The Black Cat (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1934)

 

 

The Black Cat (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1934)

Cast: Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, David Manners, Julie Bishop, Egon Brecher, Harry Cording, Lucille Lund, Henry Armetta, Albert Conti. Screenplay: Edgar G. Ulmer, Peter Ruric, suggested by a story by Edgar Allan Poe. Cinematography: John J. Mescall. Art direction: Charles D. Hall. Film editing: Ray Curtiss. Music: Heinz Roemheld.

Edgar G. Ulmer’s kinky The Black Cat may have been “suggested by” an Edgar Allan Poe story, as the screen credit says, but the only suggestion Ulmer and co-scenarist Peter Ruric seem to have taken was the title. A cat does appear, and freaks Bela Lugosi’s Dr. Vitus Werdegast out so completely that he kills it – maybe, for it seems to reappear, purring in the cuddling hands of Boris Karloff’s Hjalmar Poelzig, a few minutes later. Otherwise, the movie is an occasion for Universal’s famed horror stars Lugosi and Karloff to appear together and torment each other, and only incidentally to scare the hell out of a pair of newlyweds, Peter (David Manners) and Joan Allison (Julie Bishop, billed under her original name, Jacqueline Wells). The result is a stew (or perhaps goulash, since the setting is Hungary) of satanism, necrophilia, torture, and revenge. Lugosi’s Werdegast is returning to the place where Karloff’s Poelzig betrayed him to the Russians during World War I, and stole his wife while Werdegast was off in the gulag. Thanks to a chance encounter with the newlyweds on the train and a subsequent bus accident, Werdegast and the Allisons wind up at the home of Poelzig, built in the ruins of the fort Poelzig commanded during the war. It has been modernized in a kind of minimalist blend of Bauhaus and Art Deco – lots of glass brick and pocket doors – but there is also a gloomy substructure made out of the old dungeons of the fort. Werdegast and Poelzig meet again with a kind of stiff courtesy, hardly suggesting that Werdegast will eventually skin Poelzig alive. With good reason, for Poelzig has added Werdegast’s wife to his collection of embalmed women that he displays in glass cases, and married Werdegast’s daughter in her place. The Allisons are there only to add some semblance of normality to the whole business. It’s one of the more delirious of the classic Universal horror movies of the 1930s, with some perversities that would not have been allowed under the Production Code.

People on Sunday (Robert Siodmak, Edgar G. Ulmer, 1929)

People on Sunday (Robert Siodmak, Edgar G. Ulmer, 1929)

Cast: Erwin Splettstößer, Brigitte Borchert, Wolfgang von Waltershausen, Christl Ehlers, Annie Schreyer. Screenplay: Billy Wilder, based on reporting by Curt  Siodmak. Cinematography: Eugen Schüfftan. 

Only a strict formalist could watch the celebrated docufiction People on Sunday (aka Menschen am Sonntag) solely for its artful blend of storytelling and preservation of the way things were. But for the rest of us, there’s no way to watch Berliners enjoying themselves on a Sunday in 1929 without thinking about it as a picture of the calm before the storm – more especially because the young filmmakers who created it were soon to be caught up in the storm. Within a few years, directors Robert Siodmak and Edgar G. Ulmer, screenwriter Billy Wilder,  cinematographer Eugen Schüfftan, and even his camera assistant, Fred Zinnemann, would be driven out of Germany and eventually into Hollywood by the rise of Nazism. No work of art, after all, exists ahistorically. And People on Sunday is a work of art, a charming, slightly saucy glimpse at people being themselves. The five people the film concentrates on are non-actors: a taxi driver, a wine salesman, a salesperson in a record store, a woman who makes her living as an extra in movies, and a model. They’re all marvelously un-self-conscious about playing fictionalized versions of themselves, as are the hundreds of Berliners that surround them on the screen.

 

Detour (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1945)

Ann Savage and Tom Neal in Detour

Cast: Tom Neal, Ann Savage, Claudia Drake, Edmund MacDonald, Tim Ryan, Esther Howard, Pat Gleason. Screenplay: Martin Goldsmith, based on his novel. Cinematography: Edmund H. Kline. Art direction: Edward C. Jewell. Film editing: George McGuire. Music: Leo Erdody. 

If you ever want to discourage someone from hitchhiking, show them Edgar G. Ulmer's Detour. It's a classic B-movie noir with some astonishing twists and one of the most fascinatingly snake-like performances by a woman -- Ann Savage -- ever put on film. 

Queen Christina (Rouben Mamoulian, 1933)

Greta Garbo and John Gilbert in Queen Christina

Christina: Greta Garbo
Antonio: John Gilbert
Magnus: Ian Keith
Oxenstierna: Lewis Stone
Ebba: Elizabeth Young
Aage: C. Aubrey Smith
Charles: Reginald Owen
French Ambassador: Georges Renavent
Archbishop: David Torrence
General: Gustav von Seyffertitz
Innkeeper: Ferdinand Meunier

Director: Rouben Mamoulian
Screenplay: H.M. Harwood, Salka Viertel, Margaret P. Levino, S.N. Behrman
Cinematography: William H. Daniels
Production design: Edgar G. Ulmer
Film editing: Blanche Sewell
Costume design: Adrian
Music: Herbert Stothart

A year later, with the Production Code in full enforcement, this would have been a very different movie, though probably not a better one. It certainly wouldn't have shown Christina and Antonio sharing a room, not to mention a bed, in an inn. It probably wouldn't have suggested so strongly that before Antonio became her lover, Christina had a thing going with Countess Ebba, and almost certainly wouldn't have had Christina kiss Ebba on the mouth. Unfortunately, those little touches of mild naughtiness are pretty much all Queen Christina has going for it, especially if you're looking for some faint resemblance to historical fact. But maybe Garbo is enough. She certainly gives this pseudo-historical melodrama more commitment than it deserves. It was her fourth film with Gilbert, their only talkie, and their last. At least it dispels the myth that Gilbert failed to make the move into sound films because of his voice, which is perfectly fine -- the real reason was alcoholism, which made him unemployable and destroyed his health. The number of uncredited hands that worked on the screenplay, including Ben Hecht, Ernest Vajda, Claudine West, and director Rouben Mamoulian, suggests that it became a problem no one ever quite solved. Today, it is mostly remembered for the final shot of Garbo alone at the prow of a ship that is taking her away from Sweden. The story has it that Mamoulian directed her to empty her mind and think of nothing during the long closeup, to allow audiences to project their own emotions on her character.