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Edgar G.Ulmer
(1904-72) suffered a series of strokes and toward the end of
his life was almost totally paralyzed and unable to speak.
These last years were his "purgatory," his daughter Arianne
recalls, "mostly because he was totally helpless to do
anything for any of the people he loved so dearly. His was
truly a Greek Tragedy. He never gave up but he
suffered the pains of the damned since he knew he had hurt
so many of his loved ones...but then he was an incurable
Romantic."[1] For this German
Romantic moviemaker, light was the romance. Light recorded
the vibrations of the soul. In Green fields (US
1937), a Yiddish miracle play set in rural Eastern Europe,
Ulmer's way of making us aware of the light falling on the
fields; of the rounded, choreographed bodies of the
harvesters; of photographic gray scales; all remind us that
he trained under F.W. Murnau and called him "one of the most
cultivated of all filmmakers,"[2]
meaning of course that Murnau shows us that each moment in
life is heavenly, adventurous, and magical. Cinema is a
sense of space and time, of an event as luminist. [1].
Arianne Ulmer Cipes, from discussions with TG, unless
otherwise specified. As an actress, Arianne Ulmer appeared
in five of her father's pictures: The light ahead
(age 2), American matchmaker (3), The pirates of
Capri (12), Naked Venus (21), and Beyond the
time barrier (23). A sixth role, as young Jenny
who tries to drown young Horace in the prologue to The
Strange woman (9), ended on the cutting floor because
producer Hedy Lamarr judged her insufficiently nasty, and
the prologue was reshot with another girl and (since Ulmer
refused) another director, Douglas Sirk. By means of The
Edgar G. Ulmer Preservation Corporation, Arianne Ulmer has
been trying to locate and preserve her father's work, and is
currently producing a documentary in collaboration with
Michael Henry Wilson, E.G. Ulmer "beyond the
boundary." [2].
Interview with Bertrand Tavernier, Amis
américains (Lyon: Institut Lumière/Actes
Sud, 1993), 163. Thus in Green
fields, when a young rabbi sits in his synagogue one
last time, before forsaking his friends and all he knows in
obedience to a call to search the world for "some good
Jews," black smoke from a candle curls upwards, turning time
into a luminous event, then into a spatial one as sun bursts
through an opened door and across the darkness, setting the
air ablaze. "The idea that spirituality is achieved through
acceptance, not renunciation, of the material world is made
apparent," writes J. Hoberman.[3] [3].
Bridge of light (New York: Museum of Modern
Art/Schocken Books, 1991), 251. Incarnation of
time into space, of the "word" into the world, is repeated
in the next shot, when we watch our young rabbi wandering
the countryside. It is not he who moves, but the
countryside in back of him, in a series of superimpressions.
He stays at frame-center, for life's true journey is
a moral one-trying to be a "good Jew"-and from this
conviction he will not stray. Ulmer's movie, indeed all of
Ulmer's movies, are morality plays not because heroes are
saved or damned, but because they turn their convictions
into action, their "word" becomes the world. At the end of
one of Ulmer's last movies, Hannibal (US/Italy 1960),
Hannibal stands frame-center fighting but not moving, as a
voice-off tells us that he is damned to fight ceaselessly
for years, knowing all the while that he will not win, and
we understand that it is Hannibal's conviction that damns
him. In movie after movie, Ulmer will track and pan
following a hero or heroine in constant position in the
frame, so that there is a constancy of self despite a change
of place or desperation to escape. In contrast, when Ulmer
keeps the camera still and makes the person move within the
stable frame, we understand that the world stays the same
while the person is changing, and perhaps that the world and
change are out of the person's control. We are both free and
determined. In a magic moment in Ruthless (US 1948),
impoverished 13-year-old Horace Vendig walks through the
gate and into the yard of a rich family; the camera is
still, for until this moment Horace has been a victim
wherever his place. But now, as Horace stops and stands
still, the camera, after a pause, begins to move in,
tracking through the gate and down the path to join Horace,
and we understand that Horace has taken control of his life
and intends to conquer a place in this new home. It is
typical of Ulmer's art that, as with Murnau and King Vidor
and John Ford, abstract ideas like conviction and free will
are argued not in words but in sensory motions, and flesh
becomes word. He even puts morality plays within morality
plays, whereby he can be even more abstract aesthetically:
the morality puppet-opera (Faust) in Bluebeard
(US 1944), the morality ballet staged in The pirates of
Capri (US 1949); the morality fights-to-the-death for
entertainment in Hannibal; the morality nightclub
acts in Moon over Harlem (US 1939). Ulmer had met the
miracle play at the Jesuit prep school (gymnasium) he
attended in Vienna. Morality plays-tens of thousands of
them, on myriads of subjects sacred and secular-had been
central to Jesuit education since the 1500s. They had formed
Corneille, Molière, Voltaire, Calderón, Lope
de Vega, and now Ulmer, whose upbringing had been agnostic
and anticlerical. Jesuit plays taught language and poise,
religion and morality. They trained students to grasp
abstractions through the senses. They inculcated the Jesuit
virtues: love of good, will-power, and
self-control.[4]
Like the young rabbi in Green fields. Like Edgar
Ulmer himself. "He often examined Redemption,
Predestination, etc., etc.," says Arianne Ulmer. "He was
truly a philosopher by curiosity. [4].
William H. McCabe, S.J., An introduction to the
Jesuit theater, ed. Louis Oldani, S.J. (St. Louis:
Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1983), 22-23. "The Jesuits were
always sending him into detention in the basement for the
weekend with extra homework. Dad was a difficult unruly
brilliant student. He did not have to pay since he was
destitute. He always felt honored to have been chosen to
attend an excellent school and obtain an excellent education
with noble families, etc. They were very strict according to
his memory." Edgar's father
Siegfried, a Socialist wine merchant from Moravia, had died
of a trench infection during World War I, leaving four
children in the care of his wife, a snobbish Viennese
coquette named Henrietta Edels. Edgar, 11, was the eldest.
