Webs of Destiny and Bits of String: Edgar G. Ulmer
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If
we trust Ulmer’s own words, his career path is somewhat perplexing.
He
contests his official date of birth of 1900, placing it in 1904. But he also
points out his contribution to The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919), which
would mean he began his career in the industry – set decorator and assistant
director – at fifteen. He would then have gone to the
And
what to make of his collaboration with the latter on seven films, from The
Last Laugh (1924) to Tabu (1931), while practically nothing –
neither in the credits nor in the production stills – bears witness to his
presence?
And
besides: how, in the same year of 1929, at a time when travel was still very
slow, was he able to work both in Tahiti on Tabu and co-direct People
on Sunday in Berlin? A great deal casts doubt upon his actual participation
in this film, which officially belongs to Robert Siodmak. And yet, in 1961,
Ulmer told me that he wanted to remake what he had attempted with People on
Sunday, a totally free ‘young person’ film, by commissioning short scripts
from Bertrand Tavernier, me and a few others. A still-born project: Ulmer
already had enough trouble directing the only film he was allowed to do, Seven
Against Death, three years later.
And
how could he have worked (as he claims) with D.W. Griffith, Erich von Stroheim,
Ernst Lubitsch, Charlie Chaplin, King Vidor, Cecil B. DeMille, Sergei Eisenstein,
Fritz Lang and Frank Borzage? That would have been the most beautiful résumé in
the history of cinema.
In
the field of fabrication, Ulmer neatly beats his main competitor, Howard Hawks.
He
pretended to have directed one hundred and twenty-eight features, while it is
hard to identify forty of them.
This
has all contributed to making Ulmer seem full of it. Certain people will even
go so far as to attribute the success of The Strange Woman (1946) to
Douglas Sirk, even though it is signed by Ulmer.
Full of it because of his own words, he is equally so in
terms of his reputation as a filmmaker. He has been overestimated by certain critics.
This
broadening of his exaggerations is in no way justified, as we shall see;
Ulmer’s exaggerated claims reveal, above all, a great power of imagination –
which, after all, is not so bad for a filmmaker.
In
a thirty-year career, no film shot for a major company – just four films
distributed by minor majors, Universal and United Artists. Ulmer’s first label
is that of a specialist with no-budget films – a paradox for a filmmaker who
mostly worked in
Hollywood.
One-week shoots, or fourteen usable minutes per day (Isle of Forgotten Sins,
1943), for less than twenty thousand dollars. Compare that with the three
million spent on Vidor’s An American Romance (1944) in the same period.
Sometimes, according to Ulmer, eighty shots a day (personally, I have to be
happy with thirteen shots, nineteen at most). Ulmer recalled that, between four
and five in the afternoon, it was the ‘PRC
Hour’, from the name of his producer-distributor, the Producers
Releasing Corporation. He shot the main scenes on a single-coloured backdrop, jumping
from one sequence to another without stopping the camera. Just a hand in front
of the lens to facilitate the editor’s job, allowing him to string together
more than forty shots in an hour. Here, too, I believe Ulmer exaggerated a bit.
It
must be recognised that nothing particularly great came from this pace. I have
tried to see everything by Ulmer. But I had to give up: too many bungled,
boring films. Poor old Ulmer could not always make something out of so very
little. And no one else could have done any better.
In
1955, at Cahiers du cinéma, we acted a little hastily in classing Ulmer
among cinema’s auteurs. A real auteur is someone whose every film is good and
hides striking similarities – with, all the same, the right to fail now and
again (Alfred Hitchcock, Lubitsch, Eisenstein, Jean Renoir, etc.).
Now,
in Ulmer, two out of three films are disappointing, so we have to be precise.
Let us say that he was the auteur of certain films, like Boris Barnet, Borzage,
John Ford or John Huston. With the difference that, when Huston messes up, with
all the cash he has, he is the main person responsible (The Roots of Heaven [1958], The Barbarian and the Geisha [1958], Annie [1982], Phobia [1980], Sinful Davey [1969], etc.) – whereas, when Ulmer flops, it is not
his fault.
If
we grant that People on Sunday is a rather successful collective film,
but not a specifically Ulmerian one, we shall then notice that Ulmer’s true
debut is The Black Cat (1934) – a mystery and horror film that,
paradoxically, draws all its force from its softness and brightness. This is an
orientation that can barely be found in the rest of the films, very off-kilter
due to the variety of offers that were made to Ulmer.
