood for that.
Bekassy began to perspire heavily, so much so that he had to play parts of
the scene with his arms folded across his chest!
On the second-to-last day, the insert walls were removed from the standing
pyramid group to create the “major junction area in the citadel,” as described
in the script: “A huge chamber, a junction area of a complex tunnel network. It
is built on several levels, connected by ramps. The walls and ceiling are angu-
lar, carved of natural stone combined with concrete reinforcements, creating
a modern, abstract impression.”
Much of this was greatly simplified. The notion of levels, ramps, and
natural stone could not be practically realized. But it was possible to create
a reasonable amount of scope by opening out all the pyramids for scenes of
Allison’s first views of the underworld; various establishing angles of the si-
lent population moving about; and, ultimately and especially, the mutant riot
at the end of the film. Lighting, dolly tracking, and composition would imply
greater variety.
Flournoy, who, as one of the mutants, was to romp through this main junc-
tion in the riot scenes, observes:
 A Grave New World 235

When I reported for work out at Fair Park, the sets were already built and shoot-
ing was underway. I had studied set design and helped build sets. The upside-
down pyramids, the repeated pattern of triangles, the spare angular lines, were
striking to see, very otherworldly, but quite dysfunctional. The cast and crew
were always ducking to keep from hitting their heads and had to pick up their
feet to move through the openings which served as doors. It was an economical
approach, however, for [Ulmer] was able to use the same basic set over and over
from different angles with minimal changes.
This underground world which Ulmer created was a graphic representation
of the extremes of order and chaos, at least as I read it. The rigid, mechanistic
world of the Citadel power elite—citizens and guards in tailored outfits march-
ing at 45-degree angles to each other, in contrast to the slimy dark forces kept
locked away in the pit.

At the same time, he maintains that certain aspects didn’t gel:

As it turns out, the ordered world was managed much better than the world of
chaos. The way the story was told offered little to help the viewer understand the
smoldering underside of that society, or even fear it . . . Better to have left what
was beyond the gate [in the pit] to viewer imagination, using sound effects, let-
ting the horrors of the underworld register on the faces of the talent [rather than]
using too few mutants and borrowed footage . . . Why the mutant sequences on
the stairs were done with so few actors, I can only guess.

In theory, the impression of more was all that mattered within the kind of
representational approach Ulmer took to the production. His daughter, privy
to her father’s overview, comments:

Dad chose in this film—not in all of them, but in this film—a real theatrical
quality, because it was a minimalistic study, almost a German Expression film,
unlike a Detour, where he’d go for a very natural quality. This [Time Barrier] is
much more stylistic, and it was looked at from that vantage point [by Dad].

In the big junction Ulmer stages his climactic revolt, not only with a widened
frame but also—in order to allow better coverage—by taking advantage of
this production’s first use of a second camera. The interplay of humans on the
run, fleeing and fighting, and the tumbles, flying fists, gunfire, and shrieking
laughter is caught from both floor-mounted and dolly-track cameras, and it
results in a kind of ballet-mania that makes something energetic and fluid out
of the small number of extras (production paperwork indicates twenty-eight)
and pitifully smaller number of mutants (five). Critic Myron Meisel long
promoted Time Barrier as among Ulmer’s best, singling out not only its geo-
metric configurations but its deliberate rhythms, similar to Kagemusha. And
here, in this riot, those rhythms come most to the fore. In fact they are staged
236 Robert Skotak

with a degree of dark glee, as the militant mutants deliver on their earlier
promises to “kill, kill, kill all of you!”
This was Red Morgan’s chance to redeem, in part, his nonperformance,
translating Ulmer’s battle plan into a series of stunt gags and exchanges. Ac-
cording to Ulmer Cipes,

None of this happened extemporaneously. Dad had designed this so that [groups
of people] should be moving a certain way and other groups should come through
[another way]. He wanted to have some interesting fights. Again, we had a really
small cast, and it had to be choreographed to give you impact and action because
you’re dealing with so few people. It was all deliberate, especially all the scenes
with extras running through the corridors and so on. It was all highly designed.

Allison, Trirene, Kruse, and Bourman slip through the battle scene, tracked
by Ulmer’s gliding camera. Vignettes play out: women, seized by hysterical
mutants, spin to the ground and are ravaged; mutants and “mutes” tumble
head over heels; guards mow down mutants; mutants spring into the air.
Flournoy, a highly active participant in that action, observes,

The mutant attack was well-orchestrated. Lots of flowing movement, plausible en-
counters with guards and citizens. I don’t remember much of the specifics except
that we were very physical, which led to an unfortunate incident: In overpowering
a guard, I took away his gun and hit him in the mouth with the butt, knocking his
front teeth out. I felt terrible about it, but in the melee it happened.

Clarke recalls another type of mishap:

In this fight sequence, one of the extras would bump into the pyramids and the
canvas material would “waver” like it was in the wind, and the shot would have
to be redone . . . The falls these guys took in the action shots were tough, because
the floors were concrete and falling on that was tough.
Their action was directed by Red Morgan. He did a fine job of the stunts and
of making us a good climactic fight sequence, with as much action as he pos-
sibly could . . . I don’t think Edgar gave too much [stunt] direction other than
want[ing] the mutants to be as crazy in their appearance, as demented in their
actions as they could be. His direction was more involved in creating the shots,
moving the camera, in his pacing of the scenes.
He used the dolly quite a bit . . . which would sometimes include panning
movements to give the picture a bigger feeling [because these were] techniques
used on bigger pictures.

On Saturday, 18 April, day 10, the last scenes in the Centennial Building were
captured. Bourman betrays Kruse, then threatens Allison. The two fight. Tri-
rene is accidentally shot . . .
 A Grave New World 237

Clarke could barely move in his pressure-laced high-altitude suit, but “I

had to do my own fight stuff since we didn’t have enough money to hire a
stunt double for me.” Besides, no one else would fit in the suit!
Clarke and Van Dreelen took away painful memories of skinned knees, sore
elbows, and tumbles on hard concrete. There was no other way to shoot the
scene in the time available.
Clarke and Tompkins played her dying scene in a set with the look and feel
of a ’40s melodrama, noir shadows against deco geometrics, with Nicholson
shooting through gauzy “romantic” diffusion. Tompkins, lying with choco-
late “blood” running on her side, struggled to play at “dying,” and she later
recalled fighting to control her breathing and trying to keep her eyelids from
fluttering. Again there was no time for multiple retakes.
The overall tone is a reflection of Ulmer’s lifelong admitted schism, the
wedding of the theatrical, the melodramatic, with the meaningful: the meld-
ing of real-life concerns with the artifice of Germanic romanticism.
Ulmer’s days, early in his career, on four-day, Yiddish-language shoots, and
with nonexistent crews on “black” locations and in faux Ukranian country-
sides in New Jersey, represented true independent filmmaking: filmmaking
by the skin of the teeth, budgetless but undaunted, armed solely with a camera
and creative chutzpah. And so Ulmer found himself returning to—or reduced
to—these roots at the very end of Beyond the Time Barrier: The production
had wrapped out of Fair Park without having filmed the key scene, the justi-
fication of all that had come before, the shock reveal of the inexplicably aged
test pilot and his fade-out warning, ostensibly about the “cosmic plague”—in
reality the Bomb. “[My dad] was fascinated with fear of the bomb,” his
daughter emphasizes. “This is what this story was about.”
With a skeleton crew and no set, Ulmer was forced to film the end scene in
true “independent film channel” style—home-movie, handmade-movie style,
using a single cameraman, a couple of lights, and a bed borrowed from a
previous location. The scene was arranged to resemble a section of a hospital
room, but it was shot in the cheap motel they were staying at.
Elevating this beyond a homemade movie were the talents of legendary
makeup master Jack Pierce, tasked, on the last day, with “aging up” thirty-
nine-year-old Clarke to an eighty-plus-year-old man. Says Clarke:
My old-age makeup was applied like Pierce did with Karloff on Frankenstein,
by beginning about four in the morning. He started with what he called ‘rice
paper,’ to give me a crinkly look. He applied it in small pieces over my entire
face to give it a real wrinkled look. The rice paper was applied with spirit gum to
stick it to my skin. It made my skin contract. The paper was thinner than tissue
paper. You could literally see through it. He put that all over my face and then did
a makeup job of skin color over it and used a whitener on my hair.
238 Robert Skotak

The major’s pitiful end condition is not entirely a cruel act of fate; it is also
a credible key toward opening up an alternate course of history. Through
no fault of his own, Major Allison has been robbed of his “best years.” By
depicting this with a degree of physical verisimilitude, and urging Clarke’s
performance, Ulmer’s last images help step the film up from the intermit-
tent serial shenanigans and quasi-villainous “melodrama of the future”
episodes.
Ulmer needed the scene to work if his film was to have any real purpose.
Clarke remembers the director prodding, almost taunting him, pushing for
performance with a capital P:

I’ll say this about Edgar, insofar as his artistic appreciation of others. It was hard
to get a compliment. [But] at the end of that scene, he got a little gooseflesh on
his arms, and he kind of rubbed them with a shudder and said, “That’s the first
time you’ve made me feel this picture.” He was trying to compliment me in his
way, saying that I’d touched him in an emotional way with my acting. And I
was flattered really, even if it was kind of a left-handed compliment, because I
respected him very much.

Filming was finally completed. Remarkably, they’d worked the entire produc-
tion on a certain amount of faith that the footage was acceptable, since all
of the exposed negative had been shipped to Consolidated Film Labs in Los
Angeles for development, sight unseen. There had been no dailies.

POST-DRAMATIC STRESS

Although Time Barrier and Transparent Man weren’t filmed concurrently—

contrary to oft-repeated rumor—they were most definitely cut that way.
Editor Jack Ruggerio huddled with the director and the two films at General
Service Studios for several weeks following the director’s return to Los An-
geles after completion of the second film.
There was a certain amount of urgency hanging over the editing rooms. Ul-
mer had made a deal with an Italian producer to take on the epic tale of Han-
nibal, to be photographed in Europe. Ruggerio had to work fast. Ulmer’s input
had to be grabbed quickly before the director disappeared into the Alps.
Ulmer brought his notions of conceptual and physical geometrics, which
had informed the entire shoot, to the editorial process, striving to string the
individual pieces together in a manner somehow consistent with the film’s
overall scheme. To accomplish this, he turned to a simple, old idea that had
been more or less out of fashion since the 1940s: optical “wipes” in the shape
of triangles, he felt, could be used to segue between various episodes in the
 A Grave New World 239

future world sequence. It was a very “so-old-it’s-new-again” gambit, though

some critics were quick to jump on it as more “old” than “bold.”
Ulmer worked with versatile composer Darrell Calker to produce the wide-
ranging score, military to modern to melancholy. Ulmer’s passion for music
encouraged Calker and the sound-effects editor to experiment with electronic
tones, alternating with classical cellos and violins. If a bit thin and creaky on
occasion, the score underlines Ulmer’s changing time frames and mood—at
times salutatory, at others forlorn, warm, resigned, and, finally, sad—the emo-
tion by which the director characterized the entire film.
With Time Barrier almost completed, Ulmer moved off to handle Hanni-
bal’s march, likely confident that his cinematic “house” was in order.
But . . .

PLAN B: AIP

Shortly after Ulmer left the project, his film was to take an unplanned left
turn down a path as unpredictable as that of his lead character: Seeking
to promote his two features, executive producer John Miller, according to
producer Clarke, “became enamored of an old time movie pitchman named
Kroeger Babb, and bought into his scheme.” Miller was persuaded to invest
tens of thousands of dollars in a “sure-fire” promotional campaign involving
giveaway prizes. Babb’s plan required massive region-to-region saturation
advertising, and an investment of over $100,000, and it was implemented with
multiple bookings in Oregon.
In the dead of winter.
Nobody came.
Complete wash.
Within weeks, Miller’s company, having bet the house against this “sure
win,” folded, deeply in debt. He was forced to turn over ownership of both of
his films to Consolidated Film Labs, for nonpayment of bills.
The lab, in turn, immediately put the film on the auction block, hoping to
offset their own losses with a quick sale. For the amount owed against the
two films, $75,000 each, that ne plus ultra purveyor of exploitation movies,
American International Pictures, quickly acquired distribution rights.
Ulmer was away and unaware that his film was now to undergo an AIP
makeover. Retaining editor Ruggerio, AIP executives ordered immediate cuts.
Establishing scenes with officials shot at Carswell were first to go. Noting
several places to “open the film up,” primarily to provide fodder for print
ads, posters, and trailers, AIP approached Howard Anderson’s effects studio
to create several new establishing shots. Consequently, what had originally
240 Robert Skotak

been a scripted shot of a giant, isolated solar-power dish became a vast com-
plex resembling—though not intended to be—a city. Elsewhere, in place of
a crudely made, live-action prop representing the elevator to the engineering
lab, AIP commissioned a matte painting. To disguise the lack of “mutants,”
the AIP execs inserted stock shots of a dungeon full of shaggy “lepers” taken
from another of the company’s recent acquisitions, Fritz Lang’s Journey to the
Lost City—not Island of Lost Souls, as has been printed elsewhere. Remark-
ably, the eye-popping mismatch between Ulmer’s clean geometrics and the
decayed stone of Lang’s film, between the hirsute “barbarians” of the latter
and the sterile, clean-shorn mutant inmates of the former, wasn’t seen as a
problem by AIP.
The most significant alteration came, however, in AIP’s extensive overhaul
of the film’s structure. Pierce’s first draft had told the story in a straightforward,
A-B-C fashion, which Ulmer had made Pierce alter into a flashback structure
during preproduction, presumably with the idea that a mystery at the top of the
story would add tension. That was how he shot the film. But now AIP saw fit
to restructure it back to Pierce’s first-draft, linear telling—shearing it, in the
process, from nearly 80 minutes to its current 75-minute running time.

BELIEVE IN ME

Only a handful of people in the world—those few who happened to live in

Oregon in 1959 and attended a screening—chanced to see Ulmer’s intended
version of Beyond the Time Barrier. What has circulated since is AIP’s “re-
take.” If somewhat off-visioned, no one doubts it still remains an Edgar Ulmer
film—all things, and contributors, considered.
Despite the warmth of some of its on-screen participants, namely, Clarke,
Tompkins, and Sokoloff, a coldness hangs like morgue air throughout.
Critics—those who bothered or noticed at all, and, at that, only in later
years—tended to focus on its despairing zeitgeist, earning it few supporters.
Yet another nightmarish Ulmerian world, constructed from his presumed dark
impulse to trap his zombied characters in one more blind alley of fate, in one
more pointless maze, where they can be drained of volition and left in some
state of ignominy. Indeed, there is some reasonable support to that intent con-
tained in the last slowed frames of Time Barrier, which hold poor Allison as if
in helpless seizure, staring into the viewer’s eyes with black terror, a possible
director’s vision of “how things are.”
Then there are the major’s parting words to the grieving Supreme: “No, it is
not the end. If we believe, there is always hope . . . You will not live in a world
of darkness.” These are Ulmer’s words in Pierce’s script, the transcendence of
 A Grave New World 241

his dark German romanticism, the assertion of will amidst accidents in time,
perplexing manipulations, and other victimizations.

FINAL TALLY

For producer Robert Clarke, Time Barrier left mixed emotions. There were
the moments of inspiration working with Edgar Ulmer, the cast, and the crew.
There was the satisfaction of having created. And yet there was not insignifi-
cant pain and regret:

We were constantly concerned about money. I can’t overemphasize the budget

problems that were rampant throughout the [making of the film] . . . For in-
stance, the machinery in the background of the Engineering Lab was just a huge
photograph! We couldn’t afford the set! If we’d had another $50,000, it would
have made a tremendous difference in the scope of the coverage and allowed us
to get some exteriors so obviously needed to give the feeling that we were actu-
ally underground. We could’ve set up something outside to shoot my approach
to the city, but we didn’t have the money for that type of construction.

And worse were the financial and career losses that followed, for which there
was never to be any compensation: “It was a terrible disappointment. I broke
my neck to make the picture and then was cheated completely. It was a ter-
rible lesson.” And it was one from which he was never to fully recover, but
one he never regretted.
Arthur Pierce continued to write scripts in a similar vein in the decades that
followed, struggling often to survive in his favored genre, until his death in
1987. But Time Barrier always held a special place for him. His most gratify-
ing recollection? Seeing gigantic displays promoting the film years later in
Hong Kong, and crowds lined up around the block to see it. Regarding Ulmer,
he says: “[In spite of our battles,] he did everything I would’ve done. He fol-
lowed the script to the letter . . . We had some good elements in it. With a little
more money and color, we could’ve made a real classic.”
Shirley Ulmer couldn’t have disagreed more regarding the notion of color.
In her opinion, the film required black and white, not only for its graphic
qualities to work, but to enhance the serious tone which, she stresses, her
husband had sought—had sought in the service of a strong message:

Edgar was very concerned about [the effects of] radiation at the time because
of all the [atomic] testing that was going on . . . That was fearful to him. . . .
He was concerned about this, and that is part of what interested him about this
film. It was his theme. He was always so unhappy when audiences didn’t get
242 Robert Skotak

his message. He was trying to say something here and was grateful that some
people got it.
Edgar went to sleep with these pictures. That’s why they still live after all
these years. After all, these were all cheap little nothing deals. There was no real
money in them.
His pictures were his children.

Through actor Vladimir Sokoloff, whom her dad loved, according to Ulmer
Cipes, Ulmer was able to convey much of the feeling of descending dark-
ness. Through Sokoloff, he shifted the tone from melodrama to something
resembling real drama, equating personal loss with world loss. Ultimately, his
daughter notes, “Dad felt that sadness was important in telling the story.”
From his few comments on record, it is clear that Ulmer was attracted to
both theme and image in the story, and to the potential for the ineffable inter-
play between the physical and the emotional—an indulgence extended well
beyond the limits of most of its B-movie kin. The film attempts to triangulate
a relationship, if tenuous, between shape, theme, and emotion, to make that
which is otherwise composed of “pieces” speak as one.
Significantly, he spoke of it specifically as a “terror” film, referring
notably to the terror springing from mutation, depicted by the loss of hear-
ing, speech, and the ability to reproduce, and, in the case of the mutants,
the descent into madness. It is the terror of humankind forced to live in
a virtual tomb: “We have returned to the cave,” the Supreme asserts with
profound sadness, “where Man first lived on Earth. We have returned to our
birthplace to die.”
But through Allison’s pledge to “belief,” underlined by Ulmer through the
Supreme’s reborn faith, amplified by the sincere melancholy of Sokoloff ’s
persona, the director yields his fatalism to the deeper sentiment of survival.
The pilot flies off to engage history. Reintegrating with the ghost of his for-
mer self—shown as the merging of the dual X-80s in space, the future and the
past, the twin avatars of “the Possible and the Impossible”—Allison overtakes
Fate. Having fulfilled his duty, he leaves the rest up to us.
“I believe” are the last words from the future.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Eisenschitz, Bernard, and Jean-Claude Romer. “Entretien avec Edgar G. Ulmer,”

Midi-Minuit Fantastique 13 (November 1965): 1–14.

