Films I Love #51: Detour (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1945)

[This is a contribution to For the Love of Film (Noir), the second Film Preservation Blogathon hosted by Ferdy on Films and Self-Styled Siren. The blogathon has been organized for the benefit of the Film Noir Foundation, who do important work to restore and preserve the noir heritage. Please consider donating to the Foundation during this week. The blogathon will run from February 14-21, and during this time I'll be posting about some noirs to raise awareness of the blogathon and its worthy cause.]

Edgar G. Ulmer excelled at making tough, gritty pictures on miniscule budgets: films that transcend their Poverty Row production values with a strangely haunting grace and beauty, a powerful aesthetic guiding every rough shot of Ulmer's work. The ratty B noir Detour is perhaps Ulmer's strongest film, a pithy hour-long ode to fallen men and dangerous women — or is it the other way around? Al Roberts (Tom Neal) is just an ordinary guy, a bit down on his luck maybe, a pianist whose beloved singer girlfriend Sue (Claudia Drake) has moved to California, hoping to make it in show biz. Roberts hitchhikes after her, but his journey to be reunited with his love goes awry when, through an improbable series of circumstances, he accidentally kills a man who has picked him up on the road. Knowing that the police would never believe his outrageous story, Roberts decides to hide the body and assume the other man's identity. But even this plan is foiled when he himself picks up a female hitchhiker, the fiery Vera (Ann Savage), who recognizes the car and knows that Roberts wasn't the one who was driving it not long ago. Roberts' sad story is told through a series of flashbacks, narrated in a shattered monotone by the antihero, who relates each new twist as though he still can't believe these things happened to him. Roberts is an everyman, with no money in his pockets and no luck, and he's easily manipulated by the sinister Vera. Savage's performance is truly eviscerating; she looks at Roberts like he's prey, with her eyes wide, gritting her teeth, her eyebrows gesticulating wildly, her voice a cold hard rasp.

Ulmer's a true poet of the noir: his images have an unsettling potency and startling emotional depths. Even Vera, the wanton woman, has her moment of warmth, when she places a hand seductively on Roberts' shoulder and tells him, her words freighted with meaning, "I'm going to bed." She looks at him expectantly, and when he shakes off her implicit offer, her face hardens into her usual eagle-like mask, putting up a front of rage to disguise her disappointment and hurt. Ulmer's ragged poetry can also be found in the half-awake dream Roberts has while driving, a vision of Sue singing against a backdrop of shadowy jazz musicians — a surreal interlude that juxtaposes Sue's cheery, all-American sweetness against the dark, tawdry circumstances into which the dazed Roberts stumbles. Ulmer's images have a hazy, raw quality that is both hyper-real and disturbingly unreal, a nightmare imagining of a world determined to punish the innocent, to corrupt them, to make them guilty. But his vision is also sufficiently open-ended that it allows for another interpretation, in which the entire film is the delirious self-justification of a guilty man, spinning wild stories to assuage his conscience. Either way, Detour is a harrowing and unforgettable noir, a distillation of the genre's essential themes and images into their most untempered form.

Bluebeard

In Edgar G. Ulmer's Bluebeard, the Poverty Row auteur crafted a strange, eerie piece of extreme low-budget horror, centered around the titular murderer, an artist who strangles his models to death after painting them, throwing their corpses into the Seine River. Gaston Morrell (John Carradine) is both a painter and a puppet artist, a performer who puts on elaborate stagings of the tale of Faust with his puppets. His paintings are more of a sinister and deadly hobby, as well as a source of income — his Mephistophelian business manager (Ludwig Stössel) sells the resulting paintings at a great profit. However, Morrell is moved to give up painting — and thus also his sinister sideline — by the appearance in his life of the lovely Lucille (Jean Parker), a dress designer who agrees to create new costumes for Morrell's puppets.