I will quickly run through the occasional qualities of his B and Z films – like Fritz
Kortner’s performance in The Wife of Monte Cristo (1946) and the palette
(in Cinefotocolor) of Muchachas de Bagdad (Babes in Bagdad, 1952).
I
do not follow the Ulmerian dogma whereby one must differently judge those films
handicapped by an extremely low budget. First, we would have to know the real
budget of each film, and that is far from obvious. And second, we have to
remember that Detour (1945) is far more successful and masterful than Independence
Day (1996) or Titanic (1997), which cost a hundred times more. The
spectator’s pleasure cannot be increased by foreknowledge of a handicap.
There
are two very interesting – and completely opposed – orientations in Ulmer’s
minimalist films.
The
first is evident in a film like Isle of Forgotten Sins. No money, no
time – of course. The final scene accumulates ‘telephoned’ shots (a third of the image is left
empty for thirty seconds so that the actress can peacefully position herself
next to her two colleagues). In the editing, these shots are cut into ten
pieces, so that each group of actors is found ten times in a row, along the
same axis and in the same position as at the beginning of the shot. The scenes
are cut just before the slap or punch, doubtlessly in order to avoid the
additional union fee for dangerous scenes. Sea and storm are suggested by a
surging soundtrack that has no relation to the extremely impoverished image,
and by a multitude of short detail shots that smooth everything out. Everyone
kills each other in images where the shooter and the victim are never seen
together. It is absolutely unbelievable. There is a charm here that we will
find again, later, in Ed Wood. The excess of the mistakes, of the ‘bits of
string’ approach, ends up creating an oneirism that is quite close to
Surrealism, perhaps more voluntary than involuntary (but whether it is
intentional or unintentional cannot be a criterion of quality), which has stuck
in my memory for years since. It is a limit-case in cinema history.
The
impact of the scene is undeniable, even if it is linked to the fact that one
cannot believe it for a second. In any case, it is infinitely more joyous and
worthy than the ‘well made’ work of David Lean or Claude Sautet. It is second
degree.
The
other, less perverse orientation, is where the limited means serve the film in
the first degree. In Bluebeard (1944), the absence of money
cannot be seen, because the majority of the action remains in shadow. And this
shadow (generally nocturnal) allows us to imagine that there are whole parts of
the set we are unable to see within the shot, these threatening, grandiose
surfaces: the art of Ulmer as set decorator and (uncredited) cinematographer
Eugen Schüfftan is to conjure everything from nothing. A fabulous economy of
means. So as not to pay the actors, they were replaced (as often as possible)
by dolls, and that expresses the idea that human beings are puppets, subjected
to the will of the director or of God (cf. Strange Illusion, 1944).
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Detour is the masterpiece of
this type of film. More shots cut into fifteen pieces (1), two hundred and
eighty-three cuts in sixty-nine minutes, or forty-seven cuts a day, doubtless
derived from twenty-five filmed shots. This film, conceived to the PRC rule –
according to legend: twenty thousand dollar budget, six-day shoot – has
amazingly survived the oblivion for which it was designed. So we have a
cult-film released in
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1.
But also the opposite: sequence-shots at the start (1’32”) and the end (1’11”)
create a dialectical rhythm of fullness and delay, avoiding systematism; and
what power in that interminable final shot where so many things happen and
everything ties up. |
In
Ulmer, we truly have the impression of this fatality, this implacable destiny
that dogs the protagonist – merely because of the repetition principle (no less
implacable) of alternating shots that return ten or twenty times. Every second
of the film tightens the knot that strangles the ‘innocent’ hero in its insurmountable
net – and from which he can escape only by giving himself up to the police,
with the help of a fiendishly skillful script.
We
can see here the relation between the film’s conditions of shooting and its
moral meaning. Poverty is very constraining, and reflects the obstacles that a
human being (and a director of Z films) vainly confronts in real life.
Similarly, lack of money incites Ulmer to make a film on a single set, which
gives an impression of claustrophobia (The Cavern [1964], The Naked
Dawn [1955], The Man from Planet X [1951], Club Havana [1945]). All human existence unfolds within a completely closed room.