Anti-Semitism was virulent in Vienna and it was only a few
years later that, upon applying for the Jesuit school, which
had a quota system, he discovered he was Jewish. When
finally the war ended, the city was starving. From a bread
line, the family would get just one loaf a day, and
Henrietta would take half. Eventually she abandoned her
children. An orphan society sent the two youngest to England
and Holland, and Edgar, now 14, and Carola, 9, to Sweden,
where Edgar was bounced back and forth among four families
for a year. "He always spoke of Sweden with great
affection," Arianne Ulmer relates, "and I have a wonderful
photo of him as a teenage boy sitting with his whole Uppsala
family of Swedish women. He loved Uppsala." By 1920 Ulmer was
back in Vienna, at the Jesuit school, seeking the good,
will-power, and self-control. Because, like young Horace in
Ruthless, he could not handle his anger that his
mother was with another man, he was living on the charity of
the parents of an actor friend, Joseph
Schildkraut. "He did not have
faith," says Arianne. But he had faith in himself. And faith
or the lack of it would be the focus of almost all his
movies. He was fascinated with "the possibility of God, and
the morality and humanity of man and his culture." In each
movie, as in Green Fields, the sense would constantly
appear that ideas and values matter, and perhaps somehow
transcend the individual. "Man couldn't create the world,"
remarks a boy in Green Fields, and the rabbi replies,
"He can destroy it"-an idea with resonance in 1937, on the
eve of World War II, and one which Ulmer repeats in 1960
with the warnings in Beyond the time barrier (US) of
nuclear winter, and one which is portrayed in every film in
the ways his heroes and villains conduct their lives. There
is always a sense of our actions resonating in time and
space. There is always the matter of being a "good Jew."
Following Vidor's Hallelujah (US 1929), Ulmer puts
people on a land, in a time, in a
culture; ideas are tangible. Green Fields, typically,
has folk tunes, singing, ceremonies, rituals and proverbs,
and a working-class perspective, and elaborates the
least-important-and-therefore-most-meaningful things in
life, like two girls talking about a boy. By honing
documentary material into skits, choreographing it into
paintings, and orchestrating it into Murnau-like
cinematography, Ulmer, like Murnau's other disciples, Ford
and Rossellini, turns documents into history and melodrama
(opera, when possible), and lets us experience what's going
on in people's emotions. Italian neo-realists, Vidor,
Murnau, Jean Renoir, Ford, Flaherty, and Ulmer, all shared a
populist perspective, and combined documentary with
painterly style and melodrama. Ulmer's movies are a series
of ethnic studies: Hungarians, Yiddish, Ukrainians, blacks
in Harlem, blacks in Alabama, Wall Street tycoons, Navajos,
Mexicans, Berliners, Neapolitans, New York Dutch, Boston
WASPS, Spaniards, Caucasians, Armenians, and Brabantians.
But they are also studies in ethnic faith and
conviction. The critical
wisdom of Ulmer's champions has usually suggested otherwise.
In 1956 Luc Moullet defined Ulmer's world as "the great
solitude of man without God."[5]
And in 1974 John Belton described it as "an irrational
[world] governed by crazy nightmare more than by any
coldly mechanical sense of fate."[6] [5].
Cahiers du cinéma 58 (April 1956). [6].
The Hollywood professionals, volume 3: Howard
Hawks, Frank Borzage, Edgar G.Ulmer (New York: A.S.
Barnes, 1974), 152. Yes, there is
plenty of cold lonely mountain top in Ulmer, of feeling
adrift in a senseless universe. That German romantic is
always there. But Moullet's notion of a "spiritual
progression leading from yielding to sin to the salvation of
the soul," though accurate for The naked dawn (US
1955), belies the steadfastness of German romantic Will in
Ulmer's heroes, as does Belton's nihilistic argument that
"the world around Ulmer's characters, both their physical
environment and the events they experience, renders them its
powerless prisoners." The world around
them does sometimes threaten the sanity of Ulmer's heroes,
notably in Strange illusion (US 1945), but it never
succeeds (although it will destroy Fuller's reporter in the
Shock corridor [US 1963]). Despite Belton's
contention that "the archetypal Ulmerian situation consists
of one or more characters helplessly trapped in a hostile,
unfamiliar setting...filled with a sense of doom and
self-imposed retribution," Ulmer's heroes do not, in fact,
question their convictions, succumb to solitude, yield to
sin, or condescend to feeling helpless (Murder is my
beat [US 1955], Her sister's secret
[US 1946], The pirates of Capri, The naked
Venus [US 1958], The light ahead [US
1939], Moon over Harlem, Hannibal,
Girls in chains [US 1943], Carnegie
Hall [US 1947], Cossacks in exile [US
1939], Thunder over Texas [US 1934]).
They do progress spiritually, usually like the young rabbi
in Green fields who learns that the Torah has to be
made flesh in nature and labor,[7]
rather than remain just a book in a synagogue, so that faith
becomes our reality. "You've got to
believe. It's the only thing we have to hold onto. You've
got to. You've got to," proclaims Fishke the Cripple in
The light ahead. "Teach me to sing again!" insists a
singer whose mother is shot in Moon over Harlem,
while a black leader's response to his community's moral
devastation is undoubting-"There's so much to be done here!
It's fairly screaming for leadership!" There's a declamatory
quality to Ulmer's heroes; they are not bashful. In
Cossacks in exile, a girl sings to the moon; but
there is magic anytime anyone sings in Ulmer. In The
Naked Venus, a young lawyer (Arianne Ulmer) throws back
her head, puffs cigarettes, never blinks behind the defiant
black ramparts of her eye-glasses, acts as though she has
the world on a leash-and can't recall her married name on
her honeymoon. The paradigm of
Ulmer's heroes is Geneviève de Brabant (in an episode
in The loves of three Queens [Italy
1954]).[8]
When this medieval countess is sentenced by her husband to
be beheaded for infidelity, the ax-man, knowing her to be
innocent, sets her free, and she dwells alone in the forest
for five years with the son she has borne there. When
finally her husband learns the truth and comes for her, her
happiness is complete. [7].
Cf., Bill Krohn's excellent, "King of the B's," Film
comment (July 1983: 60-64. [8].
The
loves of three queens is a US release, in color, running
about 90 minutes, consisting of a framing story and episodes
about Geneviève, Josephine Bonaparte, and Helen of
Troy. Ulmer planned the production but directed only the
Geneviève segment. Marc Allégret is credited
as sole director and may have shot additional material for
"Geneviève" as well. An Italian edition, Eterna
femina, allegedly ran 270 minutes. According to Arianne
Ulmer, "Dad was originally going to do the entire trilogy.
