Edgar G. Ulmer - (Weimar and Now: German Cultural Criticism) by Noah Isenberg

Book Synopsis

Edgar G. Ulmer is perhaps best known today for Detour, often considered the epitome of a certain noir style that transcends its B-list origins. But in his lifetime he never achieved the celebrity of fellow Austrian and German émigré directors like Billy Wilder, Otto Preminger, Fred Zinnemann, and Robert Siodmak, and spent most of his career as an itinerant filmmaker earning modest paychecks for films frequently overlooked or forgotten. In this fascinating account of a career spent on the margins of Hollywood, Noah Isenberg sheds new light on little-known details of Ulmer's personal life and his wide-ranging, eclectic films: features aimed at minority audiences, horror and sci-fi flicks, genre pictures made in the United States and abroad. As he follows the twists and turns of Ulmer's fortunes, Isenberg shows that Ulmer's unconventional path was in many ways more typical than that of his more illustrious colleagues, advancing a new understanding of low-budget filmmaking in the studio era and beyond.

From the Back Cover

"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

Review Quotes

"[A] cogent treatment of a singularly unlikely career. Isenberg's writing...allows the monumental eccentricities of Ulmer's underground journey to shine through."--Howard Hampton "Bookforum" (3/1/2014 12:00:00 AM)

"A most welcome book, which can lay claim to being a definitive study of Edgar G. Ulmer. . . . Isenberg has given us more than an academic study of the filmmaker's eclectic career. He manages to paint a rounded, sympathetic but honest picture of the man whose endless dreams were so often dashed. . . . Edgar G. Ulmer: A Filmmaker at the Margins is scholarly but never dry. It is a valuable reference and a good read."--Leonard Maltin "Indiewire" (3/11/2014 12:00:00 AM)

"A page turner of a biography."--Andrew O'Hehir "New York Times" (6/29/2014 12:00:00 AM)

"A rare coupling of intellectual treatise and entertaining biography that beckons to both the film scholar and the public."--Miguel Rodriguez "KPBS" (1/30/2014 12:00:00 AM)

"An authoritative new biography."--Kenneth Turan "Los Angeles Times" (11/14/2014 12:00:00 AM)

"As Isenberg reveals in this utterly necessary book, Ulmer was a nonpareil slinger of [exaggerated stories] even for a business that thrives on everything inauthentic except avarice. . . . In so many ways he was the Micawber of Poverty Row, and the something that turned up was not the big budget spectaculars with A-list casts that he fervently hoped for, but the wormy little movies about failure that he actually made. They were more than good enough to justify a life, and this very good book."--Scott Eyman "ScottEyman.com" (3/4/2014 12:00:00 AM)

"Isenberg makes a scrupulously honest case for the director and 'l'aesthetique du cheap, ' as a French critic called Ulmer's kind of style, avoiding injudicious praise and recognizing his weaknesses as well as his strengths. Then again, with Ulmer the weaknesses often are the strengths, and vice versa. That's what makes him so fascinating and Isenberg's energetic study so engrossing."--David Sterritt "Film Quarterly" (2/1/2014 12:00:00 AM)

"Long considered as something of a guilty pleasure among filmmakers, critics, and fans, director Edgar G. Ulmer finally gets the attention and scholarship he deserves in Noah Isenberg's new book."--Matthew Steigbigel "The Credits" (1/28/2014 12:00:00 AM)

"Now we have what is destined to become the definitive English-language critical biography from Noah Isenberg. . . The movies speak for themselves, but they have gained an eloquent companion."--Nick Pinkerton "Sight & Sound" (8/1/2014 12:00:00 AM)

"Operating mostly outside of the Hollywood system, Edgar G. Ulmer (the original King of the B¹s) is a fascinating character whose rather notorious mysterious life is somewhere between fact and fiction. All of this is explored and solved . . . in scholar Noah Isenberg¹s brilliant new critical biography Edgar G. Ulmer: A Filmmaker at the Margins."--Caryn Coleman "Vice" (2/18/2014 12:00:00 AM)

"Remarkable for its revealing of the hidden career of a minor genius is Noah Isenberg's Edgar G. Ulmer: A Filmmaker at the Margins." Best Film Books of 2014--Thomas Gladysz "Huffington Post" (1/5/2015 12:00:00 AM)

"The first English-language biography of the studio-era director oft crowned 'King of Poverty Row, ' Edgar G. Ulmer: A Filmmaker at the Margins explores an itinerant, ramshackle, and occasionally brilliant career that encompassed proto-proto-New Wave experiments, Yiddish utopia, influential B-noirs, fly-by-night exploitation, and Cold War sci-fi super-cheese. . .Isenberg creates a picture of a filmmaker as ragtag and resourceful as the films he directed. . . . [He] effectively traces Ulmer's artistic identity through the thematic (existential dread and rootlessness) and aesthetic (German Expressionism, classical music and opera) continuity of a body of work unified by little else."--Michael Joshua Rowin "Film Comment" (3/1/2014 12:00:00 AM)

"The season's must read [for film buffs] . . . Noah Isenberg's long-awaited biography 'Edgar G. Ulmer: A Filmmaker at the Margins.' Ulmer--whose CV includes "People on Sunday," "The Black Cat," "Detour," four Yiddish talkies, a half dozen bargain basement classics and as many indescribable oddities--had a life that was every bit as interesting as his film. The writing is scholarly but, given the material, charged with irony and full of pep."--J. Hoberman "Artinfo" (12/20/2013 12:00:00 AM)

"The story of his [Edgar G. Ulmer's] life is told with remarkable research and insight."--Richard Brody "New Yorker" (1/22/2014 12:00:00 AM)

"The Ulmer that emerges from the detail-packed, though rarely dry, pages of Isenberg¹s biography is tragicomic. During his lifetime, the émigré director was rightly renowned for his ability to spin straw into gold (or silver, at any rate), yet this meant that he became in many ways a victim of his own success."--Eric J. Iannelli "TLS" (5/14/2014 12:00:00 AM)

"This definitive study of fringe director Edgar G. Ulmer is also an anatomy of the B-movie industry. . . . The stories of Ulmer's offscreen seat-of-the-pants artistry make for a delightful and inspiring read. Recommended."--M. Yacowar "Choice" (8/1/2014 12:00:00 AM)

"While other authors are drawn to celebrities of greater stature whose lives are well documented, Isenberg preferred the challenge of unraveling the mystery of this European transplant who clearly had talent but never found success in Hollywood. . . . Ulmer may not have had the resources given to his fellow émigré directors but that didn't stop him from endowing his films with a unique personal vision that may finally be finding the appreciation it deserves."--Beth Accomando "Brooklyn Rail" (5/6/2014 12:00:00 AM)

"With sober intrepidness, Isenberg tethers down to earth some of the more wild claims made by and about his subject. In recounting the filmmaker¹s amazing career, he moves easily between describing the drama going on behind the scenes and analyzing the provocative work that Ulmer put on screen. . . . This fascinating biography gives us the chance to weigh the many frustrations in Ulmer¹s career against the joy he found in the act of creation."--Betsy Sherman "Arts Fuse" (2/2/2014 12:00:00 AM)

About the Author

Noah Isenberg is Charles Sapp Centennial Professor of Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas at Austin. He is author of several books, including the Los Angeles Times bestseller We'll Always Have Casablanca: The Life, Legend, and Afterlife of Hollywood's Most Beloved Movie.