This chapter also draws excerpts from interviews I conducted between 1976 and
2008 with Edgar Ulmer’s collaborators, as listed below, on the film Beyond the
 A Grave New World 243

Time Barrier: Robert Clarke, producer/actor; Arthur Pierce, screenwriter/assistant

editor/extra; Shirley Ulmer, script supervisor; Arianné Ulmer Cipes, actor; Ernst
Fegte, art director; Meredith Nicholson, cinematographer; Darlene Tompkins, ac-
tor; Don Flournoy, actor; Russell Marker, actor; Malcolm Thomson, extra; Roger
George, special effects; Robert Maden Jr., son of executive producer.
 15
Invisibility and Insight

The Unerasable Trace of

The Amazing Transparent Man
Alec Charles

The year is 1960 and the setting is a remote and threatening homestead—
haunted house meets American Gothic. The narrative’s crucial backstory in-
volves the murder of a mother. The film is shot in black and white, and centers
around acts of theft, absurd disguise, and extraordinary murder. The story starts
with a thief on the run: a thief who ends up dying in the isolated house. During
the course of the narrative, the forces of law and order lurk in the background,
at once threatening and obtuse. One might, of course, be forgiven for mistak-
ing this film for Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho—rather than Edgar G. Ulmer’s The
Amazing Transparent Man. Ulmer’s film charts the unlikely adventures of one
Joey Faust (Douglas Kennedy—an actor who had, incidentally, appeared in
three episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents between 1956 and 1959), a profes-
sional safecracker who is sprung from jail by prospective master criminal Major
Paul Krenner (James Griffith), his moll Laura Matson (Marguerite Chapman),
and his sidekick Julian (Red Morgan). Krenner has kidnapped the daughter
of physicist Peter Ulof (Ivan Triesault), in order to force Dr. Ulof to conduct
experiments in invisibility. Ulof and Krenner turn Faust invisible, and, on their
behalf, Faust conducts a number of audacious robberies. Krenner’s ambition is
to create an invincible army of invisible men, but his plans are thwarted when
Faust—urged by Ulof—eventually turns against his paymaster in order to save
the world from his transparent tyranny. Faust and Krenner die together in the
ensuing conflagration; Ulof and his daughter Maria escape.
The Amazing Transparent Man opens with a shot of a wailing siren, a shot
reminiscent not of Psycho but of Hitchcock’s very first talking picture, Black-
mail (1929). This is not the only influence of Hitchcock’s oeuvre apparent
in Ulmer’s picture. Echoing a technique exploited by many of Hitchcock’s

245
246 Alec Charles

films—and most obviously by Psycho—The Amazing Transparent Man repeat-

edly explores and subverts uses of subjective camera work in order to challenge
the moral and psychical stance of the audience. It is a film of unusual ambigu-
ity: although it may be viewed as an ostensibly proselytizing tale of the eventual
redemption of a man called Faust, it is at the same time a film in which the
most morally acceptable character, indeed the drama’s moral heart—Dr. Peter
Ulof—to some extent represents a reincarnation of Dr. Josef Mengele.
Ulof is a former Nazi scientist, a character responsible for the death of his
own wife, a man who seeks atonement in the salvation first of his daughter
and then of the entire human race: “My wife had died of experiments I was
forced to perform on her in a concentration camp . . . all my patients wore
hoods. I couldn’t see their faces. I didn’t know my wife was one of them.”
Ulof’s wife became his victim because her identity was hidden from him—
because she became invisible to him; and his punishment is to reenact this
cycle of invisibility and moral blindness. Ulof has lost his own soul in what
Holocaust survivor Primo Levi (42) calls the “indecipherable inferno” of the
Final Solution—a process which sought to destroy the souls of its perpetra-
tors and its victims alike: “their souls are dead” (57). It is only through the
course of Ulmer’s narrative, and specifically through Ulof ’s relationship with
Ulmer’s protagonist—not Josef but Joey Faust—that the scientist may regain
his own humanity, his own soul.
If high modernity took place in, as T. S. Eliot put it in his Four Quartets,
“the years l’entre deux guerres” (26), then the postmodern period may be
seen as falling between two holocausts: the holocausts of the Second World
War (Auschwitz, Belsen, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden) and the apocalyptic
nuclear (or, in today’s terms, terroristic) holocaust to come. This much is
evidenced in the preoccupations of some of the most significant American
and British authors and filmmakers of the period: Kurt Vonnegut and Martin
Amis, for example, have written of both past and future holocausts; indeed
one might suggest that postmodernity seems to lie somewhere in between
Schindler’s List and Dr. Strangelove.
It should come as no surprise therefore that Edgar G. Ulmer—an Eastern
European Jewish American filmmaker—might be alerted by his heritage
to posit these themes within his work; and The Amazing Transparent Man
in fact quite overtly presents a discussion as to whether the proliferation of
weapons of mass destruction is worth the risk of that final holocaust. The film
takes place in an atmosphere of heightened cold war nuclear tensions: it was
released three years after the death of Joseph McCarthy and the launch of
Sputnik, two years after the United States accidentally lost a hydrogen bomb
off the coast of Georgia, the year after Fidel Castro came to power, and two
years before the Cuban Missile Crisis.
 Invisibility and Insight 247

Perhaps most significantly, however, it was released just three years after
Jack Arnold’s similarly titled The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957), another
tale of nuclear angst—a fable of a man who is mutated, alienated, and made
“tyrannical” and “monstrous,” and who is eventually destroyed by radiation.
Specifically, that film’s protagonist is destroyed by a radioactive cloud that
mushrooms toward him across the ocean—a cloud, perhaps, from one of the
United States’ atmospheric nuclear tests (such as 1954’s notorious detona-
tion on Bikini Atoll), tests that were to be outlawed by the Partial Test Ban
Treaty of 1963. The Incredible Shrinking Man’s Scott Carey (Grant Williams)
imagines a world in which humanity is to be reduced (as he has been) to
virtual nothingness by “other bursts of radiation, other clouds drifting across
seas and continents”—and yet this bleak vision of atomic atomization finally
holds for Carey some possibility of redemption: “Smaller than the smallest,
I meant something too. To God there is no zero. I still exist.” The apocalyp-
tic tenor of The Incredible Shrinking Man—as of The Amazing Transparent
Man—is met and countered by an almost Messianic fervor. America’s nuclear
paranoia is balanced (and perhaps at the same time enhanced) by its sense that
it is a nation blessed—and therefore due to be redeemed—by God.
Although the title of Ulmer’s film perhaps reflects the success of The Incredi-
ble Shrinking Man, it may actually have been forced upon Ulmer by Universal’s
ownership of The Invisible Man (1933). Yet just as F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu
seems to benefit from the fact that, for copyright reasons, it could not call itself
Dracula, so this film’s recourse to transparency rather than invisibility (even
though the character is patently—transparently—invisible rather than transpar-
ent) opens a set of oppositions and ambivalences (between transparency and
opacity), which the film repeatedly embraces in its quest for individual and
societal self-knowledge. Its protagonist is, in the words of Ulof, “a man who has
unlocked every door except the one to his own soul. Now he has the key.”
The Amazing Transparent Man may be considered by many to be flawed to
the point of absurdity—and yet that very absurdity, as a defining characteris-
tic of the postmodern alienation in which the film is grounded, may not be ar-
tistically inappropriate. Christopher Marlowe, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,
and H. G. Wells meet Luis Buñuel, James Whale, and Hitchcock: the result is
as disturbing and as interesting as one might expect it to be.

PERSPECTIVE AND PERSPICACITY

The film’s subversion of subjective camera work and editing techniques

(sometimes intentional, sometimes apparently inadvertent) adds to these dis-
turbing ambiguities in ways that contradict the classical structures of cinema
248 Alec Charles

Figure 15.1. Melodramatic irony: Ulmer’s film encompasses classical tragedy

and postmodern absurdity. Courtesy of Arianné Ulmer Cipes (private collection).
 Invisibility and Insight 249

narrative (as depicted by Christian Metz, 63), and, more specifically, recall
Slavoj Žižek’s readings of Hitchcock’s use of his camera to disrupt conven-
tions and expectations and to posit his audience within sites of alienation and
monstrosity (249).
Ulmer’s protagonist’s invisibility is inconstant, even capricious. Faust be-
comes partially—then fully—visible in the middle of robbing a bank (an act by
which he follows in the footsteps of Claude Rains’s original invisible man) and
flees to his getaway car, in which Laura—Ulmer’s film-noir femme fatale—is
waiting for him. “What’s the matter?” she asks—as if she has not noticed he is
no longer invisible—as if his invisibility itself is somehow invisible.
Shortly thereafter, Faust announces that he has had enough of the situation.
“You just can’t go off and leave me,” Laura says—at which point he again
turns invisible. It is almost as if his invisibility were psychosomatic, or at least
triggered by his psychological state and by the exigencies of the plot. “Why
do I keep appearing and disappearing?” Faust asks. The cause of his visual
inconstancy is surely his moral and emotional ambiguity.
The film’s visual ambivalence is embraced by its subjective camera work.
Ulmer draws attention to the ambiguity of the camera’s subjectivity when, near
the start of the film, Faust throws a sheet over the camera. (Ulmer performs
a similar effect in The Black Cat, when the hero—David Manners—throws
his jacket over the camera, and then pulls a blanket from the lens as he tucks
himself up in bed.) The blatant subjectivity—indeed the self-conscious falli-
bility—of Ulmer’s camera work is at its most obvious and incongruous when,
toward the end of the tale, security agent Drake (Edward Erwin) points his
binoculars at the scene of the film’s climactic explosion. We can tell we are
seeing through Drake’s binoculars because of the binocular-shaped aperture
through which we are shown the scene; yet, unlike most binoculars (at least,
unlike most binoculars in the early 1960s), Drake’s pair have a marvelous ca-
pacity to cut from angle to angle and from shot to shot—even from long shot
to close-up—as if they were showing a preedited piece of film.
The apparent clumsiness of this piece of direction is not necessarily as
accidental as it may at first seem. On a number of occasions throughout the
film, Ulmer is repeatedly playful—even deceptive—with his camera work,
as if to emphasize the visual ambiguities of the scenario. It is notable that
Ulmer’s emphasis on subjective camera work begins immediately before
Faust becomes invisible: as the invisibility machine prepares to do its work,
we see the world for the first time through Faust’s eyes. It is as if Ulmer is
stressing the relationship between vision and visibility, and therefore between
invisibility and an uncertainty of actual and moral vision.
Indeed, on several occasions, Ulmer stresses that Faust’s invisibility is not
even visible to the camera itself. Shortly after Faust has first been turned in-
250 Alec Charles

visible, he speaks to Major Krenner; we see Krenner from the invisible man’s
point of view. The camera—which, we assume, still represents Faust’s per-
spective—pans to a door some distance away. The door opens; and Faust (ap-
parently—that is, nonapparently) goes through. The film’s self-consciously
subjective camera has been shown to be fallible: it no longer shows the invis-
ible man’s point of view (as both the camera and the audience had assumed
it still did); Faust has moved invisibly away, and this is something which the
camera has failed to see.
Shortly afterward, Ulmer repeats this trick: he presents a shot of Krenner,
as Faust speaks to him, from Faust’s point of view—except that this time it’s
a window (rather than a door) behind Krenner which then opens in the middle
of this pseudosubjective shot. It is not just that Faust is invisible: Ulmer seems
to be telling us that even his perspective is invisible.
Of course, one reason for this piece of camera work might simply be that
the camera itself was static: it was able to pan around, but not to track for-
ward. There is a similar sequence, however, when Faust enters the vault of a
bank, in which the camera appears to show the scene from the protagonist’s
point of view—panning around and also tracking forward until it reaches a
doorway, where it stops. Again (perhaps because the camera was unable to
fit through the doorway—it was only twelve years earlier that Hitchcock had
been obliged to lift the walls of his studio set for the camera to glide through,
in order to maintain the single-shot flow of Rope), it seems that the protago-
nist has moved on ahead of the camera, as we see through the doorway a bag
of cash rising from the table in the next room.
Tracking shots are remarkably scarce in The Amazing Transparent Man—
and when they do happen (as when the camera follows the invisible Faust
away from the nuclear vault), they only last a second or two. Shot/reverse-shot
sequences are similarly rare: most dialogue scenes are shot in long tableaux.
The film’s limited budget and fortnight filming schedule no doubt prompted
this technique; and yet it works surprisingly well, complementing the narra-
tive’s atmosphere of alienation.
One notable use of the shot/reverse-shot formula comes during the emo-
tionally defining dialogue between Faust and Laura right at the heart of the
film. Yet the camera does not—as is usually the case—assume each charac-
ter’s approximate position. Here, the “reverse” shot is not in fact the precise
reverse of the first shot—it appears to come at 60 (rather than 180) degrees
from the original shot. It appears that the camera has been positioned at a
single point—the third point of an equilateral triangle which it forms with
Faust and Laura, as it cuts and turns from the one to the other—and, rather
than meeting each other’s eyes, it is at this point that the two characters’ sight
lines approximately converge. Of course, this would have helped to reduce
 Invisibility and Insight 251

filming time; yet again it provokes a somewhat disquieting effect, as if the

two characters are not quite looking at each other. This failure of their gazes
to meet suggests a deeper disconnection; it also continues to bare the film’s
devices—in a quasi-Brechtian effort of alienation—by indicating the pres-
ence of the camera itself.
Cinema constantly emphasizes, and at the same time erases, the subjec-
tivity of the filmmaking process. By installing the camera in the place of a
character, the spectator comes to assume that the camera is underpinning that
character’s subjectivity, rather than usurping it. The shot/reverse-shot tech-
nique is central to this process. As Kaja Silverman writes,

the viewing subject, unable to sustain for long its belief in the autonomy of the
cinematic image, demands to know whose gaze controls what it sees. The shot/
reverse shot formation is calculated to answer that question in such a manner
that the cinematic illusion remains intact . . . The gaze which directs our look
seems to belong to a fictional character rather than to the camera. (202)

Yet here, the exact opposite process takes place: the cinematic convention is
laid bare, and the effect is both disruptive and disturbing. François Truffaut
once praised Alfred Hitchcock’s camera work for being “almost invisible”
(47)—here, conversely, we discover that the invisibility of the subject has
rendered the camera visible. The invisibility of Hitchcock’s camera work ren-
ders his subjects directly visible and apparently real—while the great director
remains at once aesthetically invisible and morally opaque—but it is the very
visibility of Ulmer’s direction that makes his technique so extraordinarily
transparent and his subjects so unnatural and unfathomable.

ALLUSIONS AND ARCHETYPES

Ulmer’s film is swathed in a convoluted web of cultural allusions. Could Jo-

seph Faust, for example, be named after the Austrian Canadian actor Joseph
Furst—a performer who went on to epitomize the eccentric scientist in a
series of television and film roles during the sixties and seventies? Probably
not. More convincing, however, are the film’s references to its director’s own
oeuvre, and to the classic narratives of fictive and filmic horror.
The Amazing Transparent Man echoes elements from some of Ulmer’s bet-
ter-known earlier works. Like The Black Cat (1934), the film features a cen-
tral European scientist scarred by his experiences of war; and, also like The
Black Cat, its narrative climaxes with its two rivals battling to the death in a
desolate house which then explodes. Like Detour (1945), it tells the tale of a
man on the run from the law and from his own conscience, a man whose flight
252 Alec Charles

from justice only exacerbates his criminality. But perhaps most significantly,
like Bluebeard (1944), The Amazing Transparent Man offers a self-conscious
tribute to the myth of Faust.
We may witness in Ulmer’s film a series—an interrelated sequence—of
literary and cinematic archetypes, or indeed a set of allusions to various
manifestations of a single archetype: that of the diabolically insane scien-
tist, Faustus or Faust (in Marlowe’s, Goethe’s and F. W. Murnau’s versions);
Frankenstein (in Mary Shelley’s and Whale’s versions); Dr. Jekyll (in Robert
Louis Stevenson’s and Rouben Mamoulian’s versions); and the invisible man
(in Wells’s and—again—Whale’s versions). These figures are encapsulated at
first within Ulmer’s Dr. Ulof and then within Joey Faust: indeed, insofar as
their possibilities of redemption are irrevocably intertwined, the relationship
between Ulof and Faust represents an amalgam of these different incarnations
of that one archetype. In naming his own invisible man Faust, Ulmer seems
directly to be pointing out the parallels between these related figures. “I’m
in hell . . . I have no soul,” laments Fredric March in Mamoulian’s film of
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931); and Ulmer’s Faust and Ulof share this im-
manently Faustian condition.
Margareta, the heroine of Murnau’s Faust (1926), gives birth to Faust’s son
in the snows of winter—at which point Murnau stresses his Christian allegory
by showing carol singers in front of a nativity scene, singing of the baby Jesus
born “in the depth of winter.” In comparing the birth of Faust’s son with the
birth of Jesus, Murnau posits Faust somewhere in between Joseph and God.
(Is not this, after all, Faust’s transgression: is not he, like Frankenstein, the
ordinary mortal, the Joseph, who would be God?) Ulmer’s Joey Faust is both a
Joseph and a Faust, an ordinary Joe who (in Ulof ’s words) “may some day be
declared a martyr . . . a man who sacrificed himself ”—a man who surrenders
his God-like powers in an act of Christ-like self-sacrifice.
In making these Faustian allusions explicit in his own tale of invisibility,
Ulmer also specifically exposes the Faust myth’s influence upon Whale’s
adaptation of Wells’s The Invisible Man (1933). Whale’s protagonist Griffin
(Claude Rains) speaks of having the “power to walk into the gold vaults of the
nations, into the secrets of kings, into the holy of holies”—and, while Ulmer’s
Faust strolls into bank vaults, Goethe’s Faust and Marlowe’s Faustus frater-
nize with monarchy. In fact, Marlowe’s Faustus actually penetrates the “holy
of holies”—the inner circle of the Pope. Moreover, Faustus enters the papal
chambers while remaining “invisible to all” (49)—beneath Mephistophilis’
magic girdle of invisibility.
Whale’s Griffin is a scientist who “meddled in things that man must leave
alone.” In that respect, he resembles Faustus or Faust—or, for that matter,
Shelley’s (or in fact Whale’s) Frankenstein. Like Faustus and Faust, Griffin is
 Invisibility and Insight 253

restless and capricious in the employment and enjoyment of his powers: he

doesn’t choose to rule the world, but for no apparent reason he causes a train
crash that kills a hundred people; and, when he robs a bank, he scatters his
loot in the street. These superhuman figures remain tormented by the “help-
less absurdity” (Wells 121) of their existence: they embody not only the angst
but also the ennui of modern being. Wells’s Griffin speaks of “the things a
man reckons desirable . . . no doubt invisibility made it possible to get them,
but it made it impossible to enjoy them when they are got” (121). Or, as Me-
phisto tells Faust in Murnau’s film: “Nothing satisfies you.”
These invisible men assume the very status of gods, insofar as God’s
power is to see all while remaining invisible—insofar as God is that which,
in Derrida’s words, “holds me in his gaze . . . while remaining inaccessible to
me” (33); yet the impossibility of their desire necessitates that it must remain
eternally unsatisfied. The extraordinary mutations—the virtual apotheoses—
which these characters undergo foster a sense of alienation, which provokes
a defensive megalomania. Even the overwhelmingly sympathetic protagonist
of Arnold’s Incredible Shrinking Man aspires to mastery over his microcosm:
“I resolved that . . . I would dominate my world.” While Wells’s Griffin
rants insanely of establishing a “Reign of Terror” (125)—perhaps echoing
Frankenstein’s monster’s threatened “reign” (Shelley 204)—Claude Rains’s
incarnation goes further: “I shall offer my secret to the world, with all its ter-
rible power! The nations of the world will bid for it—thousands, millions. The
nation that wins my secret can sweep the world with invisible armies!” The
villainous Krenner in Ulmer’s The Amazing Transparent Man appears directly
inspired by Rains’s vision: “My aim is to make an entire invisible army.” Yet
Krenner not only echoes Griffin; he also recalls his Faustian original. In the
second part of Goethe’s tragedy, Faust offers the Emperor his service in battle:
he calls forth an army of spirits who have assumed “transparent shapes of
crystal purity” (324).
Ulmer’s earlier films also, of course, display an interest in the story of
Faust. The Black Cat—the tale of a Satanist who refuses to surrender his
dead wife to death—perhaps owes more to Faustian obsessions with Helen of
Troy than to the Edgar Allan Poe tale (288–300) from which it takes its name
(but nothing of its plot: its credits announce that it was merely “suggested”
by Poe’s story). But it is, as suggested above, Ulmer’s Bluebeard which most
obviously draws upon this archetype. The film’s protagonist, Gaston Mor-
rell (John Carradine), is an artist and puppeteer who—at the opening of
the film—performs a puppet version of Goethe’s Faust (a scenario perhaps
reminiscent of the shadow theater near the start of Murnau’s Faust). Mor-
rell is influenced by a Mephistopholean agent; and—just as Faust kills his
betrothed’s brother—he ends up murdering his beloved’s sister. Morrell has
254 Alec Charles

previously murdered Jeanette, his favorite model, because he has discovered

that she is a “low, coarse . . . creature” rather than the epitome of moral and
aesthetic beauty that his paintings of her had tried to synthesize. This first
murder traps him within a cycle of killing: “Every girl I painted turned out to
be Jeanette . . . Every time I painted her I had to kill her again.” His insanity
results from the impossibility of the satisfaction of his remorseless desire;
his psychosis reflects the madness of Norman Bates as of all these insatiable
Faustian figures and invisible men.
During Margareta’s brother’s funeral—in both Goethe’s and Murnau’s
versions of Faust—the medieval hymn Dies Irae is sung: “quidquid latet
adparebit” (Goethe 124), “all hidden things must plain appear.” These tales
of invisibility announce that the concealed must eventually become visible
again, and this revelation of the hidden produces that effect which Freud
called “uncanny.” That which is revealed is that which must be concealed, by
invisibility, as by Norman Bates’s disguise: the unsatisfiability of impossible
desire.
Hitchcock’s Bates murders his mother’s lover and his mother; Wells’s Grif-
fin is indirectly responsible for the death of his father—as Frankenstein is
for the deaths of his brother, of his adopted sister and wife, and of his father;
Faust murders his fiancée’s brother, and is responsible for his fiancée’s death
and the death of his own soul; Morrell kills his ideal woman and his lover’s
sister; Vitus Werdegast (Bela Lugosi) in The Black Cat has lost his wife but
tries (and fails) to save his daughter; Hjalmar Poelzig (Boris Karloff) in the
same film has lost his wife (Werdegast’s wife) but preserves her body and
marries his own stepdaughter (Werdegast’s daughter); and Ulof has killed his
own wife—but eventually redeems his lost daughter—just as Joey Faust has
become alienated from his wife but eventually redeems himself for the sake
of his absent daughter.
These transgressions of the familial imperatives of civilization (the super-
ego) and of nature alike foster binds that are humanly impossible to break
or to escape. It is only through recourse to divine manifestations of self-
sacrificing love (agape) that some of these characters—including Ulof and
both Fausts—are able to redeem themselves. These narratives—like acts of
psychoanalysis—unveil for their protagonists the horror of the impossibil-
ity of their situations and, by implication, the nature of their ultimate moral
choice. It is specifically this act of uncanny revelation that cinema so often
appropriates from literature and myth, and, in doing so, finds so appropriate
to its own modes of storytelling.
In the original folktale of Bluebeard, Bluebeard’s wife discovers a secret
room in her husband’s castle, a room which, like Poelzig’s cellar, contains
the bodies of his dead wives—just as the cellar in Poe’s “The Black Cat”
 Invisibility and Insight 255