The film was originally financed by Del Duca, the magazine
magnet in Italy, but during the filming Hedy Lamarr married
the Texan Howard Lee and had him buy out Cino Del Duca, and
now Dad had to contend with Lamarr as producer. It was the
only time he ever walked on a film...She still owns the film
and has reedited it over and over again." One such edition,
apparently dealing only with Helen of Troy, was L'amante
di Paride (US: The face that launched a thousand
ships). Who among us
would be so readily forgiving? Is this a patriarch's pipe
dream? In fact it is not
Geneviève's charity that is the theme of this
morality play, but her conviction. Here is a woman with love
of good, will-power, and self-control. She knows what she
wants. She will no more destroy what she values now than she
would speak out earlier, when a simple declaration of
innocence would have saved her from being beheaded. It never
occurs to her, nor to any Ulmer hero, to define themselves
in others' terms comparable instance occurs in The light
ahead, Ulmer's second Yiddish movie (Di
klyatshe), released the week of Hitler's invasion of
Poland in September 1939, which makes not the slightest
reference to any possible threat outside the Jewish world
(in fact never suggests everyone on Earth is not Jewish) and
instead makes searing denunciations by Jews of the
degeneracy of their shtetl life-in the very areas the Nazis
were about to "cleanse." In Hallelujah, likewise,
there is no hint that we are not all black, or that a black
was being lynched each week in the American South. As with
Geneviève, such moral defiance looks beyond mere
physical survival and becomes a sort of faith. The good stay
good, the bad stay bad. Ulmer's villains-Horace (Zachary
Scott, Ruthless), Jenny (Hedy Lamarr, The strange
woman), Dollar Bill (Bud Harris, Moon over
Harlem), and Bluebeard (John Carradine,
Bluebeard)-are vampires, Fausts, indifferent to
anything but their insatiable desires. "Anyone
seeking to destroy our happiness is a menace to be done away
with," Bluebeard ordains. These people are unattractive,
off-putting, and schematic; they are boring. As befits a
proper morality play. Ruthless has been called
Ulmer's Citizen Kane, because it attacks
wealth, and because Horace, like Kane and Jenny and perhaps
Ulmer himself, strives vainly to earn the love of an abusive
parent. But Ruthless resembles Theodore Dreiser's
An American tragedy (and Stendhal's Le rouge et le
noir) more than Kane. Welles deals with the
frivolity of inherited money, Ulmer with an ethnic
community-"rising capitalists"-and with the destructiveness
of will-to-power. "I sure like the way you talk, Dollar. It
makes us all feel like men," lauds a gangster in
Harlem, where wife beating, knifefights, and rapacious
sexuality are normal events in the best families. "He wasn't
a man, he was a way of life," a character remarks of Horace,
but with applicability to all our villains. Horace's
manipulations on Wall Street mirror Jenny's in the parlor,
Dollar's in Harlem, Hannibal's in Italy-Hannibal who "cannot
be stopped," must "keep marching," and can only destroy,
never build. "Darkness has almost entirely absorbed the
light, the robot has triumphed over the living," writes
Lourcelles of Bluebeard.[9] "The invisible
strings tying Bluebeard to his fate resemble those used to
manipulate his beautiful puppets," Lourcelles continues. Yet
surely Bluebeard's "fate" is the product of his own choices;
a mindset that blames fate is already villainous for Ulmer.
Ulmer's failed people reject every grace offered them. They
end up voids-black holes of egomania. [9].
Jacques Lourcelles, Dictionnaire du cinéma: les
films (Paris: Lafont, 1992), 157. Detour (US
1945) is usually interpreted as Ulmer's genuflection to
fate. For Lourcelles, here is "a really Ulmerian sense of
the absurd...Ubiquitous fate imposes on the hero's will
unexpected detours which will end up annihilating
him."[10]
And Belton agrees that the "journey" is the hero's assassin:
"Al Roberts embarks on a journey that destroys his identity
and his will and that can only end in his
death."[11] [10].
Lourcelles, 401. [11].
Belton, 162. But the morality
play in Detour is that Roberts makes constant
choices, lies to himself, and has the perspective of a
villain rather than a hero. As Roberts chatters away in
always-self-serving rationalizations of his actions, the
background music is often the then-popular tune, "I'm always
chasing rainbows" (to Chopin's Fantasy-impromptu),
and Roberts' "convictions" are as fallacious as they are
illusory. His piano playing too is phony. And the princess
he's hitchhiking across the continent to save is not
interested in him. After he accidentally causes the death of
a man who gives him a ride, he moralizes his helplessness
while all the while helping himself to the dead man's car,
clothes, and identity. For Ulmer's villains, in contrast to
Geneviève de Brabant, there is always a conflict
between morality and survival. In The wife of Monte
Cristo (US 1946), a health official won't sacrifice his
fortune to save thousands of lives. In Beyond the time
barrier, almost no one is willing to sacrifice
themselves to save even the whole world. In Detour
Roberts keeps choosing survival over morality, his
desires over anyone else's, just as Horace and Jenny do. But
for Ulmer, only morality makes survival possible.
Self-aggrandizement cannot be the basis of
morals. Roberts piles one
lie on top of another, not because he has to, but because
his conscience is corrupt. When he learns that the dead man
whose belongings he has stolen was himself planning to bilk
his own father, Roberts is cocky and righteous, ripe for the
fall. "$760. This was a lot of jack. But believe me, it was
the kind of money I'd rather not have," he moralizes, while
slipping the money swiftly into his pocket, as though hiding
his decision, but the inconsistency of word and act can't be
hidden from Ulmer's juxtaposition of voice-over and image,
portending Bresson. "He wasn't a big shot...just a
chiseler," Robert moralizes, and a few scenes later we find
him plotting to steal $15 million. "Maybe the old man is
lucky his son kicked off," he moralizes, and a few scenes
later we learn the old man is dying and calling for his son.
