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 émigré
directors-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
Ulmer's personal life and a thorough analysis of his wide-ranging,
eclectic films-features aimed at minority audiences, horror and
sci-fi flicks, genre pictures made in the U.S. and abroad. Isenberg
shows that Ulmer's unconventional path was in many ways more
typical than that of his more famous colleagues. As he follows the
twists and turns of Ulmer's fortunes, Isenberg also conveys a new
understanding of low-budget filmmaking in the studio era and
beyond.
eISBN: 978-0-520-95717-6
Subjects: Film Studies
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