conceals the walled-up corpse of the narrator’s wife (288–300). This unveil-
ing of hidden monstrosity represents a function for which film finds itself
extraordinarily apt.
The myth of Duke Bluebeard’s Castle was adapted into opera by Béla
Bartók. Its libretto was written by another Hungarian “Béla”—not Lugosi,
but Balázs, a writer better known for his work as a theorist of cinema. In his
study of the Theory of the Film, Balázs describes cinema as “the flickering
of . . . bloodless shadows” (280); yet he understands that these spectral and
translucent forms have “revealed new worlds . . . concealed from us . . . the
souls of objects” (47). Cinema’s own soullessness reveals the secret soul
or innate soullessness of its subjects; it makes opacity and even invisibility
transparent; it manifests the impossible within a realm of possibility.
In Ulmer’s The Black Cat, Poelzig remarks to Werdegast: “You say your soul
was killed and that you have been dead all these years . . . Did we both not die
here . . . ? Are we any less victims of the war than those whose bodies were
torn asunder? Are we not both the living dead?” Karloff and Lugosi—better
known as Frankenstein’s monster and Count Dracula—may both represent the
living dead; yet, during the course of the film, Lugosi’s character experiences
a moral and spiritual resurrection. Like Ulof, Werdegast is traumatized by the
horrors of world war; like Joey Faust, he is a former prisoner; but, like both
men, he is not incapable of redemption. Unlike Griffin, Morrell, and Poelzig,
but like Goethe’s Faust—though unlike Marlowe’s Faustus—his soul can be
whole again. Faust, Joey Faust, and Werdegast discover redemption—but only
in death.
A latter-day version of Alexandre Dumas’ Edmond Dantès, Werdegast
returns home after years languishing in prison in search of vengeance—but
eventually finds redemption rather than revenge. In The Amazing Transparent
Man, both Joey Faust and Ulof have escaped from physical prisons—Ulof
from the concentration camp in which he had once experimented upon his
own wife, Faust from a more ordinary jail cell—but both remain trapped
within their own psychical, spiritual, and moral incarcerations. In saving his
own daughter, Ulof also saves himself; but Joey Faust can only redeem his soul
by sacrificing his own life. He refers to his prison as a “concrete tomb”—yet
it is a tomb from which, like Christ (but unlike the death-obsessed Poelzig),
and like Lugosi’s Werdegast (but unlike Lugosi’s Dracula), he returns to save
all humanity, and therefore to redeem his own humanity.
Werdegast’s redemption is made evident from his first appearance: Ulmer
shows his reflection in the window of a railway carriage, a moment that signi-
fies that for once Lugosi’s character is not without a soul. Joey Faust’s redemp-
tion is also related to his appearance (or lack of it): if simulacra or superficial
appearances mask a profound absence, then his invisibility disguises and there-
256 Alec Charles

fore marks an innate presence; this transparency not only cannot erase, but in
fact emphasizes by its attempts to erase, the traces of his psychical, moral, and
spiritual being—his physical translucence fosters a mode of lucidity. Wells’s
Griffin comments that a man is “more transparent” than glass (91); and external
invisibility can therefore eventually make the soul itself appear.
As Al Roberts (Tom Neal) comments in Ulmer’s Detour: “Did you ever
want to cut away a piece of your memory and blot it out? You can’t, you
know—no matter how hard you try.” Roberts, on the run from the law, has as-
sumed the identity of the man he fears he might be suspected of killing; how-
ever, in that guise, he (inadvertently) kills a woman. At the end of the film, he
casts off his false identity (as under that identity he is suspected of murder),
but he cannot reassume his own identity. (He has been listed as dead: the dead
man whose identity he assumed has, in fact, assumed Roberts’s identity.) Like
Morrell, Poelzig, Bates, and the original invisible man himself, he is caught
in an inescapable double bind; these characters are imprisoned in paradoxes
of their own making. Joey Faust and his literary namesake (like Werdegast)
only manage to escape—and to reassert their identities, their selves, and their
souls—through acts of self-immolating love. Both Fausts willingly exchange
their godlike physical invisibility for human spiritual transparency—which is
the ultimate manifestation of visibility.
Wells’s invisible man in death returns to visibility, as he becomes “faint and
transparent as though . . . made of glass” (148). Claude Rains’s incarnation
becomes similarly visible; yet he is redeemed (as he dies) by the presence
of his beloved Flora Cranley (Gloria Stuart). Whale’s inclusion of this love
interest turns Griffin from Marlowe’s irredeemable Faustus into Goethe’s re-
deemed Faust: rather than merely pursuing his impossible desire (embodied
for Faustus and Faust in the figure of Helen of Troy), he may be redeemed by
human love (embodied for Faust, but not for Faustus, in the figure of Marga-
reta). Morrell, by contrast, pursues Bluebeard’s heroine not because of who
she is, but because, like Faust’s Helen, she represents an impossible ideal—in
that she replaces Jeanette (whom he murdered because her reality did not
live up to his ideal). She also represents Faustus’s own Margareta (the figure
who might have redeemed him, but who cannot, because—unlike Faust—he
does not love her as herself, but only as his route to an impossibly narcissistic
form of redemption). Morrell has that much in common with Hitchcock’s
Bates—who murders Marion Crane because she cannot replace the mother he
has murdered, and cannot therefore absolve him of his original sin.
At the end of Whale’s The Invisible Man, Griffin’s face is gradually super-
imposed over its absence: nothingness becomes skull and sinew and finally
facial features, the opposite of the original invisibility process that Ulmer
presents in The Amazing Transparent Man. Psycho concludes with a somewhat
 Invisibility and Insight 257

similar shot: the skull of Mrs Bates is superimposed over Norman Bates’s own
face. Bates, of course, cannot be redeemed: he is a Faust who has murdered his
Margareta and vanquished his Helen of Troy, an Oedipus who has destroyed
the very object of his Oedipal desire. As Griffin is responsible for the death of
his father (and from that point on in Wells’s novel—well before his assump-
tion of invisibility—finds himself alienated, an outcast), so Bates has killed
his mother’s lover (the father figure); and he has also killed his mother. The
impossible desire (the desire for the perfect redeeming Other)—in Bates’s case
his desire for his mother—is at once negated and exacerbated by the fact of
her murder; and Bates therefore continues to seek—and to annihilate—these
figures of redemption in the vicious cycle of this paradox. Bluebeard’s Morrell
and The Black Cat’s Poelzig languish in remarkably similar situations; and, just
as Faust and Faustus damn themselves through their faith in their false idol,
Helen of Troy, Morrell and Poelzig destroy themselves by trying to recapture
their own lost figures of false salvation.
In The Amazing Transparent Man, however, redemption takes place through
acts not of impossible desire but of impossible love, love which takes place
both on an individual and a historical scale: Ulof ’s love for his daughter, and
Joey Faust’s (eventual) love for the world—and for his own unseen daughter.
Faust is not redeemed by his attraction to Laura, an attraction which is super-
ficial, ephemeral, and inconstant: unlike her Petrarchan namesake, she fails
to inspire him to spiritual immortality, nor—despite the name of the actor
who played her (Marguerite Chapman)—does she prove to be Joey Faust’s
Margareta; indeed, she represents a false and empty vision of romantic love.
She is Faust’s Helen of Troy, or the bride of Frankenstein.
As we discover near the start of Ulmer’s film, Joey Faust was betrayed by
his wife (she informed on him), and he has a daughter whom he has “never
been allowed to see.” In these ways, his situation parallels that of Ulof, who
has betrayed his own wife, and whose daughter is kept locked away from
him—in order to ensure his cooperation in Krenner’s experiments. Faust
frees Ulof’s daughter and Ulof; but it is only when Ulof invokes Faust’s own
daughter that he chooses to sacrifice his life for the sake of humanity: “I’m
thinking of my child,” Ulof tells Faust. “You should think of yours. Is this the
kind of world you want for your child?”
Faust’s daughter is his Margareta, the key to his salvation, just as Dr. Peter
Ulof’s daughter Maria is his Margareta—and, for that matter, his Madonna.
If Joey Faust becomes Christ-like at the end of the film—a Joseph who
through the divinity conferred upon Maria (as Madonna) becomes a figure of
Jesus—then he is a Messiah who redeems both Maria (as Magdalene—who,
for that matter, is also represented in the figure of Laura) and Peter (Simon
Peter) when he rejects the plans for world domination advanced by (St.)
258 Alec Charles

Paul—Paul Krenner. He simultaneously becomes another Joseph—not the

stepfather of Christ, but Joseph of Arimathea, the convert said to have borne
Christ’s legacy, the Holy Grail.
This allegorical reading is perhaps reinforced by the incongruous name
given to Krenner’s henchman—Julian. Just as Krenner has secured Ulof ’s co-
operation by kidnapping his daughter, so he has secured Julian’s by promising
to arrange for his son to be released from prison (a son who, Julian eventu-
ally discovers, is in fact dead). Julian is the film’s third self-sacrificing father
(another father who assumes the traditionally redeeming role of an absent
mother). Could Julian therefore be named after that medieval anchorite Julian
of Norwich—whose theology preached, for the first time, a vision of Christ
as the loving, all-forgiving mother of humanity?
Joey Faust—redeemed by the memory of his own daughter, his daughter’s
reflection in Ulof’s—has never in fact seen that daughter, and will never see
her: his own invisibility reflects her own eternal invisibility to him. When
Krenner refers to Faust’s daughter, Faust threatens to kill Krenner if he “ever
mentions [his] daughter’s name again”—yet Krenner has not in fact referred
to Faust’s daughter by name. Is it therefore to be inferred that Faust does not
even know his own daughter’s name—that, unseen and invisible, she is also
nameless and unnamable? If Joey Faust represents a Faustian everyman, then
his daughter represents an anonymously universal figure of redeeming and
redeemable humanity.

MONSTROSITY AND MORALITY

The setup of Ulof’s laboratory is somewhat reminiscent of Frankenstein’s in

Whale’s film of 1931—and, like Whale’s version of Frankenstein and Wells’s
Invisible Man (but, curiously, unlike Whale’s Invisible Man), it exploits radia-
tion to work its scientific miracles. Wells’s Griffin employs “two radiating
centers of a sort of ethereal vibration”—not X-rays, he stresses, but another
form of radiation as yet undescribed (95); Whale’s Frankenstein, meanwhile,
harnesses a radiation beyond the ultraviolet: “the great ray that first brought
life into the world.” Ulmer’s Ulof uses a fissile material called X13: “its prop-
erties are different from other nuclear materials.” These indescribable, invis-
ible, and transcendental forms of radiation are, ironically, captured within an
eminently visual medium. These films’ fixations upon invisibility to some
extent reveal cinema’s anxiety that it can only describe the superficial, can
only represent what can be seen; however, its futile yet noble (noble because
futile) attempts to envision the unenvisionable suggest an awareness, even a
tangential understanding, of the unenvisionable—and therefore allow for the
 Invisibility and Insight 259

possibility that its world of shadows may indeed hint at the reality beyond
Plato’s cave—that cinema may thus perhaps come to represent what T. S. El-
iot, in his Choruses from “The Rock,” called “the visible reminder of Invisible
Light” (Poems, 178).
Yet this is of course for cinema to overreach itself into the provinces of
divinity: to become its own Griffin, Jekyll, Frankenstein, or Faust. In play-
ing upon these literary and cinematic figures, The Amazing Transparent Man
posits its narrative within a complex (and perhaps contradictory) web of allu-
sions to their stories and characters. Joey Faust is at once Wells’s and Whale’s
invisible man, Stevenson’s and Mamoulian’s schizoid protagonist, Shelley’s
and Whale’s monster, and Marlowe’s, Goethe’s, and Murnau’s lost soul; Ulof
is Frankenstein but also another Faust himself (Ulof is old Faust to Joey’s
youthful Faust); their invisible daughters (concealed and absent) are Whale’s
Flora Cranley and Elizabeth Frankenstein . . . and Shelley’s pair of angelic
sisters, Elizabeth and Margaret (her narrator Walton’s sister) . . . and Goethe’s
and Murnau’s Margareta (Valentin’s sister); Laura is Whale’s bride of Fran-
kenstein and Goethe’s Helen of Troy; and Krenner is at once Mephistopheles
and, as we shall see, The Bride of Frankenstein’s Dr. Pretorius.
Shelley’s Frankenstein is something of a Faustian figure himself: “Like
the archangel who aspired to omnipotence, I am chained in an eternal hell”
(221). The first part of Goethe’s Faust was published eight years before
Shelley started writing Frankenstein; indeed, Shelley’s novel alludes to one
of Goethe’s earlier works, Leiden des jungen Werthers, as one of the three
books that the monster reads, the text from which he learns “despondency
and gloom” (127–28). Frankenstein repeatedly calls his creation a “devil”
or “daemon” (99, 101, 165, 169, 170, 198, 202, 203, 205): it is his crucial
error to mistake his monster first for his savior and then for his Mephistoph-
eles—just as it is Faust’s crucial error to mistake Helen of Troy for his savior,
his Margareta.
Yet Oluf, in The Amazing Transparent Man, finds in Joey Faust—his
creation, his invisible self-reflection—neither a devil nor a false savior, but
the route to his own redemption. His monster, his revenant—but also his
younger self, one which (unlike Faust’s) can redeem the fatal error of his own
youth—becomes his Margareta and his Christ. Ulof is redeemed because his
invisible man—whom he has created and at the same time destroyed (for the
act of creation is fatal: the radiation which empowers Joey Faust also poisons
him)—forgives him for his own creation and destruction and, in doing so,
becomes a “martyr” who absolves his creator of that original sin. Mr. Faust in
effect becomes the Dr. Jekyll to Dr. Ulof ’s Mr. Hyde—and vice versa. Some-
thing similar happens to Frankenstein—not in Shelley’s novel, nor in Whale’s
original adaptation, but in Whale’s sequel.
260 Alec Charles

Whale’s second Frankenstein film, The Bride of Frankenstein (1935),

makes the connection between Faust and Frankenstein explicit through
the introduction of the Mephistophelean Dr. Pretorius (Ernest Thesiger), a
darkly enigmatic manipulator who practices “black magic” and who forces
the reformed baron into a “supreme collaboration.” While Bluebeard’s Mor-
rell plays with his Faustian puppets (Carradine, coincidentally, also has a
small role in Whale’s film), Pretorius—like Goethe’s Mephistopheles—has
his own homunculus in a jar. In fact, he has six homunculi, one of which
resembles “the very devil”—“There’s a certain resemblance to me,” com-
ments Pretorius.
Joey Faust, like Werdegast, dies battling evil in an exploding house—as
does Karloff ’s monster in Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein. (It is perhaps
ironic that Karloff pulls the lever that blows up the building and kills
the villain in Whale’s film of 1935: the previous year, in The Black Cat,
Lugosi had done exactly the same thing to kill Karloff.) While Shelley’s
monster and creator end up destroying each other—and thus creating an
Oedipal bind worthy of Norman Bates—Whale’s monster ultimately re-
deems himself by saving his creator (and his creator’s wife) and destroy-
ing himself, his own bride, and his creator’s nemesis (the evil Pretorius,
who has forced Frankenstein to continue his experiments by kidnapping
his wife). Ulmer’s Joey Faust similarly saves his creator, Dr. Ulof, and
Ulof ’s daughter, by consigning himself and Krenner (who has similarly
forced Ulof to continue his experiments by kidnapping his daughter) to
oblivion. And, just as Frankenstein’s monster’s deathly bride dies in the
ensuing conflagration, so Joey’s own femme fatale is in the house when it
is obliterated by an atomic blast—when it is literally blown (to quote from
The Bride of Frankenstein—rather than from The Amazing Transparent
Man) “to atoms.”
The Amazing Transparent Man ends with an explosion and a choice: a
choice addressed directly to the audience. The security agent Drake proposes
that “this idea of an invisible army is quite interesting—imagine what our
counter-intelligence could accomplish if they were able to become invisible
whenever necessary.” Ulof—an Einsteinian amalgam of nuclear physicist and
Germanic moral philosopher—admits that “the Central Intelligence Agency
has already discussed the possibilities with me. But . . . think of the danger if
the secret [like that of the A-bomb] were stolen from us . . . Perhaps it would
be better if we let the secret die.”
Ulof’s reluctance to share his dangerous knowledge recalls Franken-
stein’s—“You expect to be informed of the secret with which I am acquainted;
that cannot be” (Shelley 53)—or, for that matter, Dr. Lanyon’s reticence
towards the end of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: “What he told me . . . I cannot
 Invisibility and Insight 261

bring my mind to set on paper” (Stevenson 80). Yet Ulmer’s ending remains
ambivalent; as at the close of Wells’s The Invisible Man, there is a suggestion
that this knowledge cannot forever remain buried: “No human being save the
landlord knows those books are there, with the subtle secret of invisibility and
a dozen other strange secrets written therein. And none other will know of
them until he dies” (Wells 150).
In the very last moments of Ulmer’s film—and in the shadow of its climac-
tic mushroom cloud—Ulof turns to the camera and directly challenges the
audience to solve the film’s central moral dilemma: “It’s a serious problem.
What would you do?”
Of course, this is no end-of-Psycho moment: Triesault’s gaze into our eyes
is nowhere near as penetrating as Norman Bates’s final stare. Its moral and
aesthetic naïveté puts it somewhere in between Chaplin’s pleading polemic to
the audience at the close of The Great Dictator (1940) and the thirty-second
interval for audience debate near the end of Paul Annet’s British schlock-
horror classic The Beast Must Die (1974): “One of these eight people will
turn into a werewolf. Can you guess who it is when we stop the film for the
Werewolf Break?”
We may also recall in this context the words of another eccentric Euro-
pean scientist, namely, Van Helsing’s address to the audience at the end of
Balderston and Deane’s stage adaptation of Dracula (74)—in which the
renowned vampire hunter reminds us, on a note of ironic “reassurance,”
that such demons do in fact exist. (Perhaps fortunately, Tod Browning chose
not to include this speech in his 1931 celluloid version of Balderston and
Deane’s play.)
One might even be reminded of Hitchcock’s own laboriously worthy in-
troduction to The Wrong Man (1956)—in which the master of suspense, in
informing his audience that his film is for once based upon a true story, dis-
plays a straight-faced (even po-faced) and uncharacteristically maladroit lack
of flourish (and of subtlety, ambivalence, and moral and aesthetic invisibility)
that he was wise enough not to imitate in his addresses to the camera as he
introduced his television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
However, despite these generally unflattering parallels, the clumsiness
of Ulmer’s ending (and indeed of his entire film) is perhaps balanced by a
complexity and an ambiguity which are arguably imposed upon the text by
its conditions and standards of production (most notoriously, the fact that it
was shot in a fortnight, back-to-back with another Ulmer picture). Despite its
proselytizing, The Amazing Transparent Man maintains this ambivalence—
albeit in the clunking obviousness of Ulof ’s final question to the audience.
The film may not offer much in the way of subtlety, but it does offer moral
choice, and therefore the beginnings of responsibility.
262 Alec Charles

LAST WORDS

Ulmer’s Joey Faust is on the run. He has that in common with Roberts in
Detour, and Morrell (eventually) in Bluebeard, and Poelzig (metaphorically)
in The Black Cat. Cinema—as a fantasist and escapist medium—has often
been interested in great escapes and fugitives. Yet, in its progressive and
spectacular specularity, cinema is also a medium that prefers its protagonists
not to turn their backs on the camera (at least until the final moments—when
Chaplin or Bogart may be permitted to walk away); it therefore allows us to
view their flights from their own perspectives—as well as from the perspec-
tives of those they flee.
As Hitchcock once said, “The audience can run with the hare and hunt with
the hounds” (Gottlieb 130). Indeed, in so many of Hitchcock’s movies (The
Thirty-Nine Steps, Saboteur, Stage Fright, Strangers on a Train, I Confess, To
Catch a Thief, The Man Who Knew Too Much, North by Northwest, Psycho,
Frenzy . . . ), the protagonist is both the pursuer and the pursued. “Cat and
mouse, cat and mouse,” says Farley Granger in Rope (1948). “But which is
the cat, which is the mouse?”
Morrell, Poelzig, and Roberts are similarly hunted hunters (either predators
or scavengers)—while Joey Faust and Werdegast, conversely, shift from their
roles as escapees to those of avenging (or redeeming) angels. Yet, irrespective
of whether their paths lead to damnation or redemption, there remains some-
thing fatalistic and deathly in the inevitability of these role reversals. These
constant to-and-fros come to resemble Freud’s grandson’s fort-da game: the
game that consoles us against the immediacy of loss, and yet whose determin-
istic repetitiveness speaks of our drive toward death.
At the same time, there remains something immanently cinematic about
this process. For are not these reversals, these switchings between the hunter
and the hunted, no more than models for the structure of the shot/reverse-shot
on which classical cinema is conventionally based? And, indeed, is not this
conventional structure itself merely a model for these characters’—and our
own—drives toward individual and global destruction?

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Amis, Martin. Einstein’s Monsters (London: Jonathan Cape, 1987).