The vanity of playing God. But in Ulmer's morality tales,
debts are always paid. And Roberts does
not accept his debts. "Just my luck," he moralizes, when the
hitchhiker he picks up turns out to be Vera, the girl the
dead man had told him about. "Had to be the very last person
I should ever have met. That's life. Whichever way you turn
fate sticks out a foot to trip you." Yet in fact, he had
been warned about this woman. In fact, it was hubristic to
have contact with anyone while fleeing from a "murder" in
the dead man's car. Roberts even starts fantasizing about
the hitchhiker's hidden beauty (while Ulmer's camera dwells
on her cruel visage). "I began to feel sorry for her,"
Roberts moralizes, driving along, just before Vera tells him
he's trapped and she's boss, whereupon Ulmer jumps his
camera's point of view from looking at their faces in the
front seat, to looking at the back of their heads, thus
cutting back and forth across the axis (and figuratively
superimposing them on top of each other) as Roberts begins
slowly to comprehend-which in his case means repackaging
lies. Similarly, Ulmer begins and ends each sequence in the
motel room by peering from outside through a window (and
Roberts voice-over), then cutting across the axis to show
the camera inside the room, recording what actually happens,
emphasizing an altered perspective. These injections
of truth climax when Roberts, after causing a second death
accidentally, rushes into the bedroom and we see both him
and his image in the mirror next to him staring at the
corpse of Vera-a quote from the famous climax of McCarey's
Love affair (US 1939), when Charles Boyer finds his
painting in Irene Dunne's bedroom. Except that Boyer awakens
to reality, whereas Roberts closes down, this time in a
hand-held pan around the room, trying and failing to focus
on objects. "Fate or some mysterious force can put the
finger on you or me for no good reason at all," he exclaims,
sounding like despotic, irresponsible Queen Maria Carolina
when she's forced to abdicate in The pirates of
Capri: "Why was I permitted to be hated by the people
all these years?" [12] [12].
The
pirates of Capri (aka Captain Sirocco in the
U.K.) was shot also in an Italian edition, I pirati di
Capri, possibly with different editing and running time,
and with Elenora Rossi Drago in the role of Virginia
Belmont. An Italian director, Giorgio Maria Scotese, was
co-credited in order to obtain state subsidy. The camera
follows Roberts, keeping him in frame as he walks along the
road, not letting him escape himself, then holds steady as
the police car stops and drives him out of the frame, and
finally stares, portending the finales of Antonioni's
L'eclisse (Italy 1962) and The passenger
(Italy 1975), at the place on the road, empty now, where
Roberts was. It's a picture of absence-which for Roberts is
a kind of surcease, one granted also to Horace, Jenny, and
Bluebeard, if not to Hannibal. If we blame Roberts' journey
on fate, the empty spot on a road becomes an image of
nihilism, absurdity, and predestination; indeed, in the
sense that debts are always paid, the fearsome karma that
passes between the dead man, Vera and Roberts in
Detour is an allegory of predestination. But it is a
predestiny which the individuals design themselves. There is
an Old Testament justice in their mutual
slaughter. "He was also
fascinated with Calvin and Hegel and naturally Luther,"
Arianne recalls. "I was principally educated by him. We
traveled so very much that I was never around school a great
deal. Father read to me practically every night from the
lives of composers or operas or Greek mythology my whole
childhood. Later on around ten I was to read on my
own-Dickens, Carlyle, Goethe, Shakespeare, Balzac,
Dostoyevski, etc., etc. Saturday morning was mine alone with
him. We would listen to the Metropolitan Opera on the radio
and I would give my book reports. We took piano together and
often played the Well Tempered Clavier on two pianos. Soon I
lost interest in the piano since he was making such fast
progress...I felt I never could catch up. My piano teacher
for a while was Leo Erdody's father who was the last living
pupil of Liszt. [Erody scored many Ulmer films.]
Later on Paul Dessau who composed the score for Mutter
courage at our house while he lived with us during the
war was also my teacher. My godfather was Fritz Reiner-my
middle name is Carlotta after his wife. Dad had known him in
Hungary. He taught a class for one term at the Curtis
Institute of Music while Reiner was there. Reiner helped Dad
become close with the impresario Sol Hurock who in turn
helped him obtain most of the fantastic artists used in
Carnegie Hall [Stokowski, Rubinstein, Heifetz,
Walter, Pons, Peerce, Pinza...]. He worked very hard at
being an educator. He felt he could do a better job on me
than any normal American school. He never worried about my
social life. Children were not required since he felt I was
being exposed to the great minds of the time. He loved
Thomas Mann, Schiller, and Goethe. He was a European
intellectual who had based most of his thinking on the great
minds of the German language, only to find that it led to a
stupid monster of an Austrian painter named Hitler. For the
rest of his life he tried to understand how civilization
could end up in barbarism. During the Second World War, Dad
refused to have any German spoken around him. So I lost my
heritage. He only counted in German when we played piano
together or when he lost his temper and was cursing at me.
French literature was also basic in the household.
Molière, etc., etc. I was also trained to paint. I
had ballet lessons from Kosloff, Brunislava Nejinski, Kyra
Nejinski, Bekefi. He spent endless hours and days in museums
teaching me art and showing me architecture and the great
wonders of European cities. He also trained me as a
photographer. I have many memories of dragging his Speed
Graflex, two Rollies and Leica, plus camera kit and filters,
like a donkey wherever we went. I worked many nights in his
darkroom where he developed and printed his photos. To top
all of this off: He trained me to cook. I started as a
scullery maid learning the tricks of how to slice and
prepare for him all he required for his experiments. As I
became older he wandered far and wide looking for great
eating experiences wherever we were. We were both insomniacs
(I still am) and since our rooms adjoined, if he saw a light
was on, or if I saw his light was on, we would get in the
car and drive into the night on some wild adventure.
Sometimes when in Europe, for instance, he would drive from
Munich to Linz so we could have goulash soup at six in the
morning with the farmers before they went into the fields.
In Los Angeles we went to all night markets which were
preparing for the next day and gobbled doughnuts. Paris was
Les Halles and of course sausage at the Pied de
Cochon "My father even
pretended (I don't believe he ever gained an actual diploma)
to be a Doctor of Philosophy. His letters to me from Germany
in 1955 are all on a letter head that reads 'Dr.Phil. Edgar
George Ulmer'. When I got married, he gave me his blessings
when we were alone, and said I would always feel lost in the
valley of 'normal life'. I belonged on a cold lonely
mountain top. His letters to me speak of this
often. "He was an FDR
New Deal Liberal. He feared the Germans would win the war
but he was a socialist at heart. He disliked communism like
all isms. Much too much of an individualist for that pitch.
He loved this country, baseball, hot-dogs, Jackie Gleason,
jazz, Sid Caesar, Jimmy Durante, and Bar BQs. His true love
was classical music. He had really wanted to be a
conductor.