There is little mystery or true horror in this tale, as Ulmer, in his characteristically blunt way, establishes early on that Morrell is without a doubt the killer. He's shown murdering his assistant, Renee (Sonia Sorel), when the girl begins to wonder what has happened to all the women for whom Morrell would leave her for days or weeks at a time. The film is sexually frank for its time, and it is heavily implied that Morrell has been going to bed with his models in addition to simply painting and killing them. One wonders at times if anyone from the censorship boards ever even watched this film, particularly in the early scene where the police fish a woman's corpse out of the Seine and the wet dress clinging to her body reveals the bare flesh beneath — a haunting scene that confirms the sexual component of Morrell's murders.

Morrell is obsessed with ideas about sexuality, about purity and sin. As he reveals in the film's talky conclusion, his murderous rage was first triggered by a woman who he painted while he was helping her recover from an illness — inspired by the purity and beauty he saw in her eyes, he painted her as a saint with a glowing halo on her head. After her recovery, however, he was horrified to learn that she was a prostitute, a crude and impure woman, nothing like the unblemished portrait he'd made of her. The film makes the dichotomy between the Madonna and the whore central to its theme: Morrell goes mad because he cannot handle having his pristine images soiled by the complexities of reality. Preferring art to life, he loses control of himself and becomes a relentless killer. The film also deals with prostitution and vice in a comedic scene in which a police inspector (Nils Asther) interrogates a woman who had served as an artist's model but had, it seems, lately turned to other work. The script dances cleverly around the subject of that "other" occupation, but it's apparent that the whole conversation between the policeman and the girl is about sex, about prostitution. It's funny principally because the girl herself is unperturbed. She's openly flirtatious and says just what she means; it's the inspector who's uncomfortable with the subject and keeps cutting her short, trying to turn the conversation in another direction. He's a censor, not allowing an open and honest discussion of sexuality to take place, stopping the conversation at the surface level of euphemisms.

Here and elsewhere, the film playfully mocks male insecurities about female sexuality. The women in the film are open and charming and assertive, while the men are ineffectual and timid. When Morrell speaks to Lucille, he tries to maintain a cordial coldness that simply comes off clipped and awkward. He's a vicious murderer, but he's also a fairly sad, overly naïve guy who doesn't know how to talk to girls. At one point, he comes to visit Lucille, who is with her sister Francine (Teala Loring). Francine is getting dressed, shielded behind a thin dressing screen, but she urges Morrell to step inside, not to be shy, despite Lucille's statement that her sister is "not decent." Francine's eyes peek coyly over the top of the screen, the only part of her body visible, and Ulmer playfully highlights the sexual tension of the scene by having her step out from behind the screen just at the moment that she's fastening her shirt closed.


In this way, the film is continually calling attention to sexuality and feminine allure. If it is not a mystery or a horror film, it is in its weird way a kind of creepy love story, the tale of a man who falls in love to such an extent that he is moved to give up his profession for the love of a woman. Carradine's performance is exceptional, capturing the layered qualities of this urbane killer: by turns charming and distant, kindly and terrifying, icily murderous and tortured by his deeds. His role requires him to shift fluidly from outward calm to the pop-eyed stare he focuses on his victims, a crazed expression that Ulmer accentuates with closeups. Equally compelling are Parker and Loring as the sisters who cross paths with Morrell: the bold, independent-minded Lucille as the object of his affection, and Francine in her amorphous role as a police assistant of some kind, helping with the investigation of the Bluebeard killings.

As is typical of Ulmer and his minimalist productions, the plot of Bluebeard is almost indifferently handled, with frequent jarring cuts and a generally brisk pace that hurtles from one incident to the next with little connective tissue. The film very much displays its ragged edges: Ulmer shows only that which is absolutely necessary to either the plot or the atmosphere, omitting everything else with brutal economy. The film lasts just over an hour, and hardly a minute is wasted, though at times Ulmer's tendency towards economy sabotages the dramatic tension of the story. The conclusion, in particular, feels oddly rushed and overly talky, packing dense exposition into a few quick minutes, explaining the killer's origins and motivations before the perfunctory final battle that brings the film full circle: its last shot of the buildings along the Seine mirrors exactly its first shot.

