Word: ulmer
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...EDGAR G. ULMER'S "Classic chiller," Boris Karloff plays opposite Bela Lugosi. You therefore expect, and get, a wide range of bizarre deeds--for starters, Satanism and skinning alive. The more extreme of these deeds are supported by a host of lesser strange touches, partly in Ulmer's visual style and partly in the fine acting. These touches make the film the masterpiece it is. They constantly reveal the personalities of the characters--especially the two leads, whose traits and drives take in all mutations of moral position and psychological experience. Karloff initially seems perverse and decadent; Lugosi, virtuous...
Black Cat succeeds because Ulmer's is a highly stylized drama of personal change. Its script is full of out-of-place lines and suggestive unresolved themes--the black cat as evil's embodiment, Joan Allison's actions under a narcotic. In another director's hands their non-resolution would be irritating; for Ulmer they must remain suggestions. Only thus can they work as partial explanations of his characters' actions. Similarly, the script omits a lot of explanation of characters and events. But their resulting strangeness contributes to Black Cat's transcendence of normal experience. Ulmer uses...
Danger: Diabolik. So you've never heard of Danger: Diabolik, or for that matter anything else by Mario Bava, Italy's greatest hack (Black Friday, Planet of the Vampires, Kill Baby Kill). In the tradition of Edgar G. Ulmer and the more outlandishly-scripted Charbol melodramas, Bava films wretched nonsense with great style, color, and originality. Don't attempt to inject meaning into this tale of a Super-thief and his sexy girlfriend who inhabit a sumptuous underwater playground which makes Dr. No's look like Rindge Tech. It doesn't matter: film-making as slick and out-landish...
Like Lang's, Ulmer's work tends to combine shots in constant motion, the camera slowly dollying in or out. Godard says that the director's decision to move the camera is a political act; for these greater film-makers, Lang and Ulmer, it is perhaps applicable that moving shots represent decisions of morality in terms of the dynamic relationship between foreground and background. In addition to Ulmer's command of composition, lighting, and occasionally dazzling montage, is his ability to translate these subtle aspects of morality into cinematic spectacle...
...later scenes Ulmer substitutes anticipated melodramatics with long and thoughtful camera journeys through the strange geographies. A guided tour of Poelzig's basement reveals his beautiful victims perfectly preserved in suspended glass coffins; Ulmer's camera explores the photographic potential of the situation: one shot has Poelzig screen left, the girl screen right; another Poelzig reflected in the glass, his face partly superimposed over the girl; a third the corpse, her own reflected image, and Poelzig in background...