[His
movies are full of Schumann, Wagner, Mahler, and
Beethoven-German Romantics.] He hated Classic Comic
Books, country music, and phony producers. He hated war, did
not buy propaganda, backed the Civil Rights Movement, and
mourned the losses of the 60s-the Kennedys, Medgar Evers,
Martin Luther King. He did not even know how to swim or play
tennis or golf, did not drink (except exceptionally a good
beer), sometimes smoked but never finished the cigarettes,
collected first editions of mostly English and French
writers. "My father hated
the Korean War. He also was enraged at Vietnam. He felt that
General MacArthur was a monster and we celebrated when
Truman fired him and brought him home. The idea that anyone
would even consider using the A bomb was insanity! He was
always raging at the dinner table. I must note that when I
was 15 during the Red Scare in Hollywood, I was shocked that
my father told me to stop demonstrating for UNICEF and for a
Latvian Spanish teacher I had in the one year I attended
highschool in L.A. who was being investigated. He was
frightened and did not wish to be picked up as a Communist.
I recall I called him a hypocrite who had lied to me. I did
not make it easy for him. I was very young and idealistic.
He understood. I think he knew what I was about. "Dad first of all
could draw, and many a night he would draw in advance every
shot that came to mind. He had a large drafting table next
to his bed. His storyboard activities were a means to plan
for an inexpensive expedient, but they never fettered his
creativity. He felt free to forget and reinvent during
shooting. He loved to experiment within the confines of what
he had in mind. He loved all the new technical happenings. I
remember when Tri-X Film first came out and he could finally
shoot dark corridors and ceilings without tons of
light. "Dad always had a
light meter and frame tool around his neck. On the set he
was always designing the set up. In real life he did the
same. Loved Renoir father and son. He was a landscape
artist. His love of the land (like Ford/Murnau) is always
present. He made a huge painting of the shot in Green
fields of the man tilling the land with his plow and
hung it in our living room over the coach. That is how much
he loved the image. The peasant. The working man. Ulmer was
never a Communist but he was part of the socialist
revolutionary beliefs of his European era. "He could be
tough on actors if he felt he needed to liven them up. He
usually charmed it out of you, but he had a quick temper and
could intimidate when he wanted to. His Austrian accent and
Germanic sense of humor (almost Talmudic) are really
delightful. He really could be terribly funny or quite mad
and frightening. In any case he was always dramatic and
charming." "I felt he was
the most attractive man," recalls Helen Beverly, the ingenue
in Green fields and The light ahead. "He was
young, he was handsome, he had a shock of black hair. He was
temperamental, he was sexy. Women were all over him. They
followed him. They adored him. There was a great sweetness
and sensitivity about him. I remember him putting his hands
on my cheeks and talking to me softly about what the scene
is and what we would like to portray in a particular scene.
It was almost like he hypnotized me with explaining. He did
that with all the actors, even the men, the character
actors. He would embrace them and tell them, and he knew his
material. He knew his script word for word. He would direct
the actors the way you direct music. The timing, you know,
he would lead you and you would know when it was to be slow
and when the other actor was to wait and not to jump in, he
would give them the cue when to speak. That was amazing to
me." He used a baton.
At home, he conducted in the living room with records. On
set he conducted actors. "He drove Hedy Lamarr crazy because
he timed the way she spoke with the baton, and would slap
her ankles with the baton if she goofed!" said his wife
Shirley Ulmer.[13]
"He never put it down as far as I can remember," said
Beverly. "Higher for excitement, lower for control of
emotion and sound. And he was very familiar with the music
that he chose. It would swell to express the emotions that
the people were feeling. He knew what he was
doing."[14] [13].
Interview with Tom Weaver, Cult movies 25
(1998). [14].
Unpublished interview with Michael Henry Wilson, May 8,
1996, copyright BBC and Edgar G. Ulmer Preservation Corp. as
owners of the original video interview for their documentary
E G Ulmer "beyond the boundary." Even in Ulmer's
"villain" movies, the interesting characters are not the
off-putting, predictable baddies, but the people around
them, the empathetic souls whom they devastate-Sue, in
Moon over Harlem, who picks up her dead father's
picture from the floor; Ephraim, in The strange
woman, who hangs himself; Martha, in Ruthless,
who just disappears. The heart of the miracle play lies
neither in its stalwart heroes nor craven villains, but in
unguarded moments, in traces of soul caught mid wavering
pools of light and shadow, such as a spontaneous smile on a
girl in the background (Cossacks in exile); a young
woman's expression when she looks to see if her beau has
arrived (Club Havana [US 1945]); Mercedes's
sense of humor playing over her face (The pirates
of Capri); Nora's glance at her young son leaning
forward in Carnegie Hall; Tamara's pose by the window when
they tell her Yankel has requested her hand, with light
falling on her face like in Vermeer or Dreyer (The
singing blacksmith [US 1938]). An Ulmer picture
is always the work of a man who adored making movies. Who
adored gazing at people during their magic minutes (the way
Murnau gazed at Janet Gaynor in Sunrise [US
1927]). At his frequent
best, every shot can be something special, an adventure.
People in most Ulmer shots are choreographed almost as in a
dance, and these are the pauses, where we gaze at them even
harder. A luminist event befalls Yankel as he sits singing
with the sewing ladies: his comfort is destroyed by a
close-up Ulmer sticks in of Tamara, whom he has never seen
until now. Here is a miracle, and instant conversion. Yankel
gives her long serious stares, completely engulfing; Tamara
gives him half glances, completely revealing. In The
Naked Venus, too, and Her Sister's Secret, The Naked
Dawn, The Pirates of Capri, Carnegie Hall and
Hannibal, even, attraction is instant, and something
deeper, expressed in stares exchanged. As in Vidor, a
minute or even a single shot is enough for two people who
have never spoken to decide to marry, and from the evidence,
Ulmer would have agreed with Vidor (and they were both
dedicated gallants) that to depict romance otherwise, as
films typically do, is to falsify life. What is more
adventurous than, in Ruthless, Ulmer's long,
wandering, nighttime track following young Horace, in
deliciously wavering chiaroscuro, as, after penetrating the
gate, he walks through the
rich family's yard and around several sides of their house,
seeing the father through a window, then backing away
vertiginously to Much in the
adventurous style of Murnau and Ford is the pictorial
composition inside the house that follows-the ceiling and
floor enclosing the kitchen (like the restaurant stop in
Stagecoach [US 1939], also photographed by
Bert Glennon), and the kitchen table that stands unmoving in
the foreground, while behind it young frame and we
realise, as joyful close-ups cross-cut between Horace and
Martha, that we "He adored Ford,"
said Arianne. "He realised they were both influenced by
Murnau." Her sister's secret, besides a second homage
to McCarey's mirror shot, has blocking reminiscent of
Dreyer, a Mardi Gras like Sternberg's in The devil is a
woman (US 1935), constant evocations of Ophuls past and
future, along with long adventurous tracking shots by
Ophuls's frequent photographer, Franz Planer, and even a
sunrise out of Sunrise. (Planer shot for Murnau too:
Die Finanzen des Großherzogs [Germany
1924]). And then there are Ulmer's prodigious
experiments in "Cinefotocolor" (two-strip dye-transfer!) in
Muchachas de Bagdad (shot in seven months in
Barcelona in 1952).[15] [15].
