Synopses & Reviews
"A fascinating, meticulously researched, and most welcome biographical study of the life and filmsand#160;of Edgar G. Ulmer, a picturemaker whose name has practically become proverbial for no-budget,and#160;ultra-rapidly shot movies of quality and personal vision. What Ulmer could accomplish in six daysand#160;remains a object lesson for directors who strive to create something good with little means, andand#160;proof that miracles can happen if there is talent involved."and#160;and#151;Peter Bogdanovich
"Noah Isenberg's lovingly researched and sumptuously written book on the relentless self-mythologizer Ulmer, a man who over his singularly strange filmmaking career commingled with Hollywood titans AND worked the outermost margins of the industryand#151;even the margins of history itselfand#151;represents an intoxicating and savvy approach to biography, one that acknowledges that poetic truth lies in the blurred miles-wide belt between confirmed fact and after-the-fact longing for a better seat in the empyrean. Rich and strange. What a wonderful work this is."and#160;and#151;Guy Maddin, writer and director ofand#160;My Winnipeg
"This enthralling biography pieces together for the first time one of the strangest and most elusive careers in Hollywood. Noah Isenberg shows, with tact, elegance and exhaustive research, how the Viennese director who came to Hollywood with Wilder, Preminger and von Stroheim, wound up in the netherworld of Poverty Row, and how the directorand#8217;s noir films, made under cheap conditions on six-day-shooting schedules, exhibit something primaland#151;the grinding greed, ambition, and outsider yearning of noir." and#151;Molly Haskell, author of Frankly, My Dear: 'Gone with the Wind' Revisited
"Noah Isenberg has combined dogged detective work and an acute critical sense to create the first portrait of Edgar G. Ulmer that casts light into the dark corners of this gifted filmmakerand#8217;s labyrinthine career. Ulmerand#8217;s own life seems as spectacularly accursed as that of the protagonist of his most famous work, the 1945 film noir Detour, yet Isenberg uncovers something noble and ultimately quite moving in Ulmerand#8217;s unflagging pursuit of high art under the most unlikely circumstances."and#151;Dave Kehr, author of When Movies Mattered
and#160;
Review
"The story of his [Edgar G. Ulmer's] life is told with remarkable research and insight." New York Times
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"[A] cogent treatment of a singularly unlikely career. Isenberg's writing...allows the monumental eccentricities of Ulmer's underground journey to shine through." J. Hoberman - Artinfo
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"The seasons must read [for film buffs] . . . Noah Isenbergs long-awaited biography 'Edgar G. Ulmer: A Filmmaker at the Margins.' Ulmer—whose CV includes “People on Sunday,” “The Black Cat,” “Detour,” four Yiddish talkies, a half dozen bargain basement classics and as many indescribable oddities—had a life that was every bit as interesting as his film. The writing is scholarly but, given the material, charged with irony and full of pep." Richard Brody - New Yorker
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"Long considered as something of a guilty pleasure among filmmakers, critics, and fans, director Edgar G. Ulmer finally gets the attention and scholarship he deserves in Noah Isenbergs new book." Howard Hampton - Bookforum
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"A rare coupling of intellectual treatise and entertaining biography that beckons to both the film scholar and the public." Matthew Steigbigel - The Credits
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"With sober intrepidness, Isenberg tethers down to earth some of the more wild claims made by and about his subject. In recounting the filmmaker¹s amazing career, he moves easily between describing the drama going on behind the scenes and analyzing the provocative work that Ulmer put on screen. . . . This fascinating biography gives us the chance to weigh the many frustrations in Ulmer¹s career against the joy he found in the act of creation." Miguel Rodriguez - KPBS
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"Operating mostly outside of the Hollywood system, Edgar G. Ulmer (the original King of the B¹s) is a fascinating character whose rather notorious mysterious life is somewhere between fact and fiction. All of this is explored and solved . . . in scholar Noah Isenberg¹s brilliant new critical biography Edgar G. Ulmer: A Filmmaker at the Margins." Betsy Sherman - Arts Fuse
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"A most welcome book, which can lay claim to being a definitive study of Edgar G. Ulmer. . . . Isenberg has given us more than an academic study of the filmmakers eclectic career. He manages to paint a rounded, sympathetic but honest picture of the man whose endless dreams were so often dashed. . . . Edgar G. Ulmer: A Filmmaker at the Margins is scholarly but never dry. It is a valuable reference and a good read." Caryn Coleman - Vice