———. House of Meetings (London: Jonathan Cape, 2006).
———. Koba the Dread (London: Jonathan Cape, 2002).
———. Time’s Arrow (London: Jonathan Cape, 1991).
Balázs, Béla. Theory of the Film (New York: Dover, 1970).
Balderston, John, and Hamilton Deane. Dracula (London: Samuel French, 1933).
 Invisibility and Insight 263

Derrida, Jacques. The Gift of Death (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
Dumas, Alexandre. The Count of Monte Christo (London: Penguin, 2003).
Eliot, T. S. Collected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1936).
———. Four Quartets (London: Faber and Faber, 1979).
Freud, Sigmund. Art and Literature (London: Penguin, 1985).
———. On Metapsychology (London: Penguin, 1984).
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Faust (Wordsworth Editions, 2007).
Gottlieb, Sidney, ed. Hitchcock on Hitchcock (London: Faber and Faber, 1997).
Levi, Primo. If This Is a Man (London: Abacus, 1987).
Marlowe, Christopher. Doctor Faustus (London: A&C Black, 1985).
Metz, Christian. The Imaginary Signifier (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1982).
Poe, Edgar Allan. Tales of Mystery and Imagination (Wordsworth Editions, 1993).
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980).
Silverman, Kaja. The Subject of Semiotics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984).
Stevenson, Robert Louis. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (London: Penguin, 1979).
Truffaut, François. Hitchcock (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985).
Vonnegut, Kurt. Galapagos (London: Jonathan Cape, 1985).
———. Mother Night (London: Jonathan Cape, 1968).
———. Slaughterhouse 5 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970).
Wells, H. G. The Invisible Man (London: Penguin, 2005).
Žižek, Slavoj, ed. Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan (But Were
Afraid to Ask Hitchcock) (London: Verso, 1992).
 16
An Interview with Shirley Ulmer
Tom Weaver

Behind every great man, the old saying goes, there’s a woman. In the case of
legendary director Edgar G. Ulmer, “the Miracle Man of Poverty Row,” the
woman was his devoted wife Shirley, who script-supervised all his movies
from the mid-1930s on—and who married Ulmer even though it meant years
of major-studio blacklisting for both of them. In this interview, Shirley Ulmer
talks candidly about her “tremendous journey” (her thirty-five-year marriage
to Ulmer), the experience of working with him in the margins of Hollywood,
and some of the many cult films they made on small budgets, in sixteen-hour
days, and against all odds.
Born 12 June 1914 in New York City, teenager Shirley came out to the
movie capital for the first time in the early 1930s, after her banker father
had been wiped out in the Crash. While her dad tried to make a new start
in California, Shirley met picture people and began working as a script
supervisor. She was married to independent producer Max Alexander when
she met and instantly fell in love with Edgar Ulmer, eventually divorcing
Alexander—nephew of Universal president Carl Laemmle. Hollywood out-
casts, Ulmer and Shirley were subsequently forced to work in the East, on
Poverty Row, and at other small indie studios, where the indomitable Ulmer
forged a remarkable career as a master of minimalism, with memorable
movies like Bluebeard, Detour, Strange Illusion, The Man from Planet X,
and others. Shirley was also a writer of screenplays, teleplays, and the book
The Role of Script Supervision in Film and Television; in later years, she
(along with her daughter Arianné) maintained a high profile keeping alive
the memory of Ulmer and his highly personal films. They were collaborat-
ing on the documentary The Edgar G. Ulmer Story when Shirley’s health

265
266 Tom Weaver

began to fail. She died in July 2000. The following interview was conducted
in January 1998.

Your father came out to Hollywood to make a new start as a banker or in

the picture business?
In anything [laughs]! He didn’t have any idea about the picture business,
and banking was a no-no at that time. My grandmother (that’s on my mother’s
side) knew a lady who was Willie Wyler’s mother. I remember that Wyler’s
mother was very annoyed that the Hillcrest Country Club was anti-Semitic
then. She was the one who introduced me to [MGM production executive Ir-
ving G.] Thalberg and so forth, and that’s how I got to be a script supervisor,
thanks to her and my grandmother and a lady by the name of Moree Herring,
a script supervisor at Metro. Thalberg was very kind to me, he said, “If you
want to be a writer and you want to be on sets and learn something about the
business, being a script clerk is a good way for a woman.” That was what re-
ally got me started in the business.

Were you already Mrs. Max Alexander at that point?

No, not yet. I wrote a little play that Pasadena Playhouse put on and I
played a small, autobiographical kind of part in it. After the show, Junior
Laemmle and Max Alexander came backstage. So we went out, Junior and
Max and another girl, I think her name was Betty.

On a double-date.
Yes. I picked Max, who was Uncle Carl Laemmle’s nephew, and then I sort
of saw him exclusively during that entire summer. When the big [Long Beach]
earthquake happened [in 1933], my mother said, “I’ve had it out here, let’s go
back to New York.” We did, my mother and father and I landed up in Brooklyn,
Kings Highway. I was very unhappy that they brought me back to New York.
Max began telephoning me long distance, because he wanted to marry me.
Finally I said yes, because I was very unhappy about living at home with my
mother, who didn’t like the idea of me going around meeting producers and try-
ing to sell my scripts [laughs]! He sent me a train ticket and a thousand dollars
to come out to California. I cashed the train ticket in and I bought myself a boat
trip, a two-week trip on the Grace line, a boat that went through the Panama
Canal and stopped off in all these different ports along the northern part of
South America. It was very exciting ’cause I had a little flirtation on the trip
[laughs]—I was quite a gal, I didn’t realize it! I wasn’t scared, I was going to
marry Max Alexander, but I met [actor] Dane Clark on the boat. We had a little
romantic thing going, but nothing serious. We didn’t go to bed, but we did spend
a lot of time together. Then I got out to California and I married Max.
 An Interview with Shirley Ulmer 267

Did you marry him because you loved him or to get away from home?
I married him to get away from home. I was very fond of him; he was a
nice guy, but a very simple man. When we were first married, we went to
Hawaii on our honeymoon, then we came back and lived in Uncle Carl’s big
house. Then we took a little apartment on Stanley in Hollywood. Uncle Carl
helped us with furniture and all kinds of lovely gifts, and he was very happy
with the marriage.

How did you meet Edgar Ulmer?

Max was hiring Edgar to work [as a second unit director] on I Can’t Escape
[1934] and he invited him to dinner at our apartment on Stanley. I was in the
kitchen making a pot roast when I heard this man’s voice that was so excit-
ing to me—not just the accent, the timbre of his voice. I thought, “Oh what
a crazy, exciting man, what a beautiful voice!” I went in the living room and
Max introduced me, and that’s how I met Edgar.
Then after we had dinner, Max made the mistake of saying he was very
tired and he had a headache, and that I would entertain Edgar, go out to the
movies or something with him. Well, I entertained Edgar . . . and that was the
beginning of the end of Max [laughs]!

Where did you and Ulmer go that night?

We went driving out to the beach. I had never met anyone like him, his
knowledge was . . . incredible! He made me feel stupid, really. I talked about
the book that I was writing [Sinners in Sight] and he talked about his experi-
ences as an orphan after the war, when he had been sent to Sweden, and all
the people he knew were famous—amazing brains. And he had an amazing
brain. It was a very exciting evening. He started me out on a tremendous
journey which was forty-odd years of marriage with him before he died. It
wasn’t always easy—he was not faithful, I had to watch out for that! He even
had a daughter out of wedlock while we were married.

Subsequent “dates” with Ulmer took place behind Max Alexander’s back,
correct?
Yes.

What was it like, being part of the Laemmle clan?

It was horrible. That marriage only lasted a year, dear. Sundays were a
disaster; on Sundays you sat around the table with the whole family at Uncle
Carl’s house, and everybody who was a top person at the studio was invited.
That was a big deal, to be invited. Uncle Carl (unfortunately!) liked me very
much [laughs] and he had me seated there and he had me giving my opinions.
268 Tom Weaver

I remember one opinion I gave, I told him how I had seen Margaret Sullavan
in a play in New York, I’ve forgotten which one, and I thought she was a great
actress. He turned to Junior and he said, “You hear what Shirley said? Find
out more about Margaret Sullavan!” And he later hired her! So that was my
contribution to the industry! Uncle Carl had a tremendous estate—it got bro-
ken up into five or six estates. It was a huge hunk of land with many houses
on it. He sold it when he sold the studio.

When you say that Uncle Carl “unfortunately” liked you, does that mean
that you didn’t particularly like him?
Oh, I didn’t dislike him; he was a funny old man. But he was deaf, and
you had to scream for him to hear you. He wouldn’t use his hearing aid. He
had very old-fashioned ideas, and he never forgave Edgar for taking me away
from his nephew Max.

What was Junior like?

Junior was . . . weird. He was such a hypochondriac—he was always fight-
ing some illness, some of them real and some of them, I think, imaginary. He
wore Kotex to keep from catching cold on his penis—that I remember! By
the way, there was once an article which said I was having an affair with the
old man [laughs]. That was not true—that made me mad!

Did Junior live at home with his father?

Yes, he did.

If Max Alexander was part of the Laemmle family, why wasn’t he making
Universal pictures? Why was he making independents?
He had his own company, Beacon Productions, because he wanted to show
that he could do something on his own. He owned a little studio on Santa
Monica Boulevard. But he was on good terms with his Uncle Carl and he took
care of Uncle Carl’s business things. Uncle Carl owned that whole block on
the corner—Melody Lane was a restaurant where everybody went, there on
the corner of Hollywood and Vine. Uncle Carl owned that and the rest of that
whole square block. Max used to collect rents and things like that . . .

In addition to running his own motion picture company.

Right. Max’s other two uncles (on his mother’s side) were the Stern broth-
ers. They made the Our Gang comedies, and they were very famous and very
wealthy.

The first movie you worked on was Max Alexander’s I Can’t Escape?
 An Interview with Shirley Ulmer 269

Yes, with Lila Lee. In those days, when you got divorced, you had to wait a
year to get it finalized, and when I met Edgar, he was just finished with that
year of waiting and he was celebrating. He had been married to a girl by the
name of Joan Warner, whose name he used sometimes as a director. [Ulmer
did some early directing under the name John Warner.] She was a society
girl and she had a relative, I think an uncle, who was a vice-president of the
United States. Edgar and Joan Warner had a little girl.

What are some of your memories of the making of The Black Cat?
The Black Cat would never have been made if “Uncle Carl” had not gone to
Europe, that I know. Junior was a very psycho, mixed-up young man, and Edgar
was playing psychiatrist for him or something [laughs]! And so Junior had a
real crush on Edgar, they were very close. It was Junior who got Edgar to do
The Black Cat. When the old man came back from Europe, he didn’t even want
to release The Black Cat, because it had classical music in it. He didn’t like that,
he said, “The public can’t take classical music, I can’t take it! It’s no good!”
[Laughs] So it was a very strange thing that Black Cat became successful.

What impressions did you get of Karloff and Lugosi?

Boris was an intellectual, a very nice, easy guy to work with. Bela was a
clown. Bela told jokes, he told crazy stories that he was a hangman. On the set
he did all kinds of funny things to get attention. He was showing off.

That’s funny, because from everything I’ve heard and read, Lugosi usually
kept to himself on the sets of his pictures.
Why he acted that way, I don’t know. He invited Edgar and me to his home,
which I understood at that time was a big deal. He treated his wife [Lillian]
like she was a servant maid—that was my impression. I didn’t like him for
that, but I never said anything. He seemed to be very fond of Edgar and took
direction nicely.

Was your visit to Lugosi’s house during the making of The Black Cat?
No, much later, after the movie was made, after I started living with Edgar.
(We weren’t married legally yet, but I was living with him.) Lugosi invited us
to his home, and I recall that in the foyer of the house, right where we came in,
was a huge painting of him in Dracula. And, again, I remember him forcing
his little wife around very harshly. I felt sorry for her.

Several film historians have written that Ulmer’s “dark side” manifested
itself on The Black Cat. Is that true, or is that just modern writers trying to
be dramatic?
270 Tom Weaver

I’ve heard that, too. Maybe it did; I can’t say whether it did or not. That
early on, I didn’t know he had a dark side—I just knew that he got difficult
at times [laughs]!

Were you romantically involved with him when he was making The Black
Cat?
Not until afterwards.

So it was just a coincidence that you were assigned to The Black Cat as
script supervisor.
I wasn’t assigned to be the script supervisor, I just wangled my way in
there because I wanted to watch Moree Herring the script supervisor, I wanted
to learn more from her. So I wound up doing all her notes. I didn’t get any
credit, but in those days, you never got any credit. It was mostly an occupation
for men, believe it or not. At Metro, there was only one girl [script supervi-
sor]—everybody else was male. They changed that when they found that
these males, like Mervyn LeRoy and a lot of others who started there as script
supervisors, would leave and become directors, and the girls would stay.

What was Peter Ruric, the writer of The Black Cat, like?
He was brilliant, really, but cuckoo [laughs]. He wasn’t like any ordinary
person I’d ever met. But very, very brilliant—Edgar adored him, and they
were very close. He was one who used to show up for the Sunday luncheons
at Uncle Carl’s.

The Black Cat was made very cheaply and very fast. Obviously you worked
long hours.
Oh, and how! Not only on The Black Cat but on all Ulmer films, it was
usually a sixteen-hour day. You’d get to work at six in the morning and you
were lucky if you got home before midnight. The cameraman on The Black
Cat [John Mescall] was very, very good. He was already recognized as a top
cameraman.

And Ulmer got along well with him?

Very good. He always got along with the heads of the departments. He
didn’t get along with anybody that was a four-flusher or anything, but he got
along with all of his crews. His crews always loved him, and he tried very
hard all the way through his life to get the same people again and again.

And you didn’t get the impression that Karloff and Lugosi were close
friends.
 An Interview with Shirley Ulmer 271

They weren’t close friends if they were friends at all, they just were sort of
polite to each other. But you could feel a certain amount of jealousy or ten-
sion, I should say, going on between them.

Even emanating from Karloff?

Oh, yes. He had a certain contempt, because Lugosi did act like a clown,
he acted silly. I don’t think Karloff, any more than Edgar or I, believed these
stupid stories Lugosi told us!

Did Lugosi tell people his stories one-on-one, or did he hold court?
He would hold court. He was reserved on his other pictures—at least that’s
what everybody tells me. But not with us! But I thought he was excellent in
the picture.

Who was better in the picture, Karloff or Lugosi?

They were both good, they were both right for their parts. Karloff didn’t want
to make the picture, he didn’t want to be known as a horror actor. He didn’t
want to do this film, but when Edgar showed him his sketches and the sketch
of the costume he [Karloff] would wear, he weakened and said okay. Jacqueline
Wells [Julie Bishop] was a pretty girl and she did a fine job, and David Manners
was good, too. Edgar was a very interesting director—he directed with a baton.
He timed their speeches. He drove Hedy Lamarr [star of Ulmer’s The Strange
Woman, 1946] crazy because he timed the way she spoke with the baton, and
would slap her on the ankles with the baton if she goofed [laughs]!

Was he using the baton as early as The Black Cat?

Yes. Once Edgar told Peter Bogdanovich that he was a frustrated conduc-
tor—Edgar was very knowledgeable. He read music and he always had scores
around the house, and one year he taught a course at the Curtis Institute in
Philadelphia [on music theory and history]. So maybe he felt he was conduct-
ing! For Father’s Day every year, our daughter Arianné always gave him a
new baton, because he broke them all the time. He would go crazy on a good
Beethoven’s Ninth or things like that, “conducting” in the living room while
he was listening to the music.

Right in the middle of The Black Cat, and then later, in the middle of Blue-
beard, Ulmer includes a scene of comic relief.
He usually did that on purpose, because he was worried about being con-
sidered too serious. He felt people needed comic relief and he tried to do
comedy whenever he could. But he was not known for being a good comedy
director.
272 Tom Weaver

Supposedly Karloff’s Satanist character was based on several real-life

people—one of them Fritz Lang.
Well, Fritz Lang was one of the few people that Edgar did not get along
with, so I don’t know. They spoke badly about each other [laughs]!

In the Bogdanovich interview, Ulmer said that Fritz Lang was sadistic and
he couldn’t get along with him. Then, a few pages later, he said Erich von
Stroheim was sadistic and that he loved him! What was the difference between
those two sadists?
There was quite a difference. Von Stroheim was very intelligent and a
much more knowledgeable man [than Lang]. Edgar liked someone he could
admire.

What were some of his cost-cutting methods on a movie like Black Cat?
He always got to a point where he would suddenly say, “Well, it’s getting
towards the end of the day. I’m gonna cheat—and you’re gonna cheat along
with me. We’re gonna go fast, we’re gonna do one take.” They would call him
“One-Take” Ulmer—the actors would get scared [laughs]!

That’s one way to hurry things up! Peter Bogdanovich asked Ulmer, “How
in the world do you do 80 setups a day?” and Ulmer said, “Ask my wife.” Well,
thirty years later, I’m asking.
How did we do eighty setups a day? Well, because he would do these one-
take things. He used the dolly like nobody had ever used it before; he would
make five-minute, ten-minute shots. He was always unhappy that they didn’t
make film reels longer [laughs]!

Are you in any of his movies?

I was in Natalka Poltavka [1937]; it was a case where a girl didn’t show up
at work one day and Edgar said, “Go get in her costume.” But I was Edgar’s
script supervisor on everything after The Black Cat, from 1934 on.

Is he in any of his movies?

No. He didn’t have the acting bug.

Even though he started out as an actor?

Well, he was a different kind of actor, he was a stage actor.

One of the most striking scenes in Black Cat is the one where Karloff
prowls through the basement where he has all his dead wives in the upright
glass coffins.
 An Interview with Shirley Ulmer 273

I loved that scene. All of his sets were to me incredible, always. On his prepa-
ration for every film, he spent a lot of time and energy on creating sets that were
unusual. In those days, his use of plexiglas and glass and all the other crazy
things he did was completely modernistic. He made wonderful sets.

An actress named Lucille Lund, who played Karloff’s wife in The Black
Cat, says that Ulmer treated her nicely until he started to flirt with her and
she turned him down. After that, she said, “he wasn’t very nice at all.”
Oh, that’s very likely [laughs]—I believe her! Edgar did not have much
carrying-on with actresses, his playing around was not with people in the busi-
ness. Hedy Lamarr, who he knew from school days, was probably the only one
he may have had an affair with, but I’m even inclined to doubt that it was for
very long. ‘Cause he really didn’t like her. But he got a performance out of
her in The Strange Woman that nobody else ever got. Also in Loves of Three
Queens [1953], which we made in Italy. [Editor’s note: The three-part film (aka
L’Amante di Paride and The Face That Launched a Thousand Ships) is com-
prised of the stories of Geneviève of Brabant, Empress Josephine and Helen
of Troy. After Ulmer directed the Geneviève of Brabant story, he and Hedy
Lamarr had a fight (Lamarr had “bought out” the producers and started giving
Ulmer instructions). For the first and only time, Ulmer walked off a picture.
Lamarr engaged director Marc Allegret to direct the other two segments.]

Did the Laemmles ever come onto the sets of any of these movies?
Just Junior. Like I said, we were lucky that Black Cat even got released
because the old man was furious. When he came back, he was so angry at his
son, who had allowed Ulmer to go so crazy and use classical music and crazy
sets and all of this. He didn’t like the film at all.

Next Ulmer directed Thunder Over Texas [1934], which I’ve never seen.
Was there anything about it that set it apart from other Westerns?
Yeah, it was accused of being another Little Miss Marker, it was the same
kind of story. I wrote that film [using the pseudonym Shirle Castle].

Did Ulmer seem out of place directing a Western?

No, he liked the idea. He wasn’t too good at it, but he did it and he liked it
[laughs]! He was fascinated because that was part of America that he knew
nothing about. He used the name “John Warner” on that film—later, when
I got annoyed, he stopped using it. I got annoyed because I thought maybe
Edgar still cared for her [Joan Warner]. She had left him, and in their divorce
she said he had slapped her. He never hit me, he was not violent in that way.
He screamed like crazy, but he never touched me [laughs]!
274 Tom Weaver

Do you think he slapped her?

Maybe . . . if she made him mad enough.

Were you still married to Max Alexander when you did Thunder Over
Texas?
Yes. Then I started living with Edgar without being able to marry him
because I had to wait that whole year, and we didn’t get married until ’35. I
legally married Edgar a few months before my twenty-first birthday. Before
that, I lived with him for almost a year, which was unheard-of in those days,
too! We were living in the Christie Hotel on Hollywood Boulevard.

When you did fall in love with Ulmer and decided to marry him, do you
remember breaking the news to Max Alexander?
Well, he thought I was nuts [laughs]—everybody did! My own parents
didn’t talk to me for a couple of years.

And Laemmle-wise, what were the repercussions?

Oh, we were told that we’d never work in Hollywood again. He couldn’t get
a job—that’s why we went back to New York.

He was told by who that he would never work again?

By everyone he called.

So there was no face-to-face confrontation with any of the Laemmles.

No, no, no. But [Hollywood] just didn’t want him around.

Were things touch-and-go financially throughout all your years with Edgar?
Well, until we made Carnegie Hall, yes. I think [Carnegie Hall producer]
Boris Morros saw to it that we had dough.

After living and working in the East far several years, you and Ulmer came
back to Hollywood and started working at PRC.
Edgar met [PRC producer] Leon Fromkess, who was an accountant of
sorts—a businessman—and a real movie buff. Edgar and he struck up quite
a friendship. He was very nice, he and his wife Rita. She was a bit of a pain
in the neck, because she was always around on the set and Edgar was always
shooing her away! But a nice lady. Both of them were devout Christian Sci-
entists. At PRC I was very busy looking up scripts for them and writing little
cards with synopses of what the basic stories were about.

What memories of Bluebeard?

 An Interview with Shirley Ulmer 275

The script was written by Pierre Gendron—he was a sick man in that
he was, I guess, a semialcoholic. That made it a little difficult to work
with him. But he could write like a dream and he got along with Edgar
beautifully. He had a wife whose first name was Mary and she assisted
him, especially when he couldn’t show up or was too far gone in the cups
[laughs]!

Back in Ulmer’s Universal days, right after The Black Cat, he was going
to make a movie about Bluebeard, so it must have been something that was
in his mind even—
It was very much in his mind right along, yeah. He had a lot to do with
the writing, and Pierre and his wife put it down on paper properly. He was
an educated guy, this Pierre, very well versed in literature. I might tell
you that Edgar was terribly self-conscious because English was a second
language to him. He could write wonderfully, hut he didn’t trust himself,
he always wanted [help from] somebody who was knowledgeable in the
English language. Pierre was a fine writer, but a difficult man.

How was working at PRC different from working at one of the bigger stu-
dios?
Edgar had complete charge. Nobody else had a word to say. Fromkess
was a very quiet man . . . his wife gave Edgar a little problem now and then,
but Fromkess and Edgar got along very, very well. Or they did until The
Strange Woman came about. Hedy Lamarr wanted Edgar to direct her, and
so Fromkess made a deal and loaned Edgar out to [Strange Woman producer]
Hunt Stromberg. I’ve forgotten what Stromberg paid but it was a very large
sum. Edgar had been earning $200 a week on his contract with Fromkess, and
Fromkess never gave him a penny of the extra money that he made by lending
Edgar out to do The Strange Woman. That’s when Edgar decided enough is
enough, and very shortly thereafter, when his contract came due, he refused
to work there any more.

