Word: edgar
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...indeed a Soviet citizen at all. At Abel's 1957 trial, he refused to disclose his identity, confessing only that he had entered the U.S. illegally. At that time, the Soviet press described him as a wretched German photographer victimized by "a hoax concocted by J. Edgar Hoover and American authors of lowbrow science fiction." In fact, as Abel now tells it, he was the son of a Russian revolutionary exiled to the far north under Czar Nicholas II. He prepared for his future vocation by distributing Bolshevik literature, beating up "Trotskyites" and studying radio engineering and foreign languages...
...forth through Joanna's life, ransacking her dreams, exploring her past and minutely exposing the style of a swinger with inventive images that linger in the retina. Not all of the film works. Its sometimes derivative surface is equally indebted to Jean-Luc Godard and shampoo commercials. Even Edgar Guest would have been embarrassed by the lyrics that Pop Poet Rod McKuen composed to match his banal score. But Same makes his cast perform with the precision and refinement of a repertory company...
About fifteen minutes into the picture, a television set presents us with a sublime moment from Edgar G. Ulmer's The Black Cat, starring Karloff and Lugosi. Lugosi plays Dr. Vitus Werdegast, a tortured psychoanalyst imprisoned during WW I by the villainous General Poelzig (Karloff) who, in turn, married and murdered Werdegast's wife Karen. Werdegast, after fifteen years in the prison from which few men return ("I have returned," he says gravely at one point), journeys to Poelzig's house to investigate Karen's death and eventually kill the murderer. Through a nasty turn in the weather...
...EDGAR ULMER'S films constitute a relatively unknown group of excellent low-budget pictures made during a period of more than 30 years. His art is in many respects highly pictorial, yet in the most developed films his complicated intellect adds dimension to the straightforward impact of the images. In The Black Cat and The Naked Dawn, initially simple confrontations are made ambiguous by Ulmer's elusive concept of morality. The camera often works against the script in directing audience sympathies, and should we feel secure in our assessment of character relationships, Ulmer will invariably undermine the status...
...entertainment, Dunster's production of The Imaginary Invalid is rather successful. The good humor of the play, complemented by the translation of Robert Edgar and John Russo, makes the play move quickly along. In addition, there are three "interludes" of song and dance which add to the general festivity. But if the production held any greater ambitions than these, it seems to have lost them along...