New Book on Edgar G. Ulmer

A new book on the work of Poverty-Row director, Edgar G. Ulmer, who made the cult b-noir, Detour (1945), was released in May.

The book, Edgar G. Ulmer: Detour on Poverty Row, was reviewed today by Michael H. Price in the Fort Worth Business Press:

[In] Edgar G. Ulmer: Detour on Poverty Row … Editor [Gary D.] Rhodes and a well-chosen crew of contributing writers consider Ulmer in light of not only his breakthrough film, 1934’s The Black Cat at big-time Universal Pictures, or such finery-on-a-budget exercises as Bluebeard (1944) and Detour (1945), but also Ulmer’s tangled path through such arenas as exploitation films (1933’s Damaged Lives), Yiddish-language pieces (1937’s Green Fields), well-financed symphonic soap opera (1947’s Carnegie Hall), and ostensible schlock for the drive-in theaters (1957’s Daughter of Dr. Jekyll)… A perceptive chapter from Christopher Justice wonders aloud whether the writer-director might be considered “the godfather of sexploitation,” in view of the “new aesthetic terrain and … core prototypes” that can be observed in such films as Damaged Lives and Girls in Chains (1943) and The Naked Venus (1958)… Tony Williams regards Ulmer as an advancer, rather than a follower, of the “psychobiography” approach that Orson Wells had defined with Citizen Kane in 1941 — on the evidence of an often-maligned, oftener-ignored Ulmer picture called Ruthless (1948). (Ruthless stars Zachary Scott as an industrialist who might make Welles’ Charles Foster Kane look like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm by comparison.)