Muchachas de Bagdad runs about 99 minutes. A Spanish
director was co-credited in order to obtain state subsidy.
The American edition, Babes of Bagdad, runs about 79
minutes. Ulmer got into
the miracle business through Pepi Schildkraut's father,
Rudolph, a matinee idol in 20s Vienna. "He not only took my
father in as a teenager, he got him into Max Reinhardt's
dramatic school, where Dad started initially as a student to
be an actor. But, very quickly, they decided that they would
rather train him to do set design. So Dad was already at
Reinhardt when he was 16."[16]
Joseph Schildkraut eventually got an Oscar nomination as
Dreyfus in The life of Emile Zola (US 1937). Ulmer
worked on Reinhardt productions in Vienna and Berlin, on one
morality play (Everyman) in Salzburg, and another
(The miracle) on Broadway. Along the way (according
to Ulmer) he was involved with The Cabinet of Dr.
Caligari (Germany 1919), Nosferatu (Germany
1922), Die Niebelungen (Germany 1924),
Metropolis (Germany 1926), Der letzte mann
(Germany 1924), Faust (Germany 1926), Stiller, Pabst,
Lubitsch and Korda. Moving to Hollywood, he was signed by
Carl Laemmle at Universal, and (still according to Ulmer)
directed at least two dozen two-reel westerns, while
assisting or designing on loanouts to Lon Chaney, DeMille,
Niblo, Fairbanks, Pickford, Chaplin, Marion Davies,
Valentino, Barrymore, Griffith, Stroheim, Vidor, Walsh,
Garbo, Einsenstein, and of course Sunrise. [16].
From an interview with Tom Weaver, "Her father's keeper:
Arianné Ulmer Cipes," Video watchdog 41
(1997): 36-7. Whether Ulmer
actually participated in all of these pictures has been
questioned. Fritz Lang, for one, declared that Ulmer never
worked on a film of his.[17]
What can be said unquestionably is that it would have been
out of character for him to have stayed away from these
productions, if he could have found any way to get onto the
sets, to meet the people he admired, and to involve himself
anyway he could. He was young, ardent, ambitious; he wanted
to make movies. He could be useful at almost anything; he'd
made sure of that. Did Lang know every carpenter on
Metropolis? [17].
In an attempt to reconstruct his career, Ulmer compiled two
typed chronologies of his activites. Both are in Arianne
Ulmer's archives; one of them appeared in Italian in
Emanuela Martini, ed., Edgar G.Ulmer (Bergamo Film
Meeting, Riminicinema, 1989), 124-27. For Lang, cf.,
Filmhefte, New York, n° 1 (of two), Herbert
Linder's German translation of Bogdanovich's
interview. Returning to
Berlin in 1929, he co-directed the Vidor-like Menschen am
Sonntag (Germany 1929) with Robert Siodmak, Eugene
Schuftan, Billy Wilder, and Fred Zinnemann. In the US, he
directed his first feature, Damaged Lives, in 1933,
scored a hit with The black cat (US 1934) with
Karloff and Lugosi, and fell in love with Laemmle's nephew's
wife. "Mother and dad
were living in 'sin' in a little hotel in Hollywood. She was
all of 19 and he was recently divorced from his first wife
and still needing to pay child support for Helen Joen, his
five-year-old daughter from that marriage. The Laemmle
family were furious and naturally would have nothing more to
do with them." "Oh, we were told
that we'd never work in Hollywood again," recalls Shirley
Castle Ulmer, who had written Thunder over Texas,
which her husband had produced and Ulmer had just shot under
the pseudonym of his first wife's name, Joen Warner. "He
couldn't get a job-that's why we went back to New
York."[18] [18].
loc. cit, Cult movies. "My mother's
respectable banking family in New York wanted them to come
back there and have a Jewish wedding. So they got into an
old Plymouth and ran for New York where at least he could
find 'day' work shooting Pathé newsreels"-and making
twenty-four music shorts for Vitagraph. Shirley modeled
hats. "My mother always tells the story that...their
honeymoon was like three weeks of her being locked in a room
with him educating her." One night they slept in the New
York subway "because they got kicked out of the 16th place
where they didn't pay their rent. Mother once sent him out
for food, and he came hime with a bag of oranges and two
tickets to [Beethoven's] Ninth Symphony! This is
the man. We never worried about that. My mother
worried about that, but my father and I didn't....I thought
it was all an adventure. We went up and down....He was so
young and so successful, so early. That gave him a feeling
of immortality during the early years....My mother was
game....She believed that she was Trilby to the greatest
Svengali in the world."[19] [19].
Video watchdog, 41, 37, 41. Svengali's
fortune appeared in 1937 in the form of the Ukrainian Union
of Window Washers, who wanted to have a great national film,
Natalka Poltavka, an operetta by Ivan Kotlyarevsky.
Their producer, a dance impresario named Vasile Avramenko,
had spent two years the U.S. and Canada raising $18,000 from
Ukrainians in nickels and dimes in exchange for promises of
a movie ticket. Ulmer was hired at $35 a week to help and
promptly took control. To his amazement, sixty Finnish
carpenters materialized out of nowhere and built a Ukrainian
city on a farm in Flemington, New Jersey, and two-hundred
kids came from all over to dance; it turned out they had
been rehearsing for years. Miraculously, the picture was a
huge success. "It had one thing which I could never
recapture again-the enthusiasm of that mad bunch, it showed
on the screen," Ulmer recalled.[20] [20].