In what way was Mrs. Fromkess a pain in the neck? What was she trying to
do by hanging out on the sets?
Well, she was a frustrated moviemaker, I guess [laughs]. She was a good
woman, and they had a daughter who died of cancer. Mrs. Fromkess also died
at an early age.

Did Edgar Ulmer have input in the music of these PRC movies?
He had all the input! Everybody, Fromkess included, thought that he was
crazy to want to do an operatic thing, the Faust [marionette show], in Blue-
276 Tom Weaver

beard, hut he insisted on doing it. And it was noted; in fact, The Hollywood
Reporter gave us a very fine critique on it.

What do you remember about composer Leo Erdody and cinematographer

Eugene Schüfftan, who collaborated with Ulmer at PRC?
Erdody and Edgar were bosom pals. Erdody was a fine musician. Erdody
died very suddenly and it was a tragedy for Edgar—he didn’t really get over
it ever. He loved Leo Erdody. Erdody’s father was a conductor in Hungary,
and Liszt left Erdody’s father his baton. The father gave the baton to Erdody,
Erdody gave the baton to Edgar and Edgar used that baton when he was di-
recting. That baton still exists.
Schüfftan was a big help. Schüfftan couldn’t join the union [the American
Society of Cinematographers], they wouldn’t let him in, but he was very much
around and in charge of the camera. He was a darling man. He was Edgar’s
favorite cameraman, and he and Edgar were very close friends. But Schüfftan
couldn’t learn English properly. Every sentence had words from five different
languages [laughs], he had all these languages mixed up. And he made us laugh
very much and he would get very hurt, but we couldn’t help laughing. It was
very strange and very funny. He was a man of many languages—all at once!

Talking to Bogdanovich, Ulmer called Bluebeard “a very lovely picture.”

What were some of the parts of it that he particularly enjoyed?
He enjoyed very much being able to do the Faust aria. Sonia Sorel, John
Carradine’s girlfriend, was good in that, too. Edgar didn’t want her in it be-
cause he didn’t like hiring someone just because she was John’s girlfriend, but
she surprised him and gave a very fine performance. As did all of them. Edgar
felt that Carradine did one of his finest jobs in Bluebeard. And Carradine
kind of agreed with him [laughs]!

Your daughter Arianné tells funny stories about Ulmer losing his patience
and getting tough with actors who weren’t giving him what he wanted. In all
your years of working with Ulmer, what actor got it the worst? Who got it
with both barrels?
Offhand, I think it might have been John Saxon [on The Cavern, 1966]—
Edgar treated him pretty bad! But he got along with his women fine. He
was known for pinching their ankles sometimes during a close-up, to get an
expression [laughs], but none of them seemed to mind. They all got along
with him.

How about behind-the-camera people? Did he ever get tough with any of
them?
 An Interview with Shirley Ulmer 277

No. He got along beautifully with every crew. They were handpicked and
they were all wonderful.

I like the flashback scenes in Bluebeard, with the distorted sets and imagi-
native camera work.
Beautiful camera work, yes. Those were the kind of touches that Edgar
relied on Schüfftan for.

What more can you tell me about Carradine?

He was the Man Who Came to Dinner [laughs]! He and his son, who calls
himself David Carradine, a funny little youngster. They had been living at
the Garden of Allah, which was a very well-known place, an outdoor hotel
with bungalows all around the pool area. It was very popular with the stars
at that time. John brought his boy to dinner and he told us a sad story about
this wife whom he was divorcing, the mother of David. She was trying to get
back alimony, and he had to hide out from her. So he asked if he could stay
with us awhile. So we always laugh—he was the Man Who Came to Dinner,
but he stayed with us for months [laughs]!

So you got to know him quite well.

Of course, and also David, who was a wild boy who took our daughter
Arianné to play with him. He called himself Captain Midnight and they
would run all over the roofs of the buildings! It was so dangerous, it
scared the hell out of me—I was always chasing him and scolding him
[laughs]!

Did you ever regret letting Carradine move in?

Oh, no, he was fun. He could have been a professor of literature, really,
and Edgar admired anyone who was that knowledgeable. When Carradine
and David were staying with us, they stayed in Edgar’s bedroom and Edgar
moved back in with me. We had separate bedrooms but we usually slept in
my bedroom. Edgar’s room was always a mess—he had his drawing board
there and all of his stuff, and he wouldn’t allow anybody to come in and
clean up [laughs]. That was Edgar’s “bedroom.” He’d go back and forth—he
would spend part of the night in my bedroom and then go into the second
bedroom. He was an insomniac and he would get up in the middle of the
night and work. This second bedroom attached to Arianné’s bedroom, with
a bathroom between them. If Arianné was up late at night or if she went
into the bathroom and the light was showing beneath the door, she could go
in there and talk to him. Most of the time Arianné talked to him was in the
middle of the night.
278 Tom Weaver

If Ulmer and Carradine were such great friends, why wasn’t Carradine in
more of Ulmer’s movies?
Because Carradine got more money—he went on to become a name. When
we used him, he was not.

What was Sonia like?

[Pause] I didn’t like her too much, but she was a good little actress. We
went to their wedding; my daughter was the flower girl and David Carradine
was the ring bearer. It was in the Episcopalian church on Wilshire Boulevard
and they dressed in Shakespearean costumes. It caused a little publicity, and
people talked about it. Arianné and David scattered the rosebuds.

John Carradine in more than one interview mentioned directing one scene
in Bluebeard. Do you know what he’s talking about?
No. And I don’t think he’d say that if Edgar were alive!

What do you think of Bluebeard? Do you think it’s one of Ulmer’s better
pictures?
I certainly do. It’s hard to name my favorites, I can’t pick one, but I can say
offhand quickly Ruthless [1948], The Cavern and Detour [1945]. And The
Naked Dawn [1955] definitely. Those would be the ones that I would name
off the top of my head.

I want to hear some of the great stories you have about The Pirates of
Capri [1949].
During the bad period in the U.S. [the HUAC period], Edgar and I were off
to Europe. We were never really bothered at all, although the FBI did come
see us before we went off—two gentlemen came to the house on King’s Road
and asked questions about certain friends of ours. I remember in particular
they were interested at that moment in Gale Sondergaard. We didn’t know
anything about where she joined [the Communist Party] or what she did, so I
don’t think we helped them! Then they gave Edgar an envelope with a special
address on it, and said when we were in Europe, and we were meeting all
these people who were suspect, Edgar could [write it all down and] mail it
back to them. And he said he’d be delighted.
So now we were off to Europe [to make The Pirates of Capri] with a pro-
ducer by the name of Victor Pahlen, who was quite a character. I think they
did that movie The Bad and the Beautiful [1952] about him. He had a lot
of charm, he charmed everybody to death, but he was a bit on the crooked
side [laughs]! He had gotten a deal together with a lady from Egypt to do
this Pirates of Capri in Italy. Edgar had gone on first, to get everything
 An Interview with Shirley Ulmer 279

arranged, and then he sent me a lot of telegrams and lists of things he was
going to need.
I arrived in Italy with Arianné, who was a little girl—oh, she couldn’t have
been more than eleven or twelve years old. We arrived at Campino Airport
near Ostia. (Everything was bombed out pretty bad, from the war.) We got out
of the plane and I had all these toys and books and things for Arianné. And
some little Italian children started running after us. With all these bundles and
everything, and trying to keep hold of the child, I was having a little problem!
And these children were running after me, making me very nervous, yelling,
“Jew! Jew!” And I thought, “Oh, my God, you mean they’re anti-Semitic over
here too?” So I was frightened. I later found out they were yelling at me “Giu!
Giu!” meaning “Down! Down!” because I was schlepping all of these huge
suitcases and wouldn’t let go of them. They wanted to help me [laughs]! I
didn’t know a word of Italian beyond arrivederci!
I got into a little building there on the airfield and they opened up my
suitcases and they immediately took away my cigarettes—I had a couple of
cartons in there. They took them away. And there was no one there to meet
us—I was looking for Edgar. Finally a lady came and she said she was sorry
she was late, she was delayed. She had promised Edgar she would meet us.
We could come to the hotel and rest a little and have a little something to eat,
but then we had to catch a midnight train down to the location, which was in
Taranto. I thought of Canada, that’s the only Toronto I knew! “What are we
doing in Toronto [laughs]?”
This was probably October–November and we had been told that sunny
Italy was warm, so I didn’t have heavy clothes with me. Not for the child and
not for me. We rushed to that train and we made it all right, and, my golly,
it was freezing. One of my memories is that I couldn’t put my head down on
the pillow. We had a private train compartment and it was lovely, but it was
so cold that the pillow felt like a block of ice [laughs]. There was no stop in
Taranto, we got off the train at a little village close by, and there we were met
by a car and chauffeur and driven down to Taranto. Now, Taranto had been
bombed to the ground by the English. There wasn’t a building with [an un-
broken] window in it anymore. We were taken to the best-looking building of
them all, which had some boarded-up windows. We got in there, into a great
big sort of lobby, round, with a very unattractive lady sitting in the center at
a raised dais or desk. We called her “the Animale” later—“the Animal.” She
was a very unattractive and ugly-acting person. And there were a lot of very
pretty young women running around, most of them with just towels wrapped
around them. Nothing ever dawned on me [laughs]—I led a very sheltered
life! We were shown to our room, which was stone-walled and no windows,
but at least it sheltered us a little from the cold. It had a great big double bed
280 Tom Weaver

and there was a little single bed for Arianné over in the corner. It wasn’t until
maybe the second night that I realized where I was, because finally I asked
questions. Edgar told me, “Look, I couldn’t find any better accommodations.
This is a whorehouse!” A legal, government-licensed Italian naval whore-
house. Later on, Edgar would tell this story—he said, “I’ll bet you I’m the
only man who took his wife and daughter to a whorehouse!”

And what happened to the envelope that the FBI asked you to bring along
on the trip?
Oh, we destroyed it right away [laughs]!

What can you remember about the making of The Man from Planet X?
Last night I put on my goggles and I watched my Man from Planet X tape
all over again, and I thought it was a very respectable, nice picture. It was
made in 1950 at the Hal Roach Studios, produced by Jack Pollexfen, who was
a rather shy man. We all almost died because of the use of Nu Gel to make
the fog you see in the picture. It was a ghastly experience and we all got sick.
When we made Man from Planet X, we were in a terrible rush, because we
had a job coming up that would take us to Spain.

Planet X was one of the few Hollywood-made movies that you did around
that time. Which did you enjoy more, making movies in Hollywood or abroad?
I don’t know whether the right word is “enjoy”—they were hard work!

Both at home and abroad.

Yes. The experiences in Europe, of course, were much more exciting in
those years, because they didn’t know Americans like we didn’t know them.
We were strangers to each other. In Man from Planet X we had Robert Clarke
[as the star], an easygoing guy, very nice person. I can’t say enough nice
things about him. [Leading lady] Margaret Field was the mother of Sally, and
Margaret gave up her career and put all her efforts behind that little girl of
hers. (It paid off!) Margaret was a very simple, pleasant, nice personality.

And the guy who played X [Pat Goldin]?

I think he was okay—very okay, actually. But he was a bit of a complainer!
He’d complain about the gear. He didn’t complain bitterly, but he wasn’t too
happy. Edgar called that [mask] a “douche bag”!

Robert Clarke talks about making $210 for starring in that movie.
Well, Edgar got about three hundred, so Robert Clarke didn’t do so bad!
Man from Planet X was made in a very fast and tense schedule. As I said,
 An Interview with Shirley Ulmer 281

Nu Gel was the product that caused the fog, and it caused us all to get sick.
It was horrible to breathe. We didn’t know any other way, Edgar couldn’t get
the effect if he didn’t use the Nu Gel. So somehow or other, sick or not, we
got through. We couldn’t have a delay because Harry and Eddie Danziger
[producers of Ulmer’s earlier St. Benny the Dip, 1951] had promised us that
we were going to make a picture in Spain. We had to get going.

Did you get the sense that Edgar liked the way Man from Planet X came
out?
He wasn’t that impressed, but he liked having done it, ‘cause he wanted
to do a science-fiction of that sort. But we were in such a rush to get it done
because that crazy couple was cabling us all the time, the Danzigers. We went
to Europe on a ship called the Liberté, and it was absolutely magnificent—I
had a wonderful trip. We arrived in France and from there we took a car or a
train into Paris and met the Danzigers, who proceeded to give Edgar all kinds
of scripts and ideas. The Danzigers were a couple of Americans who became
very successful . . . became English citizens . . . owned the Mayfair and other
hotels in London . . . and now they were producing movies. They were nice,
they were pleasant, but they just drove us crazy because they’d give Edgar
ideas of pictures that they were going to make, and Edgar would prepare
them. He spent six months, after rushing to get there, before finally they got
the deal set to make Babes in Bagdad [1952] in Spain.
When we got into Spain, there was a problem: I used to be like the go-fer,
and [before leaving the U.S.] I had packed all the film and everything we’d
need and sent it to Paris, where the Danzigers were waiting for us. Then, when
I heard we were gonna be actually shooting in Spain, I transferred it all to
Spain. When we were in Spain and ready to go, we couldn’t get all this stuff
out of customs. You see, Arianné was a junior high school student, and Edgar
and I arranged for her studies to be sent from her junior high so she wouldn’t
fall behind. Unfortunately, amongst the many books that were sent in that
shipment was a book called For Whom the Bell Tolls.

[Laughs] Oh, Franco’s “favorite”!

Here’s the way we got our stuff: We had in that film Paulette Goddard, who
was married at that time to Erich Maria Remarque, the author of All Quiet
on the Western Front. Remarque had a beautiful home in Switzerland, and
Paulette had come over and stolen him away from Marlene Dietrich! Now
Goddard was working for us in Babes in Bagdad. She had a lot of clout in
Europe, and she went down to Franco. Edgar didn’t dare let Franco even know
his name, because Edgar had once been interviewed and called Franco “the
butcher of Europe.” It got a lot of publicity in Europe, and Edgar was worried
282 Tom Weaver

that Franco would find out that it was him! Fortunately he didn’t. Goddard
went down there and fooled around with all these big shots of Franco’s, and
she got a special permit to get the stuff off the ship! I remember that, because
we were going crazy waiting!
The other problem that Edgar had was, the girls they had gotten together
for him were supposed to be harem girls, beautiful girls—and they were. But
most of them had hair on their chests! And long hair under their arms and
all over their legs. And they were infuriated when Edgar made them shave
[laughs]! They thought they’d lost all their sex appeal. Back then, men liked
the hairy girls over there!

Why did Ulmer become involved on Beyond the Time Barrier and The
Amazing Transparent Man, the two science-fiction movies he made in
Texas?
They were done for dough. We shot Beyond the Time Barrier at an air force
base, and that’s interesting in my memory banks because we had to wear special
badges and we were body-searched going and coming from work at the base.
Remember the old saying, “If you don’t like the weather in Texas, wait a half
hour, it’ll change”? It was always on and off and weather-permitting calls—you
never knew what the weather would be. We had a lot of terrible storms. Both of
them [Time Barrier and The Amazing Transparent Man] were made quickly.

There was a rumor that Ulmer did not direct all of Amazing Transparent
Man.
He directed the whole thing. In fact, he stayed on in Texas longer than I
did—he sent me and Arianné home and he stayed on there, because he did his
first cut down there. Douglas Kennedy, who played the invisible man in that,
was a gentleman and Marguerite Chapman was a very nice, simple lady.

What do you remember about shooting L’Atlantide [1961] in Italy?

When we started, Frank Borzage was supposed to direct it, Edgar was a
producer and Nat Wachsberger was the money man; he was a big producer in
Europe, a Frenchman. (Actually, he was a Belgian, but he liked to be called a
Frenchman!) Wachsberger and his wife Yvette [Lebon], a well-known actress,
were quite interesting people. We started the picture and we were either one
or two days in when we realized Borzage was so sick, he could hardly hold
his head up. I was helping him the best I could, but I didn’t know what to do
about it—he was really in terrible shape. When Wachsberger came to visit us
on the set, he saw what we were up against and he had a conversation with
Mrs. Borzage and she agreed, and Frank Borzage retired. He never did an-
other thing, he died shortly after. It was very sad—it was awful.
 An Interview with Shirley Ulmer 283

How much of the picture had he directed?

There was nothing in the camera, really—a couple of long shots done on
the beach. We were just marking time until Wachsberger came and did some-
thing about it. Anyhow, we did it, and it was interesting. It was a tough picture
to make, but it was interesting.

Why tough?
Under the circumstances, we were all pretty shook up about Borzage. But
I think Edgar did a very good job, a splendid job on that picture. I remember
Arianné [the movie’s dialogue coach] teaching Jean-Louis Trintignant the
dialogue phonetically—he didn’t speak English. But he was awfully good-
looking [laughs]!

What happened to Borzage got hushed up. The trade papers said he
couldn’t direct L’Atlantide because of the “language barrier.”
Well, his wife didn’t want that publicity, because he wouldn’t get any more
work. Which he didn’t and shouldn’t have gotten—he was a sick man.

Ulmer’s last feature was The Cavern, which he made in Europe.

We had a good cast in The Cavern. Brian Aherne was in it and he was really
excellent, and if you ever read his autobiography, he talks a little bit about The
Cavern. He gives his sympathy to Edgar—and me, too!—because we were
really having a very rough time. In our cast we had Aherne and Larry Hag-
man, who was a very amusing young man who kept me going—who kept all
of us going. It was so cold on the location there, and Larry was a drinker at
the time, and he had his little flask going. He brought along same instant soup
tablets—bouillon—and he made cups of bouillon for all of us, and then he
would put something in from his flask [laughs]! It was a Yugoslavian liquor
called Slivovitz, plum brandy, and it was probably 100 proof, because we felt
it. And it did warm us up [laughs]! So we were grateful to him! He was always
carrying on with funny jokes. We also had Peter Marshall, God bless him—he
was the steadying influence, a wonderful, wonderful, decent human being.
And John Saxon, who was a nuisance, and who doesn’t like Edgar very much
because Edgar didn’t pay much attention to him [laughs]!
When we all got over there, we met in Rome and we were told, “Everything
is set, the dough is in the bank in Yugoslavia. We’re off to Belgrade!” We took
off from Rome and got onto the train. But we didn’t see our luggage—we had
taken two or three taxis [to the train station] and one taxi had all our luggage
and none of us had seen that luggage arrive. I was seated with Edgar and
Larry and Peter, and I remember Peter was upset because Edgar had rushed
us so and he didn’t have a toothbrush [laughs]! We had nothing with us but
284 Tom Weaver

the clothes on our back. And we were all pretty hysterical and angry at Edgar
about this! We arrived in Belgrade and, my God, there was no luggage. So
here we were in a strange country without luggage, with just what we had on
our backs.
The Hotel Metropole in Belgrade was a very beautiful hotel, but not quite
finished off good. In the bathrooms there were no toilets, there was just a hole
in the beautiful marble floor [laughs]! The first activity I recall there was going
shopping with Larry Hagman, looking for big tubs that we could put down on
the floor and make ourselves some kind of a quasi-wash place. All the store
windows had things in them, but when you’d go inside the store, there wasn’t
anything. We were pretty upset. We only found one tub, which became a com-
munity tub, going from room to room. And it was winter, the snow was way
up, up almost to my waist in spots, and very, very cold, and Hagman’s booze
was very welcome! In the hotel we had a woman who sat in uniform in the
lobby, and if we wanted to receive or make phone calls, we had to do them
down there on her phone. And when we went even onto location, there were
two Yugoslavian officers assigned to us. It was very Communistic. We had a
maid who had paper in her one pair of shoes because they had holes in them,
and she wouldn’t take another pair because she would be arrested. Horrible.
The people were lovely . . . but frightened. There was great fear in the air.
Like I told you, the Hotel Metropole had marble floors, and Larry Hagman
made a bonfire on the floor in his room [laughs]! He had his family with
him—he had two little girls and his wife. A charming, lovely family. (He is a
family man, as you can see—they’ve stayed together all these years.) Anyhow,
he was gonna feed his family, and somehow or other he’d gotten hold of some
sausages and he wasn’t gonna take them outside, so he just made a bonfire
in the hotel!
We shot for I would say three, four days, maybe a week on the location,
which wasn’t far from the main city of Belgrade. And all of a sudden, when
Edgar went to the bank, he discovered that the money had been confiscated.
And we got the news from others around us, from the [Yugoslavian] crew, that
the country had a new minister, the old guy had been booted out, and there
had been a lot of changes. And we better get the hell out of there!

Which you did.

They got us onto a workman’s train that left in the middle of the night.
We left like thieves in the night. And on that train, Edgar had the first signs
of what he got later—a small stroke. He kind of half-passed out, he was not
feeling good, and Peter Marshall was his “doctor” who was helping him and
was so kind. I’m always grateful, Peter really helped him—he kept everybody
from bothering Edgar while on the train.
 An Interview with Shirley Ulmer 285

The original plan was to shoot it all in Yugoslavia?

Yeah. And we were stuck now. Everybody was so good about it except
John Saxon—of course. He was suspicious ‘cause he didn’t believe us that
we would get financed again. We didn’t have money there for a week or so,
and everybody just said, “Don’t worry, we’re not gonna stop filming.” Only
John Saxon gave trouble.

You resumed shooting in Italy.

Yes. Edgar was in terrible shape, and now he had to try and find a cave,
which he did, in the city of Trieste. As I can tell you, it was a very nerve-
wracking experience. I thought that Larry Hagman gave the finest perfor-
mance, not only of his life, but of anybody playing a drunken person who’s
out of control. He was really awfully good, and I thought Brian Aherne was
lovely. The girl was Rosanna Schiaffino, and she was very pretty and very
nice. Nothing spectacular—she never got anywhere, not like Loren and Gina
Lollobrigida. But we thought she might, so we used her. It was all quite an
experience!

