4.2 Edgar G. Ulmer

 

Edgar G. Ulmer

Ulmer was born in Ulmitz, Czechoslovakia, sometime around the turn of the century, to Sigfried Ulmer, a Jewish wine merchant active in socialist politics, and a headstrong, passionate Viennese coquette named Henrietta Edels.
Shortly afterward the family moved to Vienna, where Ulmer suffered the tortures of a Jesuit education.
Rendered homeless by the First World War, he was taken in by the family of an old schoolmate, Joseph Schildkraut, through whom he became acquainted with the theatrical impresario Max Reinhardt.

Though he wanted to be an actor or a musician, Ulmer started off under Reinhardt designing and building sets, then did production design on films at UFA, where he worked with Fritz Lang and became one of F. W. Murnau’s closet collaborators.
In the Twenties he emigrated to America and went to work for Carl Laemmle at Universal, building sets and models and assisting William Wyler on a number of silent two-reel westerns.

Wyler tells an anecdote in Axel Madsen’s biography that is as startlingly apropos, for the man who would someday make Detour, as the one about Hitchcock and the village constable. Apparently Ulmer was the victim of an elaborate on-set prank: An argument was staged, the lights went out, a gun was fired. “When the lights came on again,” Wyler recalled, “one of the fellows was lying in his blood and Edgar stood over him, dumbfounded, with a gun in his hand. As he stood there watching his ‘victim’ in horror, a studio sheriff, who was in on it, put a hand on his shoulder, telling him he was under arrest for murder.”

Ulmer was frequently loaned to other studios during his stint at Universal; this permitted him to collaborate again with Murnau on all his American films, and also to return occasionally to Germany to work at UFA. During one of these trips he made the pseudo-documentary  People  on  Sunday (Links to an external site.) (1929) with Robert Siodmak co-directing, Billy Wilder scripting, and an uncredited Fred Zinnemann pushing the camera in a baby carriage.

In an interview with Peter Bogdanovich in 1967 and a work biography he dictated from memory in 1971, Ulmer recalled working in one capacity or another on films by Murnau, Lang, Lubitsch, Stiller, Pabst, Leni, Wegener, Curtiz, Griffith, Vidor, von Stroheim, Walsh, de Mille, Mamoulian, Maurice Tourneur, Clarence Brown, Chaplin, Borzage, and Eisenstein (on Que Viva Mexico). Even allowing for faulty recollection,

It is a remarkable list. Reinhardt, Murnau, and Lang alone are more influences than most young filmmakers could comfortably digest, and it is no wonder that Ulmer’s first solo effort, an all-star musical called Mr. Broadway  (1933) produced by a New York film lab, came out in his own words “a nightmare, a mixture of all kinds of styles.”

- Bill Krohn, Film Comment - Link Here


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