Elsewhere, however, Ulmer's Gothic visual sensibility provides plenty of striking images to distract from the minimal, fractured narrative. The sewers beneath Morrell's house, where he dumps the bodies of his victims, are shadowy and gray, and Ulmer's camera follows black cloaked figures creeping through the darkness on sinister errands. In another scene, Morrell stares at the shadows of his puppets reflected on the wall in front of him, suspended in the air, awaiting his control, looking like a line of tiny hanging victims above his head. The film's plot might be simple, and its aesthetics sometimes crude and rough, but it is at the same time a stylish, intelligent treatment of sexuality and violence.

The Black Cat

Edgar G. Ulmer's The Black Cat is a remarkable movie that seems entirely aware of the workings of genre within its outrageous, Gothic story. The film is structured as a collision between genre worlds, inserting the romantic young lovers Peter (David Manners) and Joan (Jacqueline Wells) into a story that is otherwise populated almost entirely with character actors, a rogue's gallery of grotesque, exaggerated figures who could, separately, serve as the villainous geniuses and marauding thugs for an entire series of low-budget horror flicks. Instead, Ulmer crams a single film with these outsized personalities: the creepy, vengeance-obsessed psychiatrist Vitus Werdegast (Bela Lugosi); the sadistic Satanist architect Hjalmar Poelzig (Boris Karloff); Poelzig's wide-eyed, frizz-haired, ghostly bride Karen (Lucille Lund), a precursor to Bride of Frankenstein; Poelzig's utterly sinister manservant (Egon Brecher) with his slicked-down hair and wordless obedience; and Werdegast's equally forbidding servant (Harry Cording) whose allegiances are anything but clear.

Ulmer is well aware of the Gothic, overblown quality of the melodrama his two young newlyweds have wandered into here, and he deliberately contrasts the earnest sappiness of the scenes between Peter and Joan against the eerie intensity of their surroundings. It is as though two characters destined for a light romantic comedy have instead accidentally stumbled onto the set of a morose psychological horror piece, without seeming to realize that the atmosphere has changed. The scenes between the newlyweds are played with a broad sentimentality and good humor, with the lovers constantly exchanging sappy grins, and Peter sweeping his young bride up into his arms so often that it can only become comical. Ulmer accompanies these scenes with a fittingly sentimental score, achingly romantic and utterly conventional, playing off of the darker musical underpinnings that run through the rest of the film.

This was the first screen pairing of Karloff and Lugosi, and the two horror legends are undoubtedly the focus of attention here. The former's Poelzig is an ex-military officer who has now built his ultra-modern, maze-like home on the ruins of the fort he used to supervise. Lugosi's Werdegast is returning, after many years in prison, to enact his vengeance upon his old friend, who betrayed him during the war so long ago. When the bus bringing Werdegast to his target's home crashes, Peter and Joan are along for the ride, and all three of them become guests in Poelzig's home, the newlyweds only slowly realizing that a wild melodrama is being played out between these two sinister men. Lugosi has never been better, carrying over a healthy portion of Count Dracula into his portrayal of the tormented Werdegast, who has an absurd fear of black cats, the origin of which is never really explained. Lugosi acts with his glittering, intense eyes and perennially arched eyebrows, crafting a memorable character with his pop-eyed expressions and characteristic thick accent. Karloff is easily his equal, starting as a hulking Frankenstein-type figure before he modulates into more of an urbane, subtle threat, keeping a museum of preserved corpses in his basement and playing chess with Lugosi for the life of the young Joan.


The film is packed with baroque touches like this, and Ulmer's direction accentuates the understated horror of the situation. Even ordinary moments are made stylized and potent under Ulmer's hand. Poelzig doesn't just wake up when his doorbell rings: he rises almost pneumatically, his body segmented like a machine, silhouetted behind a thin curtain so that his iconically familiar shadowed profile reveals his presence before he's actually seen in full. Similarly, he can't just walk into a room, but rather lets the door slide slowly open in his path, gliding in with his glowering eyes masked by shadows, his hair combed up into a ridiculous point atop the sculpted stone of his head.

