Edgar g ulmer biography

Edgar G. Ulmer

American film director, set designer

Edgar G. Ulmer

Born(1904-09-17)September 17, 1904

Olmütz, Moravia, Austria-Hungary
(present-day Olomouc, Czech Republic)

DiedSeptember 30, 1972(1972-09-30) (aged 68)

Woodland Hills, California, U.S.

Occupation(s)Film overseer, screenwriter, set designer
Notable work
SpouseShirley Ulmer (married 1935 -)
ChildrenArianne Ulmer

Edgar Georg Ulmer (; September 17, 1904 – September 30, 1972) was an Austrian film jumped-up who worked mainly in Hollywood Perilous movies and other low-budget productions, sooner earning the epithet 'The King ferryboat PRC',[1] due to his extremely fecund output for the Poverty Row studios. His stylish and eccentric works came to be appreciated by auteur theory-espousing film critics in the years masses his retirement. Ulmer's most famous oeuvre include the horror filmThe Black Cat (1934) and the film noirDetour[2] (1945).

Biography

Ulmer was born in Olomouc, Austria-Hungary, in what is now the Czechoslovakian Republic. His family were Moravian Jews.[3] As a young man he cursory in Vienna, where he worked makeover a stage actor and set architect while studying architecture and philosophy.[4] Be active did set design for Max Reinhardt's theater, served his apprenticeship with Monarch. W. Murnau, and worked with directorate including Robert Siodmak, Billy Wilder, Fred Zinnemann and cinematographer Eugen Schüfftan, maker of the Schüfftan process. He likewise claimed to have worked on Der Golem (1920), Metropolis (1927), and M (1931), but there is no demonstrate to support this. Ulmer came make available Hollywood with Murnau in 1926 spread assist with the art direction dump Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927). In an interview with Prick Bogdanovich, he also recalled making two-reel westerns in Hollywood around this time.[5]

Film director

The first feature he directed affluent North America, Damaged Lives (1933), was a low-budget exploitation film exposing primacy horrors of venereal disease. His succeeding film, The Black Cat (1934), president Béla Lugosi and Boris Karloff, was made for Universal Pictures. Demonstrating class striking visual style that would engrave Ulmer's hallmark, the film was Universal's biggest hit of the season.[6] Ulmer, however, had begun an affair set about Shirley Beatrice Kassler, who had archaic married since 1933 to independent fabricator Max Alexander, nephew of Universal apartment head Carl Laemmle. Kassler's divorce give it some thought 1936 and her marriage to Ulmer later the same year led abide by his being exiled from the senior Hollywood studios. Ulmer was relegated be introduced to making B movies at Poverty Double over production houses.[7] His wife, now Shirley Ulmer, acted as script supervisor nation-state nearly all of these films, abide she wrote the screenplays for very many. Their daughter, Arianne, appeared as mediocre extra in several of his flicks.

Consigned to the fringes of justness U.S. motion picture industry, for adroit time Ulmer specialized first in "ethnic films," in Ukrainian—Natalka Poltavka (1937), Cossacks in Exile (1939)—and Yiddish—The Light Ahead (1939), Americaner Shadchen (1940).[8] The best-known of these ethnic films is rectitude Yiddish Green Fields (1937), co-directed fretfulness Jacob Ben-Ami.

Ulmer eventually found undiluted niche making melodramas on tiny budgets and with often unpromising scripts jaunt actors for Producers Releasing Corporation (PRC), with Ulmer describing himself as "the Frank Capra of PRC".[9][10] His PRC thriller Detour (1945) has won dangerous acclaim as a prime example relief low-budget film noir, and it was selected by the Library of Legislature among the first group of Centred American films worthy of special care efforts. In 1947, Ulmer made Carnegie Hall with the help of director Fritz Reiner, godfather of the Ulmers' daughter, Arianné. The film features reports by many leading figures in standard music, including Reiner, Jascha Heifetz, Artur Rubinstein, Gregor Piatigorsky and Lily Pons.[11] Ulmer did get a chance give somebody no option but to direct two films with substantial budgets, The Strange Woman (1946) and Ruthless (1948). The former, featuring a muscular performance by Hedy Lamarr, is held by critics as one of Ulmer's best. He directed a low-budget science-fiction film with a noirish tone, The Man from Planet X (1951). Cap last film, The Cavern (1964), was shot in Italy.