The
notion of destiny is also very well established in Ulmer’s bigger budget films.
His trademark image has often hidden its reality from critics’ eyes. For Ulmer
also made long and expensive films – Carnegie Hall (1947, 2 hours 14
minutes), The Strange Woman, even Ruthless (1948) – not only Z
films. The same mistake has often been made with Jacques Tourneur, identified
with quickies because of his small horror films, while Out of the Past (1947) and The Flame and the Arrow (1950) had pretty substantial
budgets. The Strange Woman benefits from very refined casting: Hedy
Lamarr, George Sanders, Louis Hayward. And we find here the same moral confluence.
Evil Destiny acts through the intransigent will of the negative main character,
Jenny, the ‘strange woman’; as
well as Vendig (Zachary Scott) in Ruthless, opposed to the weakling
played, in both films, by Louis Hayward (Ulmer’s fetish actor), who is defeated
or destroyed in the end.
There
is a desire to always win, either by an insatiable arrivisme, without any scruples (Ruthless), or by an
ontological urge for seduction and domination (The Strange Woman). The
tenacity with which Ulmer sticks to his somber heroes gives his work a heavy,
obsessional power that is very Germanic.
Here,
manipulative characters (instead of the manipulated hero of Detour)
create their own Destiny, which then turns against them – death being
inevitable for the Ulmerian hero. There is also the drowning leitmotiv (Bluebeard, The Strange Woman, Ruthless), which is another of the major
motifs of melodrama (Leave Her to Heaven [1945], Ruby Gentry [1952], The White Angel [1955]) and of the Master, Murnau (Sunrise [1927], Tabu).
We
will have noticed, as well, a dash of misogyny in the myth of the beautiful
femme fatale (Detour, The Strange Woman), close to the American
thematic of the years 1945-1950 (Leave Her to Heaven, Mildred Pierce [1945], Ruby Gentry, Gun Crazy [1950]) – linked to the
distrustfulness of GIs faced with wives who had a good time at home during the
war; but also to the Old Testament.
The
Strange Woman, Ruthless and The Naked Dawn are strongly marked by religion: the
preacher’s incredible violence in the first film, direct references to
scripture in the other two. Compare that to Ulmer’s four Yiddish films, in
which the denominational quality is obviously very strong.
To
construe, from this, Ulmer as a religious filmmaker is to maybe go a little too
fast. First, is it the god of the Jews or the Puritans? It is really hard to
say. There seems to be a vast and imprecise idea of religion and God,
representing a need on Man’s part – and constituting a dramatic motif, and
primordial morality, without which art has no meaning.
Ulmer
is, like a lot of major filmmakers, a man of the 19th century,
linked to its ideology, to its traditional dramatic structures – which explains
a certain indifference toward him from modern critics.
With The Naked Dawn, the order changes somewhat. The film still centres on
the main character (a necessary condition for the film’s success), but the work
no longer draws its force from the hero’s excessive energy, as in the previous
diptych. Santiago (Arthur Kennedy) in The Naked Dawn – l’aurore nue,
a wink to Murnau – is a being tossed between diverse forces and impulses,
neither good nor bad, subjected to multiple changes of heart, between crime and
sacrifice. A typically modern hero and film, with the procession of back and
forth oscillations based on the subtle nuances between a woman and two men – a
novelistic weightiness rare in cinema, especially American cinema. A tender
lament – nostalgic and disillusioned all at once – about life, love and death.
Life is made more real thanks to very long takes that allow the characters to
breathe. The lack of money is sometimes bothersome here: during these very
beautiful long takes, we notice, in the background the whole time, a very
unrealistic, painted countryside that clashes with the spontaneity of the
dialogue and the performances. But it is in this film that Ulmer makes the most
out of his melomania (the music is pervasive in his films from the 1940s, as in
many American films of the period) and his Germanic heritage, the kammerspiel happily taking over from the para-expressionist economy of Bluebeard and Detour.
Translated from the French by Ted Fendt
and Adrian Martin. Originally published in Charles Tatum, Jr (ed.), Edgar G. Ulmer: Le bandit demasqué (Éditions Yellow Now, 2002). Reprinted with
the permission of Luc Moullet.
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from Issue 3: Masks |
Original French text © Luc Moullet 2002. English translation © LOLA 2012. Cannot be reprinted without permission of the author and editors. |