Ulmer also consistently uses multiple layers within his frames, pushing aggressively into the foreground as though he wanted to force his images into the audience's face. When one of the house's silent servants carries the unconscious Joan upstairs and lays her on the bed, Ulmer takes up a perspective on the far side of the bed, so that the brute walks directly towards the camera and sets the woman's inert body down right in the foreground of the image, blocking everything from view. Even more memorable is the amazing sequence when the two lovers clench, kissing tenderly in front of Werdegast and Poelzig. Ulmer abruptly racks the focus back and forth from the kissing newlyweds to the extreme foreground, where Werdegast's hand instinctively closes around a statuette of a naked woman, tightly gripping the arm in the same way as Peter is holding his wife's arm. It's an evocative image, expressing without words the intensity of Werdegast's emotions: the psychiatrist has lost his own wife, and Joan reminds him of his long-dead bride.

Ulmer is just as proficient in an unexpected scene that injects some humor into the film, in the form of a pair of local policemen (Henry Armetta and Albert Conti) who quickly forget about their line of inquiry and begin arguing about whose hometown is the better tourist destination. Ulmer proves to be remarkably adept at juggling between moods and tones, fitting this surrealistic comedic interlude smoothly into the film's overall mood of creeping dread. The specter of death hangs over the entire film, particularly the aura of wartime death, the ghosts of history who continue to haunt the present. In this sense, Poelzig's Satanism is something of a red herring; the real horror here stems not from Satanic rituals and blood sacrifices but from the unspoken horrors that Poelzig was involved with back during the first World War, the men he killed and the betrayals he committed. These historical atrocities linger in the present: the bus driver who brings Werdegast and the young couple to Poelzig's home speaks of the dead piled high in trenches, the rivers run red with blood, as though he was a tour guide pointing out the local sights.

Werdegast, a true tragic figure, understands this continuity with the horrors of the past, and he also knows that the present is oblivious to the bloody acts that preceded it. The young newlyweds are thus the ultimate avatars of the present, living continuously in the now, unaware of the dark, bloody secrets of the past. Once the film's bluntly violent, brutal climax has passed, the body count is tremendous, but Peter and Joan blithely blunder out of harm's way, leaving these horrors behind them as though it was all just a bad dream they'd had, as much a product of Peter's overblown imagination as the lurid mystery novels he writes. This denouement is particularly poignant in light of the new horrors that would shortly erupt in Europe, the new carnage and destruction that would be built on the ruins of the old. Ulmer's film is a subtle, potent allegory for the destruction of war, both physical and psychological, rewriting wartime traumas as Gothic horror, with the silly hero and heroine skipping through it all, utterly unaware of the tragic reality of what they're facing.

Daughter of Dr. Jekyll

Daughter of Dr. Jekyll is a bizarre little slice of horror schlock, as rough and ragged as one would expect, by turns maddeningly dull and curiously compelling. The film signals pretty much right away what's in store, with an unabashedly cheesy opening in which a narrator summarizes the familiar legend of Dr. Jekyll and his monstrous alter-ego Mr. Hyde, while a haze-shrouded silhouette of Hyde himself slowly turns towards the camera, his hairy, warped visage grinning as a disembodied voice threatens the audience. It aims for creepy, but just about reaches hilarious instead. The rest of the film follows through on its horror premise with raw, low-budget enthusiasm. When Janet (Gloria Talbott) and her fiance George (John Agar) arrive at the country manor of her guardian Dr. Lomas (Arthur Shields), they find that the locals are overwhelmed by superstition and terrified of going out during the full moon. Soon enough, as bodies start to pile up in the surrounding woods, Janet learns that she is, of course, the titular daughter of Dr. Jekyll, and she begins to fear that her father's condition — he's inexplicably referred to as a werewolf here — has been passed on to her. Her fears only intensify, naturally enough, when she is plagued by horrible, violent nightmares and wakes up with her clothes torn and streaked with blood. As anyone familiar with horror conventions knows, anything so obvious must of course be dismissed as silly by George and the good doctor, who deny that there's anything wrong with Janet beyond simple (female) hysteria.

