Edgar G. Ulmer: A Filmmaker at the Margins
Noah Isenberg
University of California Press
Edgar G. Ulmer is perhaps best known today for Detour, considered by many to be the epitome of a certain noir style that transcends its B-list origins. But in his lifetime he never achieved the celebrity of his fellow Austrian and German émigré directors—Billy Wilder, Otto Preminger, Fred Zinnemann, and Robert Siodmak. Despite early work with Max Reinhardt and F. W. Murnau, his auspicious debut with Siodmak on their celebrated Weimar classic People on Sunday, and the success of films like Detour and Ruthless, Ulmer spent most of his career as an itinerant filmmaker earning modest paychecks for films that have either been overlooked or forgotten. In this fascinating and well-researched account of a career spent on the margins of Hollywood, Noah Isenberg provides the little-known details of Ulmer’s personal life and a thorough analysis of his wide-ranging, eclectic films—features aimed at minority audiences, horror and sci-fi flicks, genre pictures made in the U.S. and abroad. Isenberg shows that Ulmer’s unconventional path was in many ways more typical than that of his more famous colleagues. As he follows the twists and turns of Ulmer’s fortunes, Isenberg also conveys a new understanding of low-budget filmmaking in the studio era and beyond.

From the Inside Flap

"A fascinating, meticulously researched, and most welcome biographical study of the life and films of Edgar G. Ulmer, a picturemaker whose name has practically become proverbial for no-budget, ultra-rapidly shot movies of quality and personal vision. What Ulmer could accomplish in six days remains a object lesson for directors who strive to create something good with little means, and proof that miracles can happen if there is talent involved." ―Peter Bogdanovich

"Noah Isenberg's lovingly researched and sumptuously written book on the relentless self-mythologizer Ulmer, a man who over his singularly strange filmmaking career commingled with Hollywood titans AND worked the outermost margins of the industry―even the margins of history itself―represents an intoxicating and savvy approach to biography, one that acknowledges that poetic truth lies in the blurred miles-wide belt between confirmed fact and after-the-fact longing for a better seat in the empyrean. Rich and strange. What a wonderful work this is." ―Guy Maddin, writer and director of My Winnipeg

"This enthralling biography pieces together for the first time one of the strangest and most elusive careers in Hollywood. Noah Isenberg shows, with tact, elegance and exhaustive research, how the Viennese director who came to Hollywood with Wilder, Preminger and von Stroheim, wound up in the netherworld of Poverty Row, and how the director’s noir films, made under cheap conditions on six-day-shooting schedules, exhibit something primal―the grinding greed, ambition, and outsider yearning of noir." ―Molly Haskell, author of Frankly, My Dear: 'Gone with the Wind' Revisited

"Noah Isenberg has combined dogged detective work and an acute critical sense to create the first portrait of Edgar G. Ulmer that casts light into the dark corners of this gifted filmmaker’s labyrinthine career. Ulmer’s own life seems as spectacularly accursed as that of the protagonist of his most famous work, the 1945 film noir Detour, yet Isenberg uncovers something noble and ultimately quite moving in Ulmer’s unflagging pursuit of high art under the most unlikely circumstances."―Dave Kehr, author of When Movies Mattered