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Introduction to Part Three Edgar G. Ulmer is a fascinating, if minor, figure in the history of American popular culture. Although his work as a director was almost forgotten during his lifetime, he has come to occupy a respectable place in film criticism. In terms of achievement, I would rank him somewhere between Orson Welles and Ed Wood. Like Welles, Ulmer made a splash with his feature film debut in Hollywood. The Black Cat is no Citizen Kane (1941), but it is an impressive movie, and, like Welles, Ulmer uses the techniques of German expressionist cinema to tell a tale of psychological obsession. Again like Welles, Ulmer never fulfilled the promise of his first film. Welles ran into trouble in Hollywood because of his repeated failure to stay within budgets and his inability to deliver completed films on time. Ulmer had the opposite problem. He became so well known for being able to operate on shoestring budgets and weeklong shooting schedules that he was typecast as a B-movie director. Hence the comparisons with Ed Wood. If Ulmer never made a film as bad as the infamous Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959)—widely regarded as the worst movie ever made—he did come up with the likes of The Man From Planet X (1951) and The Amazing Transparent Man (1959)—sci-fi films that shared the late-night hours in the early days of television with some of Wood’s efforts. Weak scripts, continuity lapses, recycled stock footage, cheap props, and lame special effects—Ulmer’s films share these elements with Wood’s. Both Ulmer and Wood always had to scramble to make their movies, especially to find financial backing. For different reasons, the same came to be true of Welles. Critics argue continually about where to place Ulmer in the ranking of directors. Was he, like Welles, a cinematic genius, whose genuine artistic aspirations were thwarted by a philistine Hollywood community always obsessed with the bottom line? Or was he more like Wood—someone with only pretentions to cinematic genius, whose ambitions outran his talent? After studying Ulmer’s films, I am convinced that the truth lies somewhere between these two extremes. In any event, Ulmer’s career can teach us much about the heights and depths of working in Hollywood—both of which he 215 216 Edgar G. Ulmer experienced. Ulmer often felt frustrated by the censorship and commercial constraints to which his filmmaking was subject in Hollywood. His career certainly does not exemplify the Romantic image of the artist, with the freedom to create as he sees fit, unfettered by financial or other external considerations. Yet, by dint of his talent and persistence, Ulmer did manage to have a long and productive career as a filmmaker. Many have argued that he left behind a distinguished body of work. That would have been impossible without the resources placed at his disposal by a movie industry that—grudgingly—give him the support he needed to be creative. In one respect, Ulmer is the odd man out in this book—a situation in which he often found himself throughout his lifetime. All the other main figures I discuss were born in the United States, but Ulmer was born in what is now the Czech Republic and at the time was a province of the AustroHungarian Empire. One might then ask what he is doing in a book on American popular culture. Including Ulmer is a useful reminder that the notion of a native American culture has always been problematic. America is a land of immigrants, and waves of foreigners coming to its shores over the years have made the country what it is. Especially when analyzing the growth of the motion picture industry, we must take into account the contribution of immigrants to its development. We often refer to this industry simply as “Hollywood,” reflecting our belief that it is the most distinctively American of all the arts. By the 1930s, when Ulmer began making films on his own in Hollywood, it had become the dominant force in the world in the movie industry. But in the preceding three decades, when the industry was first developing, cinema may have been the most international art form in history, one that managed to leap over national borders with ease. There were several reasons for this situation, but the primary one is the simple fact that for their first three decades movies were silent, thus eliminating the language barrier that normally separates...

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