In the mid-’60s, Ulmer finally tried to branch out into television.

That’s right, that’s why we came home from Europe. And also because I
thought Edgar needed doctoring—I didn’t know what was wrong with him.
He was getting terrible migraines.
Edgar wrote thirteen scripts for The Doris Day Show, for which they didn’t
pay him. Doris Day’s husband Marty Melcher took over, and then Melcher got
a stroke and Doris Day’s son said he didn’t know anything about [the money
Ulmer was owed] and he didn’t pay him. We had to sue Doris Day and the
suit went on for four, five years. Edgar was dead by the time I settled the suit
with her for $3,000. I couldn’t afford the lawyers.

The scripts he wrote were produced?

Yes. But no credit. The son said Edgar never wrote them, but he never met
Edgar, he didn’t know him.

What was Doris Day like to work for?

Edgar got along with her fine. She was friendly, but with a little ice, al-
ways. She had a cold nature. But she was pleasant always and on time and
very professional.
At that same time I was still working as a script supervisor, for Jacques
Demy and a lot of different directors here. I was working at Columbia on a
film directed by Demy [The Model Shop, 1969] and I didn’t finish that film,
because I came home late one night and found Edgar on the floor. He’d had
286 Tom Weaver

his big stroke. Unfortunately, Edgar had a very rough ending: For four years,
one stroke after the other. He was unable to move, unable to talk. We com-
municated by my giving him an ink pad and holding his hand, and he would
scrawl with the little movement he had in the hand—very little. He couldn’t
even raise his head, he had to be fed intravenously. It was four years of this
agony. And he didn’t like being in the hospital—he was at Cedars, and when
the insurance people cut us off, I didn’t know what to do. I went to the Mo-
tion Picture Home, and they said they would take him in for $400 a month
if I would sign off all my belongings—car, jewelry, clothing, everything you
have to sign off. I had to do it. We got him set up in a nice private room and
they were very good to him and took care of him. I took him home every
weekend—they arranged for the ambulance and . . . [chokes up]. Excuse
me—this is horrible stuff, it was a horrible time. It was the toughest four
years of my life.

You said you had to sign away everything. How did you still have a house
to bring him home to on weekends?
The house was gone, I had taken an apartment. I had nothing, dear—really
nothing! But I was lucky to be a good script supervisor, so I got work. Not
steady—I worked sporadically. I made commercials, I made a lot of money
doing commercials. There was a man by the name of John Hazard who took
pity on me—he knew Edgar, and he kept me very busy, at least two, three
commercials a month, and in those days they were paying two hundred, three
hundred dollars a day. That got me on my feet again.

Are you surprised that, twenty-five years after your husband’s passing,
there’s still so much interest in him and his movies?
I am shocked [laughs]—of course! I am not surprised at a few, because
even before he died he had quite a little fan club going. Young people flocked
around Edgar, and he loved it, and he told wonderful stories, and I wish I
could tell them like he did.

Ulmer enjoyed the freedom to make his movies the way he wanted to
make them—that’s part of the reason he worked at all these small studios.
But would it have really broken your heart if he had been taken in by a big
studio and went to work every day and made “bigger” movies, just maybe
not exactly his way? Would that steady employment really have been a bad
thing?
I think it would have been, yeah. He wouldn’t have made those particular
movies that he picked. Let’s face it, no studio would have okayed the kind of
films he made.
 An Interview with Shirley Ulmer 287

So even with all the financial ups and downs—

I have no regrets. None. He was a man who gave me a wonderful jour-
ney—an exciting journey, an instructive journey. He broadened my horizons
like no university could.
 17
Karloff, Lugosi, Browning, and Whale
Edgar G. Ulmer, translated from
the French by Bernd Herzogenrath

Karloff was able to play roles which were his speciality, since he could place
himself into some kind of self-hypnosis when he was playing these figures
. . . but not Lugosi. Lugosi was a great technician who knew the reactions of
the audience very well.

***

With his very theatrical style, Lugosi knew how to captivate his audiences.
Karloff was different . . . with him, you had to repeat, again, and again . . .
Karloff rehearsed his roles and said: “I will show you what I am going to do.”
He detested his roles as monster, for the simple reason that he was absorbed
by them. He thought of himself as a good actor—and justifiably so—but he
knew that the audience was obsessed by the horror that was emanating from
his different incarnations. For me, Karloff was continuing a direct lineage
from Lon Chaney Sr. Chaney played the kind of roles in the Silent Era,
which—as you can imagine—was very difficult: The Phantom of the Opera,
The Hunchback of Notre Dame, etc. True, Lugosi thought he was Dracula—
that was part of his life. But he reacted very theatrically in this respect. With
Lugosi, for example, I always have to give directions such as “Please, don’t
overdo it! Cut another fifty percent! . . . You can do such things on the stage,
but not here!”

***

This interview originally appeared as part of Bernard Eisenschitz and Jean-Claude Romer’s “Entretien
avec Edgar G. Ulmer” in Midi-Minuit Fantastique 13 (November 1965).

289
290 Edgar G. Ulmer

Tod Browning was maybe the first to watch what was being called “Fan-
tasy” films at this time, made in Germany and Sweden; Murnau himself made
some of those. After World War I, and in particular in Germany, the influence
of E. T. A. Hoffmann was considerably bigger than the influence of Edgar
Allan Poe. The fact that editors were using the talents of painters and illustra-
tors made Grune, Murnau, and lots of others interested in this new style of
expression. Browning knew all this, and it was he who put pressure on Carl
Laemmle (before he changed to Metro), and before he became a specialist
in this field. Browning knew every trick you could pull from a camera, and
he knew the art of montage. It was he who had Jack Pierce, a makeup artist
who had just arrived in New York, create masks and makeup—long before
Frankenstein (1931). When Irving Thalberg left Universal and joined L. B.
Mayer to found Metro Goldwyn Mayer, he was so captivated by Browning’s
imagination that he took Browning with him. In the beginning—I am talk-
ing about 1925—Metro had an excellent art department. They had made the
famous Cedric Gibbons come from New York, where he had worked as a
stage designer for the theater. And Browning, who knew the work of Wiene
in Caligari, began to turn away from the expressionism of this period in order
to embrace a concept one might call “baroque.” Browning was an immensely
cultured person, much more than the majority of the people. He was an expert
in literature, and a specialist, not only on Edgar Poe, but on the whole English
Gothic, where you find lots of these stories.

***

But we know extremely little about his private life, since he was a very re-
clusive person, a very introverted man. In the evenings, after work, Browning
took his car and disappeared. He never joined you for a drink, nobody knew
where he lived, and it was very difficult to approach him personally. He was
a very strange man! I only knew one of his habits: when he was working on a
film, in the break between takes, he used to gather the actors and technicians
and tell the most extraordinary stories . . . I don’t know any other director
who was so passionate about his subjects . . . Browning was very success-
ful with his movies. The tradition that he had implanted at Universal was
taken up again immediately, so there was no year without a horror movie.
Then James Whale was hired . . . You have to understand that in the Silent
Era, visual effects were considerably more important with regard to realism
than sound. Until the end of his career, Browning tried to keep a distance
from the use of dialogues; he wanted to keep the visual effects. I always had
this impression; although I’m not sure if the final version of the script was
Browning’s own or the scriptwriter’s . . . I have this impression because each
 Karloff, Lugosi, Browning, and Whale 291

of his films, despite the various different scriptwriters, is always typical of

his own personal style.
Note: For more information on Tod Browning, the “classic” of course is
David J. Skal and Elias Savada’s Dark Carnival: The Secret World of Tod
Browning, Hollywood’s Master of the Macabre (New York: Anchor Books,
1995); but see also Bernd Herzogenrath, ed., The Films of Tod Browning
(London: Black Dog, 2006), and Bernd Herzogenrath, ed., Tod Browning: Es-
says of the Macabre and the Grotesque (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2008).
 Filmography

The Border Sheriff (Universal Pictures) U.S., 1926

Director: Robert North Bradbury
Assistant Director: Edgar G. Ulmer [not credited]
Screenplay: Robert North Bradbury
Cinematography: Harry Mason, William Nobles
Cast: Jack Hoxie, Olive Hasbrouck, S. E. Jennings, Gilbert Holmes, Buck
Moulton, Tom Lingham, Bert de Marc, Frank Rice
5 reels / B&W

People on Sunday / Menschen am Sonntag (UFA, Paramount, MGM)

Germany, 1930
Directors: Edgar G. Ulmer, Robert Siodmak, Rochus Gliese [not credited]
Screenplay: Billy Wilder, Curt Siodmak, Edgar G. Ulmer
Producer: Seymour Nebenzahl
Cinematography: Eugen Schüfftan
Cinematography Assistance: Fred Zinnemann
Music: Otto Stenzeel
Art Direction: Moritz Seder
Cast: Erwin Splettstößer, Brigitte Borchert, Wolfgang von Waltershausen,
Christl Ehlers, Annie Schreyer, Kurt Gerron, Valeska Gert, Heinrich Gretler,
Ernö Verebes
73 minutes / B&W
DVD: BFI

293
294 Filmography

Love’s Interlude or The Warning Shadow (Peerless Production Inc.) U.S.,

1932 [Unreleased]
Director: Edgar G. Ulmer
Assistant Director: Walter Sheridan
Screenplay: Edgar G. Ulmer, Florence Pollack
Producer: Adolph Pollack
Cinematography: Frank Zucker, Lester Lang
Cast: Dita Parlo, William Desmond, Tom Moore, Arthur Housman, Ruth
Burns

Mr. Broadway (Broadway Hollywood Productions Ltd.) U.S., 1933

Directors: Johnnie Walker, Edgar G. Ulmer [not credited]
Screenplay: Ed Sullivan, Abel Green
Cinematography: Frank Zucker
Cast: Ed Sullivan, Jack Dempsey, Ruth Etting, Bert Lahr, Jack Benny,
Mary Livingstone, Jack Haley, Eddy Duchin, Ernst Lubitsch
63 minutes / B&W

Damaged Lives (Columbia Pictures Corporation) Canada / U.S., 1933

Director: Edgar G. Ulmer
Screenplay: Donald Davis, Edgar G. Ulmer
Producer: Maxwell Cohn
Cinematography: Allen G. Siegler
Editor: Otto Meyer
Clinical Supervision: Dr. Gordon Bates
Cast: Diane Sinclair, Lyman Williams, Cecilia Parker, George Irving, Alm-
eda Fowler, Jason Robards Sr., Marceline Day, Charlotte Merriam
69 minutes / B&W
DVD: Alpha Video (61-minute American version)

The Black Cat (Universal Pictures Inc.) U.S., 1934

Director: Edgar G. Ulmer
Screenplay: Peter Ruric, Tom Kilpatrick [not credited]
Producer: Carl Laemmle Jr.
Cinematography: John J. Mescall
Editor: Ray Curtiss
Music: Franz Liszt, Piotr Tchaikovski
Art Direction: Charles D. Hall
Costumes: Edgar G. Ulmer, Vera West, Ed Ware
 Filmography 295

Cast: Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, David Manners, Julie Bishop, Lucille
Lund, Harry Cording, Egon Brecher
65 minutes / B&W
DVD: Universal

Thunder over Texas (Beacon Productions Inc.) U.S., 1934

Director: Edgar G. Ulmer [credited as John Warner]
Screenplay: Eddy Granemann
Producer: Max Alexander
Cinematography: Harry Forbes
Editor: George M. Merrick
Script Supervisor: Shirley Ulmer
Cast: Guinn “Big Boy” Williams, Marion Shilling, Helen Westcott, Claude
Payton, Philo McCullough, Robert McKenzie, Ben Corbett
61 minutes / B&W

From Nine to Nine (Coronet Pictures Ltd.) Canada / U.S., 1936

Director: Edgar G. Ulmer
Screenplay: Kenneth Duncan
Associate Producer: William Steiner
Cinematography: Alfred Jacquemin
Editor: Ross Pitt-Taylor
Music: Maurice Metzger
Art Direction: Fred Govan
Script Supervisor: Shirley Ulmer
Cast: Ruth Roland, Roland Drew, Doris Covert, Kenneth Duncan, Eugene
Sigaloff, Miriam Battista, Arthur Stenning
62/75 minutes / B&W

Natalka Poltavka (Avramenko Film Productions Inc.) U.S., 1936

Directors: Edgar G. Ulmer, Michael J. Gann
Screenplay: Vasile Avramenko, Michael J. Gann
Producer: Vasile Avramenko
Music: C. N. Shvedoff
Script Supervisor: Shirley Ulmer
Cast: Thalia Sabanieeva, Olena Dibrova, Fedir Braznick, Dimitri Creona,
Lydia Berezovska, Peter Kushabsby
93 minutes / B&W
296 Filmography

Green Fields / Grine Felder (Collective Film Producers Inc.) U.S., 1936

Directors: Edgar G. Ulmer, Jacob Ben-Ami

Screenplay: George Moscov, Peretz Hirschbein
Producers: Ludwig Landy, Roman Rebush
Cinematography: William Miller, J. Burgi Contner
Editor: Jack Kemp
Music: Vladimir Heifetz
Art Direction: Steve Goulding
Script Supervisor: Shirley Ulmer
Cast: Michael Goldstein, Helen Beverly, Izidor Cashier, Aron Ben-Ami,
Anna Appel, Lea Noemi, Dena Drute
97 minutes / B&W
DVD: The National Center For Jewish Film

La Vida Bohemia (Columbia Pictures Corporation) U.S., 1937

Directors: John Alton, Joseph Berne, Edgar G. Ulmer [not credited]

Screenplay: José Lopez Rubio
Producer: Jaime del Amo
Cinematography: Jockey Arthur Feindel, J. Henry Kruse
Editor: Irving Applebaum
Music: Alexander Borisoff
Art Direction: Frank Paul Sylos
Script Supervisor: Shirley Ulmer
Cast: Rosita Díaz Gimeno, Gilbert Roland Miguel Ligero, José Crespo,
Romualdo Tirado, Juan Toren
77 minutes / B&W

The Singing Blacksmith / Yankl der Schmid (Collective Film Producers Inc.)
U.S., 1938

Director: Edgar G. Ulmer

Screenplay: Ben-Zvi Baratoff, Ossip Dymow, David Pinski
Producers: Ludwig Randy, Roman Rebush
Cinematography: William Miller
Editor: Jack Kemp
Music: Edward Fenton, Edwin Schabbehar
Script Supervisor: Shirley Ulmer
Cast: Moishe Oysher, Miriam Riselle, Florence Weiss, Anna Appel, Ben-
Zvi Baratoff, Michael Goldstein, Lea Noemi
 Filmography 297

105 minutes / B&W

DVD: The National Center For Jewish Film

Cossacks in Exile / Zaporozhets za Dunayem (Avramenko Film Company

Ltd.) U.S., 1938
Director: Edgar G. Ulmer
Screenplay: Vasile Avramenko
Producers: Vasile Avramenko, Michael J. Gann
Cinematography: William Miller, Leo Lipp
Editor: Jack Kemp
Music: Anthony Rudnicki
Costumes: Fedir Braznick
Script Supervisor: Shirley Ulmer
Cast: Maria Sokil, Michael Shvets, Helen Orlenko, Alexis Tcherkassi,
Nicholas Karlash, Vladimir Sikevitch
110 minutes / B&W

Moon over Harlem (Meteor Productions Inc.) U.S., 1939

Director: Edgar G. Ulmer
Screenplay: Sherle Castle [Shirley Ulmer]
Producers: Edgar G. Ulmer, Peter E. Kassler
Cinematography: J. Burgi Contner, Edward Hyland
Editor: Jack Kemp
Music: Donald Heywood
Art Direction: Eugene Wolk
Script Supervisor: Shirley Ulmer
Cast: Percy “Bud” Harris, Cora Green, Izinetta Wilcox, Alec Lovejoy, Earl
Gough, Zerita Steptean, Petrina Moore
68 minutes / B&W
DVD: Image Entertainment

The Light Ahead / Fischke der Krumer / Di Klayatshe (Carmel Productions

Inc.) U.S., 1939
Director: Edgar G. Ulmer
Screenplay: Chavet Pahver, Mendele Mocher Sforim, Edgar G. Ulmer,
Shirley Ulmer
Producers: Edgar G. Ulmer, Peter E. Kassler
Cinematography: J. Burgi Contner, Edward Hyland
Editor: Jack Kemp
298 Filmography

Music: Dean Cole

Art Direction: Robert Benny, Edgar G. Ulmer
Script Supervisor: Shirley Ulmer
Cast: Izidor Cashier, Helen Beverly, David Opatoshu, Rosetta Bialis, Tillie
Rabinowitz, Anna Guskin, Celia Budkin
94 minutes / B&W
DVD: The National Center For Jewish Film

American Matchmaker / Amerikaner Shadkhn (Fame Films Inc.) U.S., 1940

Director: Edgar G. Ulmer
Screenplay: Sherle Castle [Shirley Ulmer]
Producer: Edgar G. Ulmer
Cinematography: J. Burgi Contner, Edward Hyland
Editor: Hans E. Mandl
Music: Sam Morgenstern
Art Direction: William Saulter
Script Supervisor: Shirley Ulmer
Cast: Leo Fuchs, Judith Abarbanel, Yudel Dubinsky, Anna Guskin, Celia
Brodkin, Abraham Lax, William Mercur
100 minutes / B&W
DVD: The National Center For Jewish Film

Shorts for National Tuberculosis Association & U.S. Health 1937–1940

Cloud in the Sky
Another to Conquer
Goodbye Mr. Germ
Methods of Diagnosis
Let My People Live
They Do Come Back
Mantoux Text
Life Is Good

Director: Edgar G. Ulmer

Springer Pictures Inc., 1940/1941
Industrial Pictures (42)
Commercials (8)

Military Films (Such as Series on Celestial Navigation)

Hostages (Angelus Pictures Inc.) U.S., 1941
 Filmography 299

Released by Paramount
2nd Unit Director: Edgar G. Ulmer
Hitler’s Madman (Atlantis Pictures Inc. / P.R.C. Pictures Inc.) U.S., 1942
2nd Unit Director: Edgar G. Ulmer

Tomorrow We Live (Atlantis Pictures Inc. / P.R.C. Pictures Inc.) U.S., 1942
Director: Edgar G. Ulmer
Screenplay: Bart Lytton
Producers: Leon Fromkess, Seymour Nebenzal
Cinematography: Jack Greenhalgh
Editor: Dan Milner
Music: Leo Erdody
Set Decoration: Fred Preble
Script Supervisor: Shirley Ulmer
Cast: Ricardo Cortez, Jean Parker, Emmett Lynn, William Marshall, Rose-
anne Stevens, Ray Miller, Frank S. Hagney
63 minutes / B&W
DVD: Alpha Video

My Son, the Hero (P.R.C. Pictures Inc.) U.S., 1943

Director: Edgar G. Ulmer
Screenplay: Edgar G. Ulmer, Doris Malloy, Sam Newfield
Producer: Peter R. van Duinen
Cinematography: Jack Greenhalgh, Robert Cline
Editor: Charles Henkel Jr.
Music: Leo Erdody
Set Decoration: Fred Preble
Script Supervisor: Shirley Ulmer
Cast: Patsy Kelly, Roscoe Karns, Joan Blair, Carol Hughes, Maxie Rosen-
bloom, Luis Alberni, Joseph Allen Jr.
66 minutes / B&W
DVD: Alpha Video

Prisoner of Japan (Atlantis Pictures Inc. / P.R.C. Pictures Inc.) U.S., 1943
Directors: Arthur Ripley, Edgar G. Ulmer [not credited]
Screenplay: Robert Chapin, Arthur Ripley
Producers: Seymour Nebenzal, Edgar G. Ulmer
Cinematography: Jack Greenhalgh
Editor: Holbrook N. Todd
300 Filmography

Music: Lee Zahler

Script Supervisor: Shirley Ulmer
Cast: Alan Baxter, Gertrude Michael, Ernst Deutsch, Corinna Mura, Tom
Seidel, Billy Boya, Ray Bennett
64 minutes / B&W

Minstrel Man (P.R.C. Pictures Inc.) U.S., 1943

Director: Joseph H. Lewis
Screenplay: Irwin Franklyn, Pierre Gendron
Producer: Leon Fromkess
Cinematography: Marcel Le Picard
Editor: Carl Pierson
Music: Ferd Grofé
Art Direction: Paul Palmentola
Production Design: Edgar G. Ulmer
Script Supervisor: Shirley Ulmer
Cast: Benny Fields, Gladys George, Roscoe Karns, Jerome Cowan, John Raitt
Ulmer directed the first 5 days, and was 2nd Unit Director for the entire
production.

