Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Film What's Old: Ulmer at Doc
Posted by Pat Graham on Wed, Oct 15, 2008 at 5:11 PM
Yes, Virginia, there is an Edgar G. Ulmer, and he is no longer one of the private jokes shared by auteur critics, but one of the minor glories of the cinema. —Andrew Sarris in The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968
Already I've sat through Edgar Ulmer's Strange Illusion (screening at Doc Films Sunday at 7) twice and still can't remember anything about it. Or hardly anything: one very odd-looking actor (presumably Jimmy Lydon, from review summaries I've read), an elaborately gated estate entrance, and some of the most ludicrously awful back-screen projection I've ever been witness to ... except I adore that out-of-sync matting, as antidote to our official (as in "oppressive") realist paradigm, arguably one of the "minor glories" that Sarris would call our attention to.
But a lot of Ulmer just goes by me—like Detour (October 26), his alleged poverty row "masterpiece." Yes, yes, the surreality and hothouse delirium, the expressionist accents on loan from 20s Weimar, the absurdity of the winding telephone cord—and of course Ann Savage (but why "of course"? what's supposed to be so outlandish?: another of those privileged insights I can't get a handle on). But inspired?—I'd take Ed Wood's Bride of the Monster any day. Or Ruthless (not in the Doc series), the Citizen Kane of the bargain bins and, pace The Black Cat, still probably my favorite Ulmer of all. Rich if not exactly strange—which is defeating the whole idea, right? Since respectable Ulmer is arguably less consequential than no Ulmer at all.
I'm also a bit of a contrarian—or maybe just out of it—on the Texas state fairgrounds twins of 1960, The Amazing Transparent Man (November 23) and Beyond the Time Barrier (November 30—and why isn't Doc screening them back-to-back?). Beyond usually gets the critical thumbs-up, for its putatively "imaginative" dollar-store sets, while Transparent is more often dissed for being too straightforward, too doggedly matter-of-fact. Like anyone else's movie about a guy who's supposed to be invisible, the camera stalking a vacancy as if somebody or something were actually there. Pure, elemental Dada—gotta love the damn stuff.
Still to come in the series: The Strange Woman (November 9) and The Naked Dawn (November 16), plus a trio of Ulmers from a concurrently running Doc series of Yiddish-language films: Green Fields (October 30), The Light Ahead (November 13), and The Singing Blacksmith (aka Yankl der Shmid, December 4). None of which is a missable one-night stand, whatever the reservations and kvetches. But I probably won't remember anything in the morning.
Doc Films is at Ida Noyes Hall, University of Chicago, 1212 E. 59th St; call 773-702-8575 or go here for more info.
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Good post. The one thing I don't get though is how you preferring "Bride of the Monster" discredits the reputation of "Detour" any. You basically made a great case for it.
PAT--the professional polish of DETOUR tends to subvert the very things it's praised for, something that obviously can't be said of wood's BRIDE, which plays around the nocturnal edges of awareness like a proto-ERASERHEAD
Sure, and I wish I'd hear that argument for Wood more often. But the fact that the one shot you took at "Detour" was questioning whether or not it was "inspired" makes me hungry for elaboration. "Inspired" is a word that is most often followed by "by", which tells me that you've alloted a definition to that term that might not match mine. Not that I want to (or will) deter you any--I've never really heard anyone pick a fight with "Detour." If I can break the rules and back-track a little, I'd like to comment on your old post regarding Steve Erickson's "Zeroville." Sorry, but I just recently finally got a chance to read it. The pleasure of that book to me was not derived from any sort of "fresh" perspective, but from the fact that said perspective isn't condensed into exhausted prose. I like lines like "Cagney was complicated, but Bogart was neurotic man," or the idea of a starving black street dude ranting and raving about the myth vs. the anti-myth. I will say that the narrative side of it lags until the last forty or so pages as it devolves into Forrest Gump-y appropriations of its main character far too often. But it worked overall because it didn't want to tell stories nor did it want to criticize movies--it just wanted to talk about them. Just two cents--figure it wouldn't be a problem, for the original post was met with but a single comment.
Who, in all of noir, is a nastier bitch than Anne Savage in Detour? She's so unlikable. So plain and nasty in a way that makes you contemptuous of her. I think that's why people tend to praise her performance. It's awesome.
Richard Corliss on Detour: "No film is noirer." Maybe your capacity isn't as large as Corliss's.
PAT--"cagney was complicated ...," etc, seems pretty exhausted--or at least the conventional wisdom re both of the actors involved * and the "street dude ranting" relies on some pretty dubious stereotyping to achieve its effects: "o look, a black guy spouting all this educated white guy stuff," while performing racial obsequies to white paranoia about black criminal propensities * kind of a push-me/pull-you hydraulic there, yes?--don't see it going over with the readership colors reversed MATT--same stereotyping friction in DETOUR: painted china doll ornament versus castrating harpy ... except it's all so commonplace in movies now (post-john waters, the high school "heather"s, the apatow comedies, etc) we hardly give it a thought * as why would we, since all the invidious gender divisions (the china doll, the harpy, etc) are officially obsolete ... unless of course they aren't DAN--bravo for corliss's capacity! ... i'm sure i should be impressed
I didn't mean it as a bad thing. I'm just wondering if you're that into film noir. But hear, hear, bravo to Corliss's capacity!
DAN--not that i blame you ... sometimes i wonder that too
Pat, your criticisms of the book seem to me to be a lot more "exhausted" than anything Erickson wrote. What I meant by bringing up the aforementioned quote and character is that we finally get to hear all of this come out through some sort of "layman's talk." Not everyone who loves the movies and have valuable things to say about them feel it necessary to get all Andrew Sarris about it on the internet. I, thankfully, didn't learn how to watch movies by way of Jonathan Rosenbaum. The "man" at the end of the Cagney/Bogart line is thus more important than the actual content. And while I agree the street dude's character requires a big leap of faith in principle, I do not think an informed interest in Ford requires a label such as "educated white man stuff."
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