In Peter Bogdanovich, "Edgar G.Ulmer," Who the devil made
it (New York: Knopf, 1997), 583. Besides
Ukrainians, New York had three million Yiddish-speaking
Jews. Schildkraut's friendship led to Green fields.
Once again a rival had rehearsed the actors-Ulmer did not
see them until the first day's shooting on location-and once
again he promptly took control. "He didn't know any
Yiddish," Helen Beverly recalls, "and he didn't talk much in
English either. We were standing in a straight line in front
of the little hut as actors do sometimes on the stage,
facing the audience, and we were doing our parts, and he
stopped us: 'No, no, no, no, no! You can't do that in front
of a camera.' Then he explained the whole business of
close-ups and detail shots, and how you didn't have to face
the camera. You were to behave perfectly natural, and the
camera would look for you to shoot you."[21]
In making a movie of Peretz Hirschbein's well-known play,
Ulmer built up all the physical actions (as Murnau does in
Sunrise), making abstractions sensual, making real
grass and trees into luminous events (Helen Beverly mentions
Van Gogh or Monet or Renoir), so that episodes such as the
teasing interaction of the two ingenues became far more
dominant in the movie than they could have been on stage.
Stock characters became flesh. When Green fields was
playing in New York, Helen Beverly would sometimes make an
appearance afterward. "It baffled the audience. Here they
thought I was a little girl from Europe, a little European
actress, how did I learn to speak English, someone must have
taught me the speech in English."[22]
On the set, "He would set the mood. In the dinner scene,
where the mother and I are moving around serving, he caught
the mood, entirely silent, tender and beautiful. Everything
was worked out beforehand."[23] [21].
Helen Beverly to TG, Jan. 24, 1998. [22].
Helen Beverly to Michael Henry Wilson. [23].
Helen Beverly to TG. Two more Yiddish
movies and a second Ukrainian opera, all shot in New Jersey,
then a fourth Yiddish film in New York. Filmed operas are
often ruined as movies, but in Cossacks in exile,
from Semyon Stepanovich Gulak-Atemovsky's 1853 Cossacks
beyond the Danube), Ulmer is obviously having the time
of his life, finding opportunities for sailing where
everyone else flounders on reefs. His Dovzhenko-like
emphasis on the horizon is enough to make Newton, N.J., look
like the Ukraine. In the next three
years, after (according to him) turning down an offer to
make two Shirley Temple films at 20th Century-Fox, Ulmer
made a series of multi-ethnic documentaries about TB for the
American Lung Association, 42 industrial pictures, various
military training films, including a series on celestial
navigation, three Coca Cola commercials, and, between 1942
and 1946, eleven remarkable features for PRC Pictures, Inc.,
scripted mostly by Shirley Ulmer who, in any case, was
Script Supervisor (and often much more) on every one of his
pictures from 1934 on. By his count, he made 128 movies in
his lifetime. Thanks to the
Cold War and Red Scare, and a conservative producer, Ulmer
and his blacklisted writer, Alvah Bessie, had had to
suppress some of their pet ideas for
Ruthless.[24]
Sequences in The naked dawn and The naked
Venus might have been suppressed as well, had anyone
bothered to take seriously a Mexican western or a
nudie. [24].
Ulmer has perhaps embroidered this episode in telling
Bogdanovich that five big sequences were cut after the first
release, and that "S.K.Loren [sic] and G.Kahn...were
names that were made up" (600). Both S.K.Lauren and Gordon
Kahn have dozens of credits stretching back to the early
1930s. Arianne Ulmer observes that not only was her father
confused at the time of the interview, after a massive
stroke, but "besides he was a great story teller and each
time he told a story it got a little bigger and better. He
never could admit he did not know anything. He had to
present himself always as knowing. My mother and I took this
with a grain of salt. That is why I believe he is so very
vulnerable in some of his recollections." Social satires of
American life were common during the 50s, yet few are so
accurate in horrifying ways as The naked Venus. Bob's
mother is one of Ulmer's vampires, but more interesting
because almost sympathetic, and Bob is her mama's boy. He
recalls how she sat with him the night before he shipped out
to Korea, and she replies as though to a boyscout, "You got
all the medals." "If they'd only known how scared I was."
"Only you and I know," she says, but of course she doesn't
know; the whole idea of his going to war had been hers. Now
she wants to rid him of his wife, because of jealousy, but
ostensibly because the girl (French, naturally) poses nude
for artists and recreates in naturalist resorts-and Bob, who
until now has adored his wife, allows his mother to convince
him he wants a divorce. There are many Bobs in real life,
but they are almost never shown in movies. He's an incipient
villain, in Ulmerian terms, already lying to himself. Ulmer
establishes everything in the first shots: a lie, a moral
tale, a child in a crib, the husband standing over the wife.
"I'm afraid of your mother," the wife says. The natural is
opposed by the lurid and the aggressive. In a courtroom,
constitutional freedoms are trampled on by a judge who looks
like a pig and has the culture of a tabloid (rather than of
a German romantic). In its own way, The naked Venus
paints a picture of McCarthy America as devouring as in
McCarey's My son John (US 1952). Organized
naturalism had originated in Germany, around 1900, as
"Freikörperkultur" (free body culture). It was a time
of awakening and rejection of artifice, a return to nature.
There's a moment in Borzage's Little man, what now?
(US 1934), where a salesman replies to shock at his quitting
his job, "Foolish? Independent! Perhaps being a nudist does
that for me. Standing up in the sun gives one strength and
courage." The nudist movement grew quickly and became quite
numerous, and international, including Ulmer and his wife,
before being banned in Germany by the Nazis and inspiring
persecution in the United States in the guise of Ulmer's
prurient mother, district attorney, and judge. The naked
Venus is a nudie without nudity-there are less than
three minutes of resort sequences, all of people with their
backs turned, with an occasional sideview of a breast-but
except for producer Gaston Hakim, no names are credited on
the print, except Victor Hugo's, who nevertheless reminds us
that "Because we do what we believe in we must bear the
consequences." Yvonne, in court, defines nudism as "complete
relaxation. And a higher moral level." But Ulmer treats the
resort sequences as little documentaries, with no dialogue
but only wind and ocean sounds, with people preening
heroically (a bit like Leni Riefenstahl-no one not 22 and a
"ten" would dare be seen in this place). A small girl
keeps showing up to wave at us and relieve the hieratic
tension, but the total effect is surreal and anything but
"relaxing," and we land back in the normal world with a
thump, like tumbling back down into Plato's cave. For Ulmer,
as Hoberman says above, "spirituality is achieved through
acceptance, not renunciation, of the material
world." Which is also the
moral in The naked dawn. The script, by the
blacklisted Julian Halevy Zimet, is built around
quasi-Marxist notions such as morality being determined by
class and economic structures turning us into things (Maria,
for example, has been sold to her husband as part of a land
deal), and Zimet was immune to Ulmer's art. "Although I
liked the film when I saw it, I don't think Ulmer brought
anything much to the script through camerawork or
interesting ideas...Betta St. John was
amateurish."[25]
[25].