Girls in Chains (Atlantis Pictures Corporation / P.R.C. Pictures Inc.) U.S.,

1943
Director: Edgar G. Ulmer
Screenplay: Albert Beich
Producers: Peter R. van Duinen, Leon Fromkess
Cinematography: Ira Morgan
Editor: Charles Henkel Jr.
Music: Leo Erdody
Art Direction: Fred Preble
Set Decoration: Harry Reif
Script Supervisor: Shirley Ulmer
Cast: Arline Judge, Roger Clark, Robin Raymond, Barbara Pepper, Doro-
thy Burgess, Clancy Cooper, Allen Byron
70 minutes / B&W

Isle of Forgotten Sins [reissue title Monsoon] (Atlantis Pictures

Corporation / P.R.C. Pictures Inc.) U.S., 1943
Director: Edgar G. Ulmer
Screenplay: Raymond L. Schrock
 Filmography 301

Producer: Peter R. van Duinen

Cinematography: Ira Morgan
Editor: Charles Henkel Jr.
Music: Leo Erdody
Art Direction: Fred Preble
Script Supervisor: Shirley Ulmer
Cast: John Carradine, Gale Sondergaard, Sidney Toler, Frank Fenton, Veda
Ann Borg, Rita Quigley, Rick Vallin
81 minutes / B&W
DVD: Alpha Video

Jive Junction [UK title Swing High] (P.R.C. Pictures Inc.) U.S., 1943
Director: Edgar G. Ulmer
Screenplay: Irving Wallace, Walter Doniger, Malvin Wald
Producer: Leon Fromkess
Cinematography: Ira Morgan
Editor: Robert Crandall
Music: Leo Erdody
Art Direction: Frank Sylos
Script Supervisor: Shirley Ulmer
Cast: Dickie Moore, Tina Thayer, Gerra Young, Johnny Michaels, Jack
Wagner, Jan Wiley, Bill Halligan
64 minutes / B&W

Raphael Wolff Productions with U.S. Army Forces, 1943

Coca Cola morale films for service men (4)
Army training films (12)
Army Hymns from Home (2)
Director: Edgar G. Ulmer

Bluebeard (P.R.C. Pictures Inc.) U.S., 1944

Director: Edgar G. Ulmer
Screenplay: Pierre Gendron
Producer: Leon Fromkess
Production Designer: Eugen Schüfftan
Cinematography: Jockey Arthur Feindel
Editor: Carl Pierson
Music: Leo Erdody
Art Direction: Paul Palmentola, Angelo Scibetta
302 Filmography

Set Decoration: Glenn P. Thompson

Script Supervisor: Shirley Ulmer
Cast: John Carradine, Jean Parker, Nils Asther, Ludwig Stössel, George
Pembroke, Teala Loring, Sonia Sorel
70 minutes / B&W
DVD: Image Entertainment

Strange Illusion [Out of the Night] (P.R.C. Pictures Inc.) U.S., 1944
Director: Edgar G. Ulmer
Screenplay: Adele Comandini
Producer: Leon Fromkess
Cinematography: Philip Tannura, Benjamin H. Kline [not credited], Eugen
Schüfftan [not credited]
Editor: Carl Pierson
Music: Leo Erdody
Art Direction: Paul Palmentola
Set Decoration: Harry Reif
Script Supervisor: Shirley Ulmer
Cast: James Lydon, Sally Eilers, Warren William, Regis Toomey, Charles
Arnt, George Reed, Jayne Hazard, Jimmy Clark
85 minutes / B&W
DVD: Alpha Video

Club Havana (P.R.C. Pictures Inc.) U.S., 1945

Director: Edgar G. Ulmer
Screenplay: Raymond L. Schrock
Producer: Leon Fromkess
Cinematography: Benjamin H. Kline, Eugen Schüfftan [not credited]
Editor: Carl Pierson
Music: Howard Jackson
Art Direction: Edward C. Jewell
Set Decoration: Glenn P. Thompson
Script Supervisor: Shirley Ulmer
Cast: Tom Neal, Margaret Lindsay, Don Douglas, Lita Baron, Dorothy
Morris, Ernest Truex, Marc Lawrence
62 minutes / B&W

Detour (P.R.C. Pictures Inc.) U.S., 1945

Director: Edgar G. Ulmer
Screenplay: Martin Goldsmith
 Filmography 303

Producer: Leon Fromkess

Cinematography: Benjamin H. Kline
Editor: George McGuire
Music: Leo Erdody
Art Direction: Edward C. Jewell
Set Decoration: Glenn P. Thompson
Script Supervisor: Shirley Ulmer
Cast: Tom Neal, Ann Savage, Claudia Drake, Edmund MacDonald, Tim
Ryan, Esther Howard, Pat Gleason
67 minutes / B&W
DVD: Alpha Video

The Wife of Monte Cristo (P.R.C. Pictures Inc.) U.S., 1946

Director: Edgar G. Ulmer
Screenplay: Dorcas Cochran
Producer: Leon Fromkess
Cinematography: Edward A. Kull, Benjamin H. Kline [not credited], Eu-
gen Schüfftan [not credited]
Editor: Douglas Bagier
Music: Paul Dessau
Art Direction: Edward C. Jewell
Set Decoration: Glenn P. Thompson
Script Supervisor: Shirley Ulmer
Cast: John Loder, Leonore Aubert, Martin Kosleck, Charles Dingle, Edu-
ardo Ciannelli, Fritz Feld, Eva Gabor
85 minutes / B&W

Her Sister’s Secret (P.R.C. Pictures Inc.) U.S., 1946

Director: Edgar G. Ulmer
Screenplay: Anne Green
Producer: Henry Brash
Cinematography: Franz Planer
Editors: Jack W. Ogilvie, Carl Pierson
Music: Hans Sommer
Art Direction: Edward C. Jewell
Set Decoration: Glenn P. Thompson
Script Supervisor: Shirley Ulmer
Cast: Nancy Coleman, Margaret Lindsay, Phillip Reed, Regis Toomey,
Henry Stephenson, Felix Bressart
85 minutes / B&W
304 Filmography

The Strange Woman (Mars Film Corporation) U.S., 1946

Director: Edgar G. Ulmer
Screenplay: Herbert Meadow, Hunt Stromberg, Edgar G. Ulmer
Producers: Hedy Lamarr, Hunt Stromberg, Jack Chertok, Eugen Shüfftan
Cinematography: Lucien Andriot
Editors: John M. Folay, Richard G. Wray
Music: Carmen Dragon
Art Direction: Nicolai Remisoff
Script Supervisor: Shirley Ulmer
Cast: Hedy Lamarr, George Sanders, Louis Hayward, Gene Lockhart, Hill-
ary Brooke, Rhys Williams, Alan Napier
99 minutes / B&W
DVD: Image Entertainment

Carnegie Hall (Federal Films Inc.) U.S., 1947

Director: Edgar G. Ulmer
Screenplay: Karl Kamb
Producers: Boris Morros, William Le Baron, Samuel Rheiner
Cinematography: William Miller
Editor: Fred Feitshans Jr.
Art Direction, Costumes: Max Rée
Script Supervisor: Shirley Ulmer
Cast: Marsha Hunt, William Prince, Frank McHugh, Martha O’Driscoll,
Hans Jaray; As themselves: Walter Damrosch, Jascha Heifetz, Harry James,
Vaughn Monroe, Jan Peerce, Ezio Pinza, Lily Pons, Arthur Rubenstein, Risë
Stevens, Leopold Stokowski
143 minutes / B&W
DVD and VHS: Bel Canta Society

Ruthless (Producing Artists Inc.) U.S., 1947

Director: Edgar G. Ulmer
Screenplay: S. K. Lauren, Gordon Kahn, Alvah Bessie [not credited]
Producer: Arthur S. Lyons
Cinematography: Bert Glennon
Editor: Francis D. Lyon
Music: Werner Janssen
Art Direction: Frank Sylos
Set Decoration: Ray Robinson
Script Supervisor: Shirley Ulmer
 Filmography 305

Cast: Zachary Scott, Louis Hayward, Diana Lynn, Sydney Greenstreet,

Lucille Bremer, Martha Vickers, Edith Barrett, Raymond Burr
104 minutes / B&W
VHS: Terra

Captain Sirocco / I Pirati di Capri (Film Classics) Italy / U.S., 1949

Directors: Edgar G. Ulmer, Guiseppe Maria Scotese
Screenplay: Sidney Alexander
Producers: Rudolph Monter, Victor Pahlen
Cinematography: Anchise Brizzi
Editor: Renzo Lucidi
Music: Nino Rota
Art Direction: Guido Fiorini
Script Supervisor: Shirley Ulmer
Cast: Louis Hayward, Binnie Barnes, Alan Curtis, Rudolph Serato, Mas-
simo Serato, Mariella Lotti, Mikhail Rasumny, Virginia Belmont
95 minutes / B&W
DVD: Image Entertainment

So Young So Bad (Danziger Productions Ltd.) U.S., 1950

Directors: Bernard Vorhaus, Edgar G. Ulmer [not credited]
Screenplay: Jean Rouverol, Bernard Vorhaus, Joseph Than [not credited]
Producers: Edward J. Danziger, Harry Lee Danziger
Cinematography: Don Malkames
Editor: Carl Lerner
Music: Robert W. Stringer
91 minutes / B&W

St. Benny the Dip (Danziger Productions Ltd.) U.S., 1951

Director: Edgar G. Ulmer
Screenplay: John Roeburt
Producers: Edward J. Danziger, Harry Lee Danziger
Cinematography: Don Malkames
Music: Robert W. Stringer
Script Supervisor: Shirley Ulmer
Cast: Dick Haymes, Nina Foch, Roland Young, Lionel Stander, Freddie
Bartholomew, Oscar Karlweis
82 minutes / B&W
DVD: Alpha Video
306 Filmography

The Man from Planet X (Mid Century Films Inc.) U.S., 1951
Director: Edgar G. Ulmer
Screenplay: Aubrey Wisberg, Jack Pollexfen
Producers: Aubrey Wisberg, Jack Pollexfen
Cinematography: John L. Russell
Editor: Fred Feitshans Jr.
Music: Charles Koff
Art Direction: Angelo Scibetta, Byron Vreeland
Script Supervisor: Shirley Ulmer
Cast: Robert Clarke, Margaret Field, Raymond Bond, William Schallert,
Roy Engel, Gilbert Fallman, David Ormont
71 minutes / B&W
DVD and VHS: MGM

Babes in Bagdad / Muchachas en Bagdad (Danziger Productions Ltd.)

Spain / U.K. / U.S., 1952
Directors: Edgar G. Ulmer, Jerónimo Mihura
Screenplay: Felix Feist, Joe Ansen
Producers: Edward J. Danziger, Harry Lee Danziger
Cinematography: Jack E. Cox, Georges Périnal, José Luis Pérez de Rozas
Editors: Edith Lenny, Teresa Alococer, Angeles Pruna
Music: Jesus Garcia Leoz
Art Direction: Juan Frexe, Enrique Bronchalo
Script Supervisor: Shirley Ulmer
Cast: Paulette Goddard, Gypsy Rose Lee, John Boles, Richard Ney,
Thomas Gallagher, Sebastian Cabot, MacDonald Parke, Christopher Lee
79 minutes / Color

Loves of Three Queens / L’Eterna Femmina / L’ Amante di Paride (Cine

del Duca, P.C.E.) Italy / France, 1954
Directors: Edgar G. Ulmer (directed the Geneviève of Brabant episode)
[not credited], Marc Allégret
Screenplay: Marc Allégret, Vittorio Nino Novarese, Vadim Plemiannikov,
Salka Viertel
Producers: Victor Pahlen, Hedy Lamarr
Cinematography: John Allen, Desmond Dickinson
Editor: Manuel del Campo
Music: Nino Rota
Art Direction: Virgilio Marchi, Mario Chiari
 Filmography 307

Script Supervisor: Shirley Ulmer

Cast: Hedy Lamarr, Milly Vitale, Massimo Serato, Cathy O‘Donnell, Anna
Amendola, Cesare Danova, Robert Beatty
90 minutes / Color

The Naked Dawn (Joseph Shaftel Productions) U.S., 1954

Director: Edgar G. Ulmer
Screenplay: Nina Schneider, Herman Schneider (Julian Zimet)
Producer: Joseph Shaftel Productions
Cinematography: Frederick Gately
Editor: Dan Milner
Music: Herschel Burke Gilbert
Art Direction: Martin Lencer
Set Decoration. Harry Reif
Script Supervisor: Shirley Ulmer
Cast: Arthur Kennedy, Betta St. John, Eugene Iglesias, Roy Engel, Char-
lita, Tony Martinez, Francis McDonald
82 minutes / Color

Murder Is My Beat [UK title Dynamite Anchorage] (Masthead

Productions Inc.) U.S., 1955
Director: Edgar G. Ulmer
Screenplay: Aubrey Wisberg
Producer: Aubrey Wisberg
Cinematography: Harold E. Wellman
Editor: Fred Feitshans Jr.
Music: Albert Glasser
Art Direction: James Sullivan, Harry Reif
Script Supervisor: Shirley Ulmer
Cast: Paul Langton, Barbara Payton, Robert Shayne, Selena Royle, Roy
Gordon, Tracey Roberts, Kate MacKenna
77 minutes / B&W

The Perjurer / Der Meineidbauer / Die Sünderin vom Fernerhof (Eichberg

Film GmbH) Germany, 1956
Director: Rudolf Jugert
Screenplay: Erna Fentsch
Producer: Edgar G. Ulmer
Cinematography: Roger Hubert
308 Filmography

Editor: Lilian Seng

Music: Friedrich Meyer
Art Direction: Max Mellin, Wolf Englert
Cast: Heidemarie Hatheyer, Carl Wery, Hans von Borsody, Christiane Hör-
biger-Wessely, Attila Hörbiger, Joseph Offenbach
100 minutes / B&W

Daughter of Dr. Jekyll (Film Ventures Inc.) U.S., 1957

Director: Edgar G. Ulmer
Screenplay: Jack Pollexfen
Producer: Jack Pollexfen
Cinematography: John F. Warren
Editor: Holbrook N. Todd
Music: Melvyn Leonard
Art Direction: Theobald Holsopple
Set Decoration: Mowbray Berkeley
Script Supervisor: Shirley Ulmer
Cast: John Agar, Gloria Talbott, Arthur Shields, John Dierkes, Mollie Mc-
Cart, Martha Wentworth, Marjorie Stapp
70 minutes / B&W
DVD: Image Entertainment

The Naked Venus (Beaux Arts Films, Inc.) U.S., 1958

Director: Edgar G. Ulmer
Screenplay: Gabriel Gort, Gaston Hakim
Producer: Gaston Hakim
Cinematography: Jacques Sheldon
Editor: Ronny Ashcroft
Music: Arne Hasse
Cast: Patricia Connelle, Don Roberts, Arianne Arden (Arianné Ulmer),
Wynn Gregory, Douglas McCairn
77 minutes / B&W
DVD: Image Entertainment

Swiss Family Robinson (Transworld Artists) U.S., 1958 (one episode)

Director: Edgar G. Ulmer
Screenplay: Harold Jacob Smith
Producer: Edgar G. Ulmer, Henry F. Ehrlich
Cinematography: J. Charles Carbajal
 Filmography 309

Editor: Carlos Savage

Music: Lan Adomian
Art Direction: Edward Fitzgerald
Script Supervisor: Shirley Ulmer
Cast: Will Rogers Jr., Kasey Williams, Reba Waters, John Schmidt, Mi-
chael Schmidt, Donald Allain
30 minutes / Color
DVD: Allday Entertainment

Beyond the Time Barrier (Pacific International, aka Miller Consolidated

Productions) U.S., 1960
Director: Edgar G. Ulmer
Screenplay: Arthur C. Pierce
Producer: Robert Clarke
Cinematography: Meredith M. Nicholson
Editor: Jack Ruggiero
Music: Darrell Calker
Art Direction: Ernest Fegté
Script Supervisor: Shirley Ulmer
Cast: Robert Clarke, Darlene Tompkins, Arianne Arden (Arianné Ulmer),
Vladimir Sokoloff, Stephen Bekassy
75 minutes / B&W
DVD: Sinister Cinema

The Amazing Transparent Man (Pacific International, aka Miller

Consolidated Productions) U.S., 1960
Director: Edgar G. Ulmer
Screenplay: Jack Lewis
Producer: Lester D. Guthrie
Cinematography: Meredith M. Nicholson
Editor: Jack Ruggiero
Music: Darrell Calker
Art Direction: Ernest Fegté
Set Decoration: Louise Caldwell
Script Supervisor: Shirley Ulmer
Cast: Marguerite Chapman, Douglas Kennedy, James Griffith, Ivan
Triesault, Boyd ‘Red’ Morgan, Carmel Daniel
58 minutes / B&W
DVD: Alpha Video; Roan
310 Filmography

Hannibal / Annibale (Liber Films, Chefordi) Italy / U.S., 1960

Directors: Edgar G. Ulmer, Carlo Ludovico Bragaglia
Screenplay: Mortimer Braus, Sandro Continenza
Producer: Ottavio Poggi
Cinematography: Raffaele Maschiocchi
Editor: Renato Cinquini
Music: Carlo Rustichelli
Art Direction: Amedeo Mellone, Ernest Kromberg
Script Supervisor: Shirley Ulmer
Cast: Victor Mature, Rita Gam, Milly Vitale, Gabriele Ferzetti, Rik Batta-
glia, Franco Silva, Mario Girotti (Terence Hill)
100 minutes / Color
DVD: VCI Entertainment

Journey Beneath the Desert / Antinea, l’amante della citta sepolta /

L’Atlantide (C.C.M. / Fidès) France / Italy, 1961
Directors: Edgar G. Ulmer, Giuseppe Masini, Frank Borzage (uncredited)
Screenplay: André Tabet, Ugo Liberatore, Remigio Del Grosso
Producer: Luigi Nannerini
Cinematography: Enzo Serafin
Editor: Renato Cinquini
Music: Carlo Rustichelli
Art Direction: Piero Filippone, Edgar G. Ulmer
Script Supervisor: Shirley Ulmer
Cast: Haya Harareet, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Rad Fulton (James Westmo-
reland), Amedeo Nazzari, Georges Rivière, Giulia Rubini
104 minutes / Color
DVD: Sinister Cinema

The Cavern / Sette contro la morte / Helden—Himmel und Holle /

Neunzig Nachte und ein Tag (Cinedoris S.p.A., Arwin Productions / 20th
Century-Fox Corporation) Italy / Germany / U.S., 1964
Director: Edgar G. Ulmer
Screenplay: Michael Pertwee, Jack Davies
Producer: Edgar G. Ulmer
Cinematography: Gábor Pogány
Editor: Renato Cinquini
Music: Carlo Rustichelli
Script Supervisor: Shirley Ulmer
 Filmography 311

Cast: John Saxon, Rosanna Schiaffino, Larry Hagman, Peter Marshall,

Brian Aherne, Nino Castelnuovo, Hans von Borsody
96 minutes / B&W

The Doris Day Show (Arwin Productions) U.S. 1968

DVD: MPI Home Video
Ulmer worked as unit production manager, primarily production planning,
cost control and management of production.
 Name Index

Adorno, Theodor W., 1, 42, 49 Chaplin, Charlie, 111, 261, 262

Abramowitz, S. Y. (Mendele Mokher
Sforim), 80 Deleuze, Gilles, xvii, 50
Aleichem, Sholem, 12, 73, 80, 93 Derrida, Jacques, 253, 263
Alexander, Max, 73, 143, 146, 265–68, Dreyer, Carl Theodor, 111
274
Allen, Woody, xxi, 12, 87, 88, 97, 98; Eisner, Lotte, 6, 55
Annie Hall, xxi, 19, 88, 96–100, 102, Eliot, T. S., 246, 259, 263
104–6 Erdody, Leo, xxi, 13, 112–13, 117–21,
Altman, Robert, 116, 161, 163 123, 276
Amenábar, Alejandro, 161–63
Annet, Paul, 261 Freud, Sigmund, xvii, xxi, 49, 74, 78,
Ansky, S., 74; Der Dibek (The Dybbuk), 84, 99, 100, 129, 162–63, 254, 262,
74–75, 89, 107 263
Arnold, Jack, 247, 253 Fuchs, Leo, 11, 81, 82, 94, 95

Belton, John, xviii, xxiv, 2, 6, 21–37, Gallagher, Tag, 22, 23, 36, 51, 176, 189,
40, 43, 50 190
Bogdanovich, Peter, ix–xi, xviii, 5, 6, 7, Gliese, Rochus, 4, 6
9, 10, 14, 41, 62, 67, 72, 122, 139, Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 247, 252,
140, 142, 145, 148, 157, 179, 184, 253, 254, 255, 256, 257, 259, 263
271, 272, 276 Godard, Jean-Luc, 47, 48, 123, 134
Brecht, Bertolt, xxi, xxvi, 109–11, 118, Goldsmith, Martin, xxiii, 149–51, 154,
188, 251 156–57, 303
Breen, Joseph, 150 Grafe, Frieda, 4, 19
Browning, Tod, 26, 261, 289–91 Green, Joseph, 71, 75, 89
Büchner, Georg, xxi, 110 Grissemann, Stefan, xv, xvii, 11, 91

313
314 Name Index

Hirschbein, Peretz, 27, 75, 91, 296 186, 189, 210, 224, 247, 252, 253,
Hitchcock, Alfred, xxvi, 134, 136, 231, 254, 259, 290; The Last Laugh, x, 71
245, 246, 247, 250, 251, 254, 256,
257, 260, 261, 262, 263 Neal, Tom, Jr., 153–54
Hoberman, J., 73, 74, 78, 80, 82, 84 Neal, Tom, Sr., 13, 153, 155, 173, 256
House Committee on Un-American Nebenzahl, Seymour, 72, 145
Activities (HUAC), xxv, 201, 202 Neufeld, Sigmund, 144–45
Nordau, Max, 75
Jameson, Fredric, xviii, 21, 22, 25, 26, Novak, Kim, 134
27, 37
Judell, Ben, 144 Oysher, Moishe, 77, 92, 296