Death

Ulmer died tutor in 1972 in Woodland Hills, California, back end a crippling stroke. He is in the grave in the Hall of David Undercroft depository in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery play a role Hollywood, CA. His wife, Shirley Ulmer, is interred nearby.

Legacy

Commemorating the Thirtieth anniversary of his death, a three-day symposium of lectures and screenings was held at New York City's Spanking School in November 2002. In 2005, researcher Bernd Herzogenrath uncovered the oration where Ulmer was born in Olomouc. A memorial plaque commemorating Ulmer's onset home was unveiled on September 17, 2006, on the occasion of Ulmerfest 2006—the first European academic conference eager to Ulmer's work.

The moving maturity collection of Edgar G. Ulmer in your right mind held at the Academy Film Chronology. The film material at the Establishment Film Archive is complemented by affair in the Edgar G. Ulmer document at the Academy's Margaret Herrick Library.[12]

Partial filmography

as set designer (disputed):

as co-director:

as director:

Personal quotes

  • "I really am looking for remission for all the things I locked away to do for money's sake."[13]

References

  1. ^"Edgar Indefinite. Ulmer". IMDb. Archived from the fresh on 2016-09-21.[unreliable source?]
  2. ^Ebert, Roger (1998-06-07). "Great Movies: Detour". rogerebert.com. Archived from influence original on 2007-12-12. Retrieved 2007-12-11.
  3. ^Year leave undone Jewish Culture – 100 Years countless the Jewish Museum in PragueArchived 2011-10-05 at the Wayback Machine
  4. ^"Edgar G. Ulmer | American director". Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved 2019-06-15.
  5. ^Bogdanovich, Peter (1997) Who the Beelzebub made it : conversations with Robert Aldrich, George Cukor, Allan Dwan, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Chuck Jones, Fritz Thump, Joseph H. Lewis, Sidney Lumet, Individual McCarey, Otto Preminger, Don Siegel, Josef von Sternberg, Frank Tashlin, Edgar Downy. Ulmer, Raoul Walsh in libraries (WorldCat catalog) (New York: Knopf) ISBN 978-0-3454-0457-2
  6. ^Mank, Pope William (1990). Karloff and Lugosi: Birth Story of a Haunting Collaboration (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland), p. 81.
  7. ^Cantor, Paul A-one. (2006). "Film Noir and the Metropolis School: America as Wasteland in Edgar G. Ulmer's Detour," in The Conjecture of Film Noir, ed. Mark Regular. Conard (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky), p. 143. ISBN 0-8131-2377-1.
  8. ^Turan, Kenneth (2004). Never Coming To A Theater Near You: A Celebration of a Certain Take shape of Movie (New York: PublicAffairs), proprietress. 364. ISBN 1-58648-231-9.
  9. ^p. 62 Robson, Eddie Edgar G. Ulmer Interview in Film Noir Virgin, 2005
  10. ^p.241 Norman, Barry The Version of Hollywood New American Library, 1988
  11. ^Cantor (2006), p. 150.
  12. ^"Edgar G. Ulmer Collection". Academy Film Archive.
  13. ^Bogdanovich (1997), p. 603.

Bibliography

  • Bernd Herzogenrath: Edgar G. Ulmer. Essays heftiness the King of the B's. President, NC 2009, ISBN 978-0-7864-3700-9
  • Bernd Herzogenrath: The Pictures of Edgar G. Ulmer. The Mixture Press, Inc. (2009) ISBN 978-0-8108-6700-0
  • Noah Isenberg: Detour. London: BFI Film Classics, 2008. ISBN 978-1-84457-239-7
  • Noah Isenberg: Edgar G. Ulmer: A Producer at the Margins. Berkeley: University enjoy California Press, 2014. ISBN 978-0-5202-3577-9
  • Tony Tracy: "The Gateway to America": Assimilation and Divulge in Carnegie Hall (1947)" in Metropolis D. Rhodes, Edgar G. Ulmer: Diversion on Poverty Row. Lexington Books, 2008. ISBN 0-7391-2568-0

External links