Edgar G. Ulmer Day on TCM

Leonard Maltin calls Edgar G. Ulmer a "remarkably resourceful B-movie director whose works often transcended their budgetary and artistic limitations." He spent most of his heyday toiling away for PRC, a Poverty-Row studio known for producing sub-B movies very quickly (sometimes in a week or less) and very cheaply. Ulmer is remembered today primarily for two movies: THE BLACK CAT (1934), a stylish Universal horror film which was the first to pair Boris Karloff with Bela Lugosi, and DETOUR (1946), an ultra-cheapie film noir that does, in fact, transcend its circumstances of production to become a minor classic. However, on the evidence of a number of films that Turner Classic aired last week during a 100th birthday salute to Ulmer, those films were more or less flukes. Most of the rest of his oeuvre doesn't stand the test of time. I've written before about STRANGE ILLUSION and BLUEBEARD, and DETOUR deserves its own entry in the future; what follows are some notes about of a few of the other films on TCM.

TOMORROW WE LIVE (1942) has Ricardo Cortez as a underworld figure nicknamed The Ghost because he cheated death twice (and has bullets lodged near his brain and heart that he knows could kill him at any time). He keeps people under his thumb through blackmail, as with old-timer Emmett Lynn, who runs a desert diner that is largely a front for Cortez's gang of hoodlums. Lynn's daughter, Jean Parker, comes home from college for a visit and Cortez is taken with her, despite the fact that she has a finace, professor turned solider William Marshall. A triangle of sorts develops, with predictable results. Cortez, in the twilight of his career but still with a commanding presence, is very good, Parker is OK, and there is at times a noirish sensibility at play, but the film mostly resembles a TV drama. The overly loud background music is a mood killer.

ST. BENNY THE DIP (1951) wants to be a Capra movie (like LADY FOR A DAY). Three grifters on the run from cops after pulling a scam wind up in disguise as clergymen; trying to stay clean under the watchful eyes of the neighborhood cops and a couple of real men of the cloth, they reopen an old mission for the homeless and wind up getting reformed by their work. The cast is promising, a notch above Ulmer's usual actors: Dick Haymes, Roland Young, and Lionel Stander are the con men, and former child star Freddie Bartholomew, in his last movie role, is one of the real ministers. They are all fine, but everything else about the movie is hard to take, especially the slapdash writing and awkward camera set-ups. There are some New York City exteriors (or fake exteriors) that look good--one shot even reminds me of a scene in Woody Allen's MANHATTAN. Nina Foch, who somehow wound up in this cheapie the same year she was in the Oscar-winning AMERICAN IN PARIS, is wasted in an underwritten role. Dick Haymes gets a song and Young is good as always, if a looking a little weary--he died two years later.

THE LIGHT AHEAD (1939), in Yiddish, is the best of the batch. The plot concerns the relationship between a crippled boy (David Opatoshu) and a blind girl (Helen Beverly) who live in a Russian village; they are in love but too poor to marry. A parallel plot involves a bookseller (Isadore Cashier) who wants the town to spend 100,000 rubles from its treasury on cleaning up a cholera-ridden river and bringing a doctor to town, but the council wants to spend the money elsewhere and let God take care of the townspeople's health. In the end, the town foots the bill for the marriage of the boy and girl (in a cemetery at midnight!) because of an old folk belief that such a ritual will rid the town of illness. Beverly is unhappy that she will be forever known as a Cholera Bride, and the bookseller helps them "escape" after the wedding to go live in a nearby town that is more "rational" and modern. Opatoshu as Fishke the Cripple is sweet-natured, with soulful eyes, and gives the best performance in any of these Ulmer films. This movie, though probably done even cheaper than the others, looks better, with some Caligari-like sets, and in general the acting and writing is a notch above as well. This is the one to seek out. [TCM]