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"As Isenberg reveals in this utterly necessary book, Ulmer was a nonpareil slinger of [exaggerated stories] even for a business that thrives on everything inauthentic except avarice. . . . In so many ways he was the Micawber of Poverty Row, and the something that turned up was not the big budget spectaculars with A-list casts that he fervently hoped for, but the wormy little movies about failure that he actually made. They were more than good enough to justify a life, and this very good book." Leonard Maltin - Indiewire
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"The first English-language biography of the studio-era director oft crowned 'King of Poverty Row,' Edgar G. Ulmer: A Filmmaker at the Margins explores an itinerant, ramshackle, and occasionally brilliant career that encompassed proto-proto-New Wave experiments, Yiddish utopia, influential B-noirs, fly-by-night exploitation, and Cold War sci-fi super-cheese. . .Isenberg creates a picture of a filmmaker as ragtag and resourceful as the films he directed. . . . [He] effectively traces Ulmers artistic identity through the thematic (existential dread and rootlessness) and aesthetic (German Expressionism, classical music and opera) continuity of a body of work unified by little else." Scott Eyman - ScottEyman.com
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"Isenberg makes a scrupulously honest case for the director and 'laesthetique du cheap,' as a French critic called Ulmers kind of style, avoiding injudicious praise and recognizing his weaknesses as well as his strengths. Then again, with Ulmer the weaknesses often are the strengths, and vice versa. Thats what makes him so fascinating and Isenbergs energetic study so engrossing." Michael Joshua Rowin - Film Comment
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"While other authors are drawn to celebrities of greater stature whose lives are well documented, Isenberg preferred the challenge of unraveling the mystery of this European transplant who clearly had talent but never found success in Hollywood. . . . Ulmer may not have had the resources given to his fellow émigré directors but that didnt stop him from endowing his films with a unique personal vision that may finally be finding the appreciation it deserves." David Sterritt - Film Quarterly
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"The Ulmer that emerges from the detail-packed, though rarely dry, pages of Isenberg¹s biography is tragicomic. During his lifetime, the émigré director was rightly renowned for his ability to spin straw into gold (or silver, at any rate), yet this meant that he became in many ways a victim of his own success." Beth Accomando - Brooklyn Rail
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"A page turner of a biography." Andrew O'Hehir
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"Now we have what is destined to become the definitive English-language critical biography from Noah Isenberg. . . The movies speak for themselves, but they have gained an eloquent companion." Eric J. Iannelli - TLS
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"This definitive study of fringe director Edgar G. Ulmer is also an anatomy of the B-movie industry. . . . The stories of Ulmer's offscreen seat-of-the-pants artistry make for a delightful and inspiring read. Recommended." Nick Pinkerton - Sight and Sound
Synopsis
Edgar G. Ulmer is perhaps best known today for
Detour, considered by many to be the epitome of a certain noir style that transcends its B-list origins. But in his lifetime he never achieved the celebrity of his fellow Austrian and German and#233;migrand#233; directorsand#151;Billy Wilder, Otto Preminger, Fred Zinnemann, and Robert Siodmak. Despite early work with Max Reinhardt and F. W. Murnau, his auspicious debut with Siodmak on their celebrated Weimar classic
People on Sunday, and the success of films like
Detour and
Ruthless, Ulmer spent most of his career as an itinerant filmmaker earning modest paychecks for films that have either been overlooked or forgotten. In this fascinating and well-researched account of a career spent on the margins of Hollywood, Noah Isenberg provides the little-known details of Ulmerand#8217;s personal life and a thorough analysis of his wide-ranging, eclectic filmsand#151;features aimed at minority audiences, horror and sci-fi flicks, genre pictures made in the U.S. and abroad. Isenberg shows that Ulmerand#8217;s unconventional path was in many ways more typical than that of his more famous colleagues. As he follows the twists and turns of Ulmerand#8217;s fortunes, Isenberg also conveys a new understanding of low-budget filmmaking in the studio era and beyond.
and#160;
About the Author
Noah Isenberg is Director of Screen Studies and Professor of Culture and Media at the New School, author of Detour (2008), and editor of Weimar Cinema: An Essential Guide to Classic Films of the Era (2009).
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Preface
1. Traces of a Viennese Youth
2. Toward a Cinema at the Margins
3. Hollywood Horror
4. Songs of Exile
5. Capra of PRC
6. Back in Black
7. Independence Days
Postscript
Filmography
Notes
Select Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Index