Riches From a Fast, Cheap Master

Edgar G. Ulmer must have loved movies--he made so many of them.

A wizard of low-budget filmmaking, the Austrian-born Ulmer claimed to have turned out 128 cheapie features in a career that lasted from the late ‘20s to the mid-’60s. “Nobody ever made good pictures faster or for less money,” says Peter Bogdanovich, who interviewed Ulmer in 1970, two years before he died.

Most filmographies are content to credit the director with 30 to 40 pictures, and “Strange Illusions: The Films of Edgar G. Ulmer,” the new American Cinematheque tribute starting Wednesday and running through Aug. 15 at Hollywood’s Egyptian Theatre, showcases 26. But the stories that go along with each of them make today’s scrappy independent productions seem like privileged luxury liners.

Shooting a film in six days for a $20,000 budget and moving through 80 camera setups a day were business as usual for this man who cut his teeth as an assistant to two of the legends of the German film world: Max Reinhardt and F.W. Murnau. (A newly restored 35-millimeter print of Ulmer’s first film, the 1929 “Menschen Am Sonntag/People on Sunday,” written by Billy Wilder, co-directed by Robert Siodmak and photographed by Eugen Schufftan and Fred Zinnemann, is a highlight of the Cinematheque series.)

A man who must have gloried in his speed and versatility, Ulmer made everything from “Damaged Lives,” a controversial anti-syphilis film sponsored by the American Social Hygiene Society, to the all-black “Moon Over Harlem,” well ahead of its time in its naturalistic treatment of people of color but shot largely on short ends of film, which meant reloading the camera every few minutes.

Although he spoke neither language, Ulmer made significant films in Ukrainian (“Natalka Poltavka,” “Cossacks in Exile”) and Yiddish (“Green Fields,” “The Light Ahead”). In fact, he told Bogdanovich he once made pictures in both languages almost simultaneously on a pristine site in rural New Jersey owned by an open-minded Benedictine monastery.

It wasn’t how economically Ulmer worked that made him significant--it was how well. The performers were often substandard. The dialogue featured lines like “You’re even more beautiful when you’re angry” and “You’re like your mother, a wanton.” But Ulmer’s sense of visual style, his talent for brooding lighting and smooth, elegant camera movements made it clear--especially in his best work--that this was a gifted director.

Ulmer spent much of his career with outfits so threadbare that when he began working for PRC, part of Hollywood’s Poverty Row group of low-budget studios, it was the equivalent of moving to MGM. Yet if Ulmer couldn’t have relished his often primitive working conditions, he did understand that they helped guarantee his artistic freedom. As he told Bogdanovich (in an extensive interview reprinted in “Who the Devil Made It”), “I did not want to be ground up in the Hollywood hash machine.”

It was French critics, always on the alert for American exotica, who first championed Ulmer and his work. Writing in Cahiers du Cinema in 1956, Luc Moullet called him “les plus maudit des cineastes,” the most cursed of filmmakers. American writers like Bogdanovich, Andrew Sarris and Myron Meisel brought the gospel to this country, but Ulmer’s work is still unknown to all but the most devoted buffs.

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The series at the American Cinematheque has films both for the Ulmer fanatics and those new to the man and his work. Ulmerites can cherish a chance to see the uncut European version of his last film, 1965’s “The Cavern,” as well as his rarest film, a 1958 nudist colony epic called “The Naked Venus,” usually credited to one Gaston Hakim. And those just discovering Ulmer can experience the dark, brooding films that prove that budgetary limitations can be a blessing as much as a curse.

One of Ulmer’s best films, 1934’s “The Black Cat,” was one of his first films in this country, his last for a major studio and one of his few to star big-name actors. Vividly atmospheric and wonderfully disturbing, it featured Boris Karloff as Satan worshiper Hjalmar Poelzig and Bela Lugosi as his marginally less demented nemesis, Dr. Vitus Werdergast. A gloss on the horrors of the first World War, it’s one of the jewels of Universal’s 1930s horror cycle and retains all its power to unnerve.

Ulmer’s masterpiece, however, came a dozen years later, with 1946’s astonishing “Detour,” probably the blackest, most doom-laden film noir ever made. In only 70 minutes, it relates the devastating tale of what happens to musician Al (Tom Neal) when he tries to hitchhike across the country and runs into Vera, a fury incarnate. Ann Savage’s sensational performance in that role, combined with the real-life mistakes of Neal, who ended up going to prison for murdering his wife, have made this the noir to end all noirs, what Sarris calls “this most despairing and most claustrophobic of all B pictures.” (Savage is scheduled to appear at the Aug. 7 screening, along with Ulmer’s daughter, Arianne Ulmer Cipes).

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As dark as Ulmer was here, that’s how warm and empathetic he was in the two Yiddish films in the series. “Green Fields,” co-directed by the Yiddish Art Theater’s Jacob Ben-Ami, is an elegy to the virtues of the simple rural life, with a young scholar finding “the light of truth” among unsophisticated peasants. Made in five days for just $8,000, it stars Michael Goldstein, Helen Beverly and a very young Herschel Bernardi.

Ulmer also used Beverly in “The Light Ahead,” in which she and David Opatoshu formed what’s been described as the most beautiful couple in the history of Yiddish cinema. Based on Mendele Mocher Seforim’s classic short stories and detailing the touching romance between a blind girl and a lame beggar, this is one of the most emotionally satisfying of all Yiddish films.

The other vintage Ulmers on view display further aspects of the director’s multifaceted temperament. The vivid “Ruthless,” which stars Zachary Scott as an unapologetically heartless tycoon, shows Ulmer both remaking “Citizen Kane” and relishing the energy of pure melodrama.

“The Man From Planet X,” one of several science fiction items on the program, showcases Ulmer’s ability to create arresting visuals on a shoestring. The Planet X spacecraft, its portholes flickering like the eyes of a malevolent Halloween pumpkin, and the blank face of the Planet X man are hard images to get out of your mind.

With a working life permanently assigned to non-prestige items, Ulmer is more appreciated now than he ever was while he was on the job. What one of the characters in “Detour” says applies as well to the career of its creator. “Those guys in Hollywood,” the line goes, “don’t know the real thing when it’s right in front of them.”

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Ulmer Films Back in Spotlight

The schedule:

* Wednesday: “Bluebeard,” “Strange Illusion,” 8 p.m.

* Thursday: “Green Fields,” “The Light Ahead,” 8 p.m.

* Friday: “The Black Cat,” 7 p.m.; “The Wife of Monte Cristo,” “The Pirates of Capri,” 8:45 p.m.

* Saturday: “Carnegie Hall,” 4 p.m.; “Detour,” 6:45 p.m.; “Man From Planet X,” “The Daughter of Dr. Jekyll,” 8:45 p.m.

* Next Sunday:: “Hannibal,” 4 p.m.; “Menschen Am Sonntag/People on Sunday,” “Damaged Lives,” 6:15 p.m.

* Aug. 11: “Club Havana,” “Moon Over Harlem,” 8 p.m.

* Aug. 13: “Beyond the Time Barrier,” 7 p.m.; “The Strange Woman,” “Her Sister’s Secret,” 9 p.m.

* Aug. 14: “The Naked Venus,” “Girls in Chains,” 6 p.m.; “Murder Is My Beat,” “The Naked Dawn,” 9:15 p.m.

* Aug. 15: “Ruthless,” 4 p.m.; “The Amazing Transparent Man,” “The Cavern,” 6:30 p.m.

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American Cinematheque, Egyptian Theater, 6712 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood. $5-$7. (323) 466-FILM.