Director Edgar G. Ulmer has been acclaimed as a king of B-movies for his ability to inject a certain roughshod aesthetic sensibility into even the lamest of sub-B plots, and to the extent that he infuses this unbelievably weak scenario with some frisson of atmosphere, suspense, and even strange beauty, his reputation proves to be well-earned. There are long stretches of the film, particularly early on, that are really rough going, like everything involving the supposed romance between Janet and George; Agar seems positively bored and can't manage to suppress a smirk when delivering some of his generically reassuring dialogue. Talbott, at least, is competent, and what she lacks in acting chops she makes up for in sheer intensity and charisma. Her glaring black eyes give a certain credibility to the idea that she really is a "werewolf" or Hyde-like creature, even if one knows instinctively that she isn't. She especially shines in a series of dream sequences where Ulmer superimposes her sleeping face over scenes of moonlit stalking in the woods around the mansion. Janet dreams that she has transformed into a cold-eyed monster who hunts and kills young women before drinking their blood (because apparently the film's script also had to blend elements of vampire lore into its already confused monster). Ulmer finds blunt, bloody poetry in images like this, as he does in the rhythmic recurrence of shots of clouds passing across the moon, or in the soulful terror with which Janet stares into her mirror, caressing her cheeks as though expecting hair to sprout at any moment.


For the most part, Ulmer does a fine job of populating the film with enough memorable images like this that the otherwise shaky aesthetics (like the jittery, uncertain editing and laughably fake miniatures of the house and grounds) seem less important. Ulmer has no patience for the niceties of smooth plotting or transitions; he's only got a little over an hour to tell this story, and he seems determined to milk it for all the potent imagery it can yield, even if it means giving in to incoherence and silliness from time to time. The film's finest scene comes towards the end, during the monster's last nighttime raid, as it pauses to peer into a window at a sexy young woman changing into raunchy black lingerie. It's an unashamedly exploitative moment, one that's completely out of tune with the rest of the movie: in the midst of these desolate country back roads where all the locals have jagged teeth, dirty faces, and hard edges, suddenly the monster stumbles across this incongruous pin-up model who seems to be posing for a Playboy shoot. It's played for laughs with a knowing wink, but it just as quickly transitions into the film's most stunningly executed sequence, and in fact its only genuinely frightening one. As the monster advances on this young woman, Ulmer focuses only on her face in close-up, capturing her dawning recognition and a terror that finally erupts as a series of screams. As the attack commences, Ulmer maintains his fixed perspective, as the woman's face leans into the frame, her screams intensifying and the blurred motion of her face in close-up substituting for the unseen violence done against her body. The scene ends with a pan downward to see her limp hand sticking out from underneath a table, the rest of her body obscured from view. Ulmer pans right then, to catch a glimpse of her other hand and her stockinged leg sticking out from under the table on the other side; the scene's resolution is a dark mirror of the way the woman had earlier stuck out her leg alluringly to pull her stockings on.

Daughter of Dr. Jekyll is ultimately as silly and uneven as its title would suggest, punctuated by long stretches of utter boredom, but also possessing a sporadic sense of visual imagination and playfulness that is wholly unexpected in such an unpromising bottom-of-the-barrel genre piece. This is Ulmer's trademark, and while it may sound like faint praise to say that he spruces up such otherwise ratty material — like embedding tiny nuggets of gold in shit — his talents are far from insignificant. Rather, he manages to locate and magnify the virtues of whatever he makes, crafting moments of strange, unsettling genius in the midst of the most disposable films.