Tavernier, 526. The naked dawn credits its scenario
to Nina and Herman Schneider, who do not exist, whom Ulmer
identified to Tavernier first as Tennessee Williams' house's
caretakers, then as Albert Maltz, then as Dalton Trumbo, but
who is actually Zimet (523-34). St. John's Maria
is one of the highpoints of American cinema. Ulmer filmed
her in takes as long as nine-and-a-half minutes, and
evidently his baton technique was inspired, for her
movements are completely balletic and her dialogue almost
Lieder. Like Renoir's gamine Nini (Françoise Arnoul)
in French cancan (France 1954), Maria is a composite
of calculation and innocence, one of Ulmer's deadly
manipulators, an illiterate peasant beaten, raped and
enslaved who nonetheless incarnates the poise and charm of a
princess and the girl next door, a femme fatale who offers
salvation. Evidently Zimet is blind to the miracle Santiago
(Arthur Kennedy) comes upon, painted by Ulmer, of Maria
doing her wash on the riverbank, like a moment stolen from
Kenji Mizoguchi. Santiago would agree with Simone Weil that
beauty is God's way of communicating with us (and his
romantic convictions will cost him his life), but Maria
feels only grief-and is probably equally insensitive to the
awesome, luminist event Ulmer finds in her bath beside the
pigsty. Her husband digs miserably in a hole in the ground
that he says is a well but which looks like a grave. They
ignore Ulmer's painterly landscape, à la Green
fields but in Technicolor now, of their picturesque farm
nestled into the lovely valley. Given a chance, they will
oppress their oppressors-unlike Geneviève de
Brabant. Ulmer's villains
argue, like Zimet's script, that morality is artifice and
that we are at the mercy of structures. Indeed, the question
comes up in most Ulmer movies, and some Ulmerians cite this
in evidence of Ulmer's alleged sense of our helpless
imprisonment in paranoia-even of Ulmer's alleged agreement
with his villains. These black-hearts overlook the morality
play, the debate that has haunted western thought at least
since Job over our ability to choose or refuse love
of good, will-power, and self-control. We get to see all the
arguments against free will in order to see free will (and
to see sin). "We cannot begin to understand European
culture," notes Arianne Ulmer, "without some idea of the
many artists who are tangled in the iconography of the
faith. This is the European thinking mind. The naked
dawn is almost like a Yiddish film for me. It is
religious, not Marxist. I know the last scene with Arthur
Kennedy up against the tree was definitely the crucifixion
in iconography. I was on the set when that scene was shot. I
was 16 and Dad talked a great deal about the Everyman
aspect of this film. Note the use of the cross on the wall
in many of the interior shots." Too often,
discussion of Ulmer lays stress on the "poverty" of many of
his productions. A succession of Puritans have lauded his
endurance midst "the banality of his scripts and the
weakness of his actors' performances" (Belton); "the meager
conditions and speed of...production" (Steven Jenkins); the
"intransigent ...disregard for...conventional aesthetics"
(Myron Mesiel); the puny budgets, the sixty or eighty shots
a day.[26]
Such remarks belie the art achieved. What does it matter
that Green fields was shot in five days, for $8,000,
or that Ulmer hadn't had even twice as much negative to
shoot with as his finished film would be, or that he had to
share a bed with his assistant and they had all hocked their
furniture to raise money? What do these things matter,
unless to prove that money is bad for art, since nearly
every movie ever made has cost more than Green Fields
and looks impoverished alongside it. Miracles can't be
bought. "God said, 'Let
there be light.' And there was light..." These are
the last words in The cavern (1965), Ulmer's last
movie. Goethe, too, went out speaking of light. This essay first
appeared in French translation in
Cinémathèque 15 (Spring
1999). [26].
Jenkins, Monthly film bulletin, July 1982; Meisel, in
Todd McCarthy & C. Flynn, Kings of the Bs, 1975;
cited in John Wakeman, World film directors: vol. 1:
1890-1945 (New York: Wilsonm 1987), 1111.
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Abstract
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version
stare
up toward a second-story window which 12-year-old Martha has
just opened, while brushing her hair, a loveliness beyond
his class-or is she? Horace thinks like Stendhal's Julien
Sorel.
Horace
begs to be taken in. Similar, in The light ahead, was
the foreground candle that, like the eye of God, witnessed a
shabes meal behind it; or in Moon over Harlem
the flowers on the piano that won't be able to prevent Sue
being thrown out of her home. But now, in Ruthless,
comes a coup like Ford's coup eight years
later in The searchers (US 1956) when Natalie
Wood magically appears on the horizon behind John Wayne and
Jeffrey Hunter. Martha appears walking down the stairs, into
a spotlight, behind her mother, Horace and
the
table, and her mother scurries to frame-left, setting up a
triangle that turns 
Martha's
adoring stare into a kind of miracle for Horace, and a
luminist event in geometric space for us, despite our
knowledge that Horace is manipulating Martha and her mother.
Ulmer cuts closer, so that
we
look past the mother's back to see Martha, but then the
mother leaves the
were
seeing Martha from Horace's (emotional and physical)
perspective. Each cut and composition is as revelatory as
these two teenagers are to one another. Moreover, Ulmer's
staging and cutting here recapitulates similar manoeuvers
near the beginning of the movie when, decades after
our flashback of young Horace, old Horace "encounters" (the
word is too mild) a Martha look-alike
(in
fact the same actress, Diana Lynn). Clearly this is a
moviemaker who loved movies. The ultimate proof? He always
knows where to put the camera.
And he was
never ashamed to gaze, unlike so many filmmakers today. Try
to watch Washington Square (US 1997) or The Wings
of the Dove (Germany/France 1988), where neither
director has the courage to stare more than three or four
seconds at Jennifer Jason Leigh or Helena Bonham Carter
without cutting away.