Kahn, Gordon, 203 Pasolini, Pier Paolo, xix, 39, 40, 48

Kant, Immanuel, 134 Payton, Barbara, xxii, 132, 134, 164,
Karloff, Boris, ix, xxvi, 8, 41, 43, 44, 186
46, 140, 141, 237, 254, 255, 260, Peckinpah, Sam, 202
269–73, 289 Poe, Edgar Allan, 140, 253, 254–55, 263
Kennedy, Arthur, 202
Kohner, Paul, 17, 178 Rabbi Eliezer, 77, 78
Reinhardt, Max, xvi, 3, 4, 5, 6, 14, 20,
Lacan, Jacques, xxiii, 133, 159, 161, 72, 74, 111, 124, 210, 217
163 Resnais, Alain, xix, 44, 50
Lahn, Ilse, 17, 18, 19, 178
Lamarr, Hedy, xxii, 17, 127, 128, 166, Savage, Ann, xxii, 131, 155, 173, 303
182, 183, 219, 271, 273, 275 Schoenberg, Arnold, 111
Lang, Fritz, 10, 62, 71, 72, 111,125, Seberg, Jean, 134
139, 142, 145, 210, 240, 272; Shelley, Mary, 74, 252, 253, 254, 259,
Metropolis, 10–11, 20, 33, 64, 84, 263
139, 142 Shyamalan, M. Night, 161–63
Levi, Primo, 246, 263 Silverman, Kaja, 251, 263
Lugosi, Bela, ix, xxvi, 8, 40, 46, 140, Sondergaard, Gale, 113, 114, 121, 219,
254, 255, 260, 269, 270, 271, 289 278
Lynch, David, xxiii, 132, 161, 163, 173 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 252, 259, 261,
263
Mamoulian, Rouben, 45, 252, 259
Marlowe, Christopher, 247, 252, 255, Tavernier, Bertrand, 17, 19, 47, 52, 176,
256, 257, 259, 263 181, 184, 186, 191
Marx, Karl, 78, 185, 200–201
Metz, Christian, 249, 263 Ulman, Erik, 14, 20, 44, 48, 52
Mooney, Martin, 150 Ulmer, Josephine (Joan Warner), 72,
Morris, Gary, xiii, 23 269, 273
Moullet, Luc, 43, 47, 176 Ulmer, Shirley Kassler, 73, 265–87
Murnau, F. W., x, xxiv, 4, 6–7, 8, 10, 14,
19, 23, 31, 32, 34, 41, 55, 71, 111, Van Sant, Gus, 45, 142
125, 142, 148, 177, 178–80, 185, Viertel, Salka, 72
 Name Index 315

Wagner, Richard, xxi, 109–24; Der Ring Wiene, Robert, 74, 111, 125, 290; The
Des Nibelungen, xxi, 109, 111–23 Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, xxv, 9, 46,
Wedekind, Frank, 110 72, 74, 80, 84–85, 105, 139, 142,
Wegener, Paul, 10, 125; The Golem, 10, 217, 224, 290
72, 74, 84, 139 Wilder, Billy, x, 2, 4, 17, 72, 85, 174, 178
Weill, Kurt, 111 Williams III, Wade, xxiii, 153–54, 157;
Wells, H. G., 247, 252, 255, 256, 257, Detour (remake), 152–54
258, 259, 263 Wyler, William, 139, 178, 266
Whale, James, xxvi, 51, 252, 256, 258,
259–60, 289–91; Frankenstein, Zimet, Julian, xxiv, 184, 185, 201, 202,
xix, xxv, xxvi, 8, 39, 51, 140, 229, 203
237, 252, 253, 254, 255, 257, 258, Žižek, Slavoj, 161, 174, 249, 263
259–60, 290 Zukor, Adolph, 73
 Title Index

Amerikaner Shadkhn (American Di Klyatshe (The Old Mare, aka Fishke

Matchmaker), xx, xxi, 11, 12, 14, 27, der Krumer [Fishke the Cripple]),
34–36, 71, 79, 81, 82, 88, 90, 93–97, 71, 79–81
101, 102–4, 106
The Light Ahead, xviii, xx, 11, 14, 27,
Beyond the Time Barrier, 205–43 36, 71, 79, 90, 107
The Black Cat, v, ix, xviii, xix, xxvii,
2, 8–10, 16, 20, 22, 26, 39–50, 55, Menschen am Sonntag (People on
72, 122, 127, 136, 140–41, 145, 147, Sunday), x, 2, 36, 72, 188
155, 175, 178, 180, 229, 249, 251, Moon over Harlem, xx, 12, 27, 61–69
253–55, 257, 260, 262, 269–73, 275 Murder Is My Beat, xxii, xxiv, 111, 126,
132, 135, 164, 178, 183, 186
Detour, v–ix, xv, xvii–xviii, xxii–xxiii,
2, 13–14, 17–18, 20–22, 24–25, The Naked Dawn, vii, ix, xxiv, xxv,
52, 68, 70–71, 90–93, 103, 105–7, xxvii, 6, 8, 22, 71, 111, 183–86, 188,
111–13, 122, 126–27, 129, 132–36, 189, 190, 193–203, 278
137–57, 160, 164, 166, 173, 176–78,
Ruthless, ix, 2, 22, 23, 71, 122, 176,
186, 188, 190, 235, 251, 256, 262,
184, 203n5, 211, 278
265, 278
So Young So Bad, 177
From Nine to Nine, 53–59
The Strange Woman, xxii, 22, 51, 52, 53,
Grine Felder (Green Fields), xviii, xx,
99,154, 155, 162, 163, 164, 173, 194
11, 27–31, 49, 71, 75–79, 89, 90,
91–92, 101, 104, 185 Yankl der Shmid (Yankl the Blacksmith,
aka The Singing Blacksmith), xx,
Isle of Forgotten Sins, aka Monsoon,
xviii, 27, 29, 31, 71, 75, 77, 78, 80,
xxi, 109–24, 176
90, 92, 107

317
 Subject Index

alienated, 7, 22, 26, 36, 99, 103, 185, exile, xviii, xx, xxii, 2, 8, 10, 12, 18, 19,
247, 254, 257 20, 41, 42, 50, 52, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65,
alienation, 16, 21, 25, 26, 29, 30, 46, 67, 69, 70, 73, 137, 146, 184, 201,
101, 110, 118, 125, 247, 249, 250, 202, 203
251, 253
alienation effect, 118 family, 1, 6, 21, 28, 30–31, 36, 45, 82,
88, 89, 94, 104, 125, 128–29, 162,
American culture, xx, 11, 61, 73, 90, 168, 194–95, 198, 201
130, 151 figuration, xxii, 127
amnesia, 36, 159–60, 256 film noir, xxii, 13, 21, 22, 78, 80, 84–
anti-Semitism, 68, 69, 72, 90, 91, 98 85, 125–35, 146, 159–60, 164, 166,
170, 176–77, 186, 237, 249
betrayal, xxv, 23, 196, 197, 200–202
blacklist, xxiv, 23, 177, 178, 184, 201–2, genre, xxvii, 8, 42, 47, 62, 68, 81, 94,
203 100, 110–11, 122–23, 125–26, 139,
159–61, 176, 197, 241
camp or campiness, 40, 41, 46, 48, 182 German expressionism, xxii, 10, 40–41,
capitalism, 21, 23, 64, 197 46, 49, 74, 78, 80, 84, 139, 142–43,
censorship, 42, 58, 59, 66–67 147, 214–15, 290
class, 12, 23, 26, 27, 29, 30, 31, 34,
58, 78, 79, 92, 127, 139, 195, 197, Harlem, xx, 27, 61–69
198 high and low art, xv, 46, 48
classical Hollywood cinema, xix, 42, 43, Holocaust, xxvi, 62, 246, 255, 260–61
46, 50, 169, 173 horror film, xix, 6, 39–51, 125, 167,
community, xix, xxiv, 2, 11, 21, 25–34, 179
65, 71, 72, 104, 284
identity, xv, xx, xxi, xxiii, 4, 5, 25, 26,
European culture, 40, 49, 141 35, 36, 61, 64, 72, 83, 84, 85, 88,

319
320 Subject Index

91, 99, 100, 102, 103, 130, 133, 146, representation, 47, 49, 110, 112, 126–
148, 160, 162, 173, 181, 186, 201, 29, 131–32, 135, 217, 235
246, 256 revolutions, xxv, 185, 200–201
Israel, 33, 77, 84, 89
self-image, 23, 24, 25
jazz, 13,14,62,64, 105 shtetl, 11, 27, 29, 30, 32, 61, 75, 82,
Jew/Jewish/Jewry, xvi, xvii, xx, xxi, 5, 90–93, 102, 104
11, 12, 19, 23, 26–29, 31, 32, 34–36, sublime, xxii, 126–27
61–64, 65–67, 68, 69, 71–85, 87–91,
93–106, 137, 139, 177, 178, 246, trash film, xxvii, 48
279, 286
Judaism, xxi, 74, 84, 101, 103, 105 UFA, ii, 35, 139, 142, 293
unpresentable, xxii, 126–27, 131, 134,
Kuleshov effect, 114 135

mass culture, xviii, 21, 22, 23, 26, 36, Vienna, xv, xvi, 2, 3, 4, 5, 9, 12, 15, 41,
37, 42, 51 71, 72, 141
melodrama, ix, xxv, 6, 13, 28, 31, 32,
46, 47, 51, 66, 89, 104, 109, 110, wandering, 7, 14, 16, 17, 18, 28, 34,
111, 112, 113, 206, 210, 237, 238, 177, 207, 214, 225
242, 248 Weimar, xx, 6, 9, 10, 17, 19, 71, 72,
musklyid (muscle Jew), xxi, 75, 77–79 111, 112
yeshive bokher (yeshiva student), xx–
Nazi, Nazism, 72, 81 xxi, 75–79
New Jew (New Jewishness), xx, xxi,
71, 75, 77, 79, 81, 83, 84 Yiddish, x, xviii, xx, xxi, xxiv, 5, 11,
12, 19, 20, 26, 27, 32, 35, 36, 49,
Olomouc, xvi, xvii, xxvii, 1, 71, 141 61, 71–75, 81–85, 87–95, 100, 101,
103–6, 175, 176, 237
patriarchal, 25, 100, 126, 129, 130, 134, Yiddish films, xviii, xx, xxiv, 5, 27, 35,
169, 170 36, 49, 71–85, 88, 90–94, 104, 175
psychoanalysis, xxi, 50, 99, 100, 103,
161–62, 168, 170–71, 254 Zionism, Zionist, 75, 77, 78
 About the Contributors

John Belton is professor of English and film at Rutgers University. He is

the author of five books, including Widescreen Cinema (1992), winner of the
1993 Kraszna Krausz prize for books on the moving image, and American
Cinema/American Culture (1994, 2004), a textbook written to accompany
the PBS series American Cinema. He has edited three books, edits a series
of books on film and culture for Columbia University Press, and serves as
associate editor of the film journal Film History.

Peter Bogdanovich received two Oscar nominations for the small-town

drama The Last Picture Show, the film that made him the hottest young direc-
tor of 1971. More than thirty-five years later, with Tom Petty and the Heartbreak-
ers: Runnin’ Down a Dream, he’s still hot. His other films include What’s Up
Doc? Paper Moon, Mask, and The Cat’s Meow.

Vincent Brook has a Ph.D. in film and television from UCLA. He has been
teaching media studies on the university level for more than twenty years,
most recently at UCLA and USC. He has written dozens of journal articles,
anthology essays, encyclopedia entries, and reviews; authored the book
Something Ain’t Kosher Here: The Rise of the “Jewish” Sitcom (2003); and
edited the anthology You Should See Yourself: Jewish Identity in Postmodern
American Culture (2006). He is currently working on a book about film noir
from the standpoint of Jewish émigré directors.

Alec Charles is senior lecturer in media at the University of Bedfordshire. He

is currently editing a collection of essays on Media in the Enlarged Europe.

321
322 About the Contributors

His recent publications include chapters in The Films of Tod Browning (2006)
and Time and Relative Dissertations in Space (2007).

Bernd Herzogenrath is professor of American studies and teaches Ameri-

can literature and culture at the University of Frankfurt and the University
of Cologne, Germany. He is the author of An Art of Desire: Reading Paul
Auster (1999), and the editor of From Virgin Land to Disney World: Nature
and Its Discontents in the USA of Yesterday and Today (2001); The Films
of Tod Browning (2006); The Cinema of Tod Browning: Essays of the Ma-
cabre and Grotesque (2008); and Edgar G. Ulmer: Essays on the King of
the Bs (2008). His fields of interest are nineteenth- and twentieth-century
American literature, critical theory, and cultural/media studies. He has just
finished a project of a “Deleuzian History of the American Body/Politic”;
future publications include a collection of essays on Deleuze/Guattari &
Ecology, and an anthology on Intermedia[lity]. Bernd is also the organizer
and “inventor” of the Ulmerfest, a biannual conference series on the work of
Edgar G. Ulmer that takes place in Ulmer’s hometown of Olomouc, Czech
Republic. (See www.uni-koeln.de/phil-fak/englisch/abteilungen/berressem/
herzogenrath/ulmer/index.htm.)
After years of digging through various archives, he also managed to locate
Ulmer’s birth home in Olomouc; there are now two memorial plaques on this
house: one for Ulmer, one for Bernd.

Reynold Humphries was a student of Christian Metz and wrote his thesis
on a corpus of Fritz Lang’s American films into Fritz Lang: Genre and
Representation in His American Films (1989). He has since specialized in
the horror genre, publishing The American Horror Film: An Introduction
(2002) and The Hollywood Horror Film, 1931–1941: Madness in a Social
Landscape (2006). He has contributed to Monstrous Adaptations (2007), The
Cinema of Tod Browning (2008), and The Modern American Horror Film
(2009), as well as to special horror issues of Post Script and Paradoxa, and
to the online journal Kinoeye. He has published essays on David Cronenberg
and Michael Powell and has contributed to 101 Horror Movies and 101
Science-Fiction Movies. His other publications include essays in Film Noir
Reader 4, Gangster Film Reader, Docufictions, and anthologies devoted to
Kubrick and Huston, as well as articles on Hollywood, blacklisting, and the
cold war in French publications; seven contributions to 501 Movie Direc-
tors, and essays in French on Joseph Losey, Kenji Mizoguchi, and Jacques
Tourneur. His latest book is Hollywood’s Blacklists: A Political and Cultural
History (2008).
 About the Contributors 323

Noah Isenberg is associate professor of university humanities at the New

School, where he teaches literature, film, and intellectual history. He is the
author, most recently, of a monograph on Edgar G. Ulmer’s Detour and edi-
tor of Weimar Cinema: An Essential Guide to Classic Films of the Era. He is
currently completing a full-scale critical study of Edgar G. Ulmer’s life and
career as a filmmaker. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endow-
ment for the Humanities, Fulbright, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation,
and other grant agencies, his writing has appeared in such scholarly and non-
scholarly publications as Cinema Journal, New German Critique, Raritan,
Partisan Review, Dissent, Bookforum, The Nation, The New Republic, and the
New York Times.

David Kalat is a film historian and motion picture preservationist. He has

worked with such media companies as Turner Classic Movies, the Criterion
Collection, Kino International, Film Preservation Associates, and Classic
Media to promote film culture. He is the author of several well-regarded
books on film history, including The Strange Case of Dr. Mabuse and J-
Horror, and writes regularly for Video Watchdog and Turner Classic Movies
Online. Through the auspices of his own company, All Day Entertainment, he
has rediscovered and restored important works by such filmmakers as Harry
Langdon, Jean Epstein, Edward Dmytryk, Fritz Lang, Claude Chabrol, and
of course, Edgar G. Ulmer. He lives in La Grange Park, Illinois, with his wife
and children.

Bill Krohn is the author of the award-winning Hitchcock au travail and of

Luis Bunuel: Chimera, which have been published in several languages; and
codirector/coproducer/cowriter of It’s All True: Based on an Unfinished Film
By Orson Welles. He has been the Los Angeles correspondent of Cahiers du
cinèma for thirty years. He also reviews films for The Economist. He recently
published French monographs on Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick and
is currently completing Serial Killer Dreams and translations of five “cine-
poems” by Jean-Luc Godard, originally published by P.O.L., Paris.

Hugh S. Manon is an assistant professor in the screen studies program at Okla-

homa State University, where he specializes in Lacanian theory and film noir.
He has published in Cinema Journal, Film Criticism, and International Journal
of Žižek Studies, as well as in several anthologies. He is currently completing a
book project that links the rise and decline of classic American film noir with
the advent of television. He recently led a graduate seminar entitled “Lacan and
His Followers” and has taught courses on “Film Noir and the Classical Holly-
wood Crime Genres” at both the graduate and undergraduate level.
324 About the Contributors

Andrew Repasky McElhinney is the maker of the films The Scream (1994),
Her Father’s Expectancy (1994), A Maggot Tango (1995), Magdalen (1998),
A Chronicle of Corpses (2000), Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye (2003),
and Animal Husbandry (2008). McElhinney is also a repertory film program-
mer, educator, journalist, burlesque performer, social-issue advocate, opera
enthusiast, and multimedia video-installation performance artist who occa-
sionally directs for the stage. Go to www.ARMcinema25.com.

Herbert Schwaab teaches literature, film and media studies in Dortmund

and Lüneburg. He holds a Ph.D. in film studies from the Department of
Media Studies at the Ruhr-University Bochum. His dissertation focused on
the film philosophical works of Stanley Cavell and on concepts of popular
culture, experience, and the ordinary. His main fields of research are televi-
sion series, popular film, concepts of cinephilia, theory of criticism and inter-
pretation, and film philosophy. He is currently working on an introduction to
media philosophy based on readings of the sitcom King of Queens.

Robert Skotak has worked as a visual-effects supervisor and sequence direc-

tor for motion pictures for over thirty years, with over eighty feature (primar-
ily) and commercial credits to his name. He is the winner of two Academy
Awards and two British Academy Awards for visual effects as supervisor of
Aliens and co-supervisor of Terminator 2. He has worked creatively with
Ridley Scott, Tim Burton, James Cameron, Sam Raimi, Woody Allen, Fran-
cis Ford Coppola, Gore Verbinski, and John Carpenter, among many others.
Skotak has run his own visual effects company, 4-Ward Productions, Inc.,
since 1989, as a creator of models, matte paintings, digital composites, pyro,
and other effects for numerous motion pictures. A person who was inspired
to make motion pictures in the genre of the “fantastic” from the age of two,
Skotak is a recognized film historian whose studies continue to add depth and
insight to his own extensive experience.

Jonathan Skolnik teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He

is the author of articles on Berthold Auerbach, Paul Celan, Heinrich Heine,
Arnold Zweig, and the image of the Wandering Jew. He was guest editor
for special issues of New German Critique on “German-Jewish Religious
Thought” (1999) and “Secularization and Disenchantment” (2005). He is at
the moment working on a book entitled “Two must have got hanged together
. . .”: German Jews and African Americans in Hollywood, 1932–1965.

Alena Smiešková is an assistant professor at the Department of English and

American Studies of University of Constantine the Philosopher in Nitra, Slo-
 About the Contributors 325

vakia. In her Ph.D. work she examined the novels of Philip Roth in the light
of contemporary postmodernist theories. She teaches American literature and
American studies. Her research interests have been aimed at visual culture, the
questions of artistic representation, and philosophy of art. The major theme that
she has examined in a number of articles is recursive structures in the context
of many artistic phenomena, such as street art, film, and fiction. She has been a
nominee of the Fulbright Scholar Program, and during the academic year 2008/
09 she is going to spend a semester at University of California Santa Cruz doing
research on the impact of visual culture on American studies programs.

Miriam Strube is an associate professor in English and American stud-

ies at Paderborn University (Germany). She has received scholarships to
do research at Princeton University, to participate in the Fulbright Summer
School (“The Role of Media in American Society”), to be a visiting scholar
at Columbia University, and to study at New York University. Her book on the
sexual self-definition of women in literature, music, and visual culture will be
published in the winter of 2008, and her textbook on American Philosophy in
2009. She has also written articles on hip-hop, Sex and the City, The L Word,
and women and music, as well as on gender studies.

D. J. Turner has been a senior film archivist with the National Archives of
Canada since 1974. A film historian and restorationist, Turner has supervised
the restoration of numerous films, particularly titles involving Ernest Ship-
man (Back to God’s Country) and Nell Shipman (Something New and A Bear,
a Boy and a Dog). Other titles include Carry on Sergeant! (1928); Lotos, Die
Tempeltänzerin; The Night Riders; Tangled Trails; and The Arctic Patrol, as
well as Damaged Lives (in collaboration with Robert Gitt at UCLA) and From
Nine to Nine. He participated in the Ulmer Conference organized by the New
School University in New York in 2002. His work has appeared in many jour-
nals, including Cinema Canada, Journal of the University Film Association,
24 Images, Griffithiana, Journal of Film Preservation (formerly FIAF Bul-
letin), and Film History. In 1987 he published Canadian Feature Film Index,
1913–1985. He has taught film history at Carleton University, Ottawa, and is
working on a book about Canadian producer Ernest Shipman.

Arianné Ulmer Cipes is the daughter of Edgar G. Ulmer. She was an actress
and has worked in the film business for many years. Today she runs the Edgar
G. Ulmer Preservation Corp. in Sherman Oaks, California.

Tom Weaver, one of the “leading scholars in the horror field” (New York
Times), is a Sleepy Hollow, New York–based film researcher and historian.
326 About the Contributors

Since 1982, he has interviewed nearly six hundred actors, writers, producers,
directors (etc.) for a variety of nationally distributed magazines. His books
(nearly twenty) include Universal Horrors, an examination of the studio’s
classic chillers of the 1930s and ’40s. Weaver has written liner notes, produc-
tion histories, and cast bios for hundreds of laser discs and DVDs; provided
DVD audio commentaries for The Wolf Man, Bedlam, Creature from the
Black Lagoon and sequels, Fiend without a Face, Devil Doll, The Haunted
Strangler, The Atomic Submarine, It Came from Outer Space, and many oth-
ers; and guested on movie-related documentary series on American Movie
Classics and E! An article cowritten by Weaver and Bob Burns appeared in
the 2001 edition of The Best American Movie Writing, an annual publication
that reprints important essays on film history. It was one of 26 pieces chosen
from more than 320 books and magazines, including the New Yorker and the
New York Times; previous volumes have featured articles by Steven Spielberg,
Gore Vidal, Roger Ebert, and Martin Scorsese. Weaver is an eight-time win-
ner of the Rondo Hatton Classic Horror Award, a fan-based award presented
each year for the best in horror research and appreciation.