A stable base: Edgar G. Ulmer at PRC (Part 1)

At first blush, the pairing of filmmaker Edgar G. Ulmer with Hollywood B-movie studio Producers Releasing Corp. made for an odd combination when they came together in the early 1940s.

There was Ulmer (1904-1972), Czech-born and trained at the famde German studio UFA prior to coming to America in the early 1930s. He was an artistically-minded triple threat as a writer, producer and director also proficient in set design and construction who valued his independence as much as his desire to demonstrate his particular talent; he later claimed turning down an offer from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer boss Louis B. Mayer was something of a professional highlight for him. As Ulmer put it, "I did not want to get ground up in the Hollywood hash machine."*

PRC, as the company was more commonly known, was on the bottom rung of indy moviemakers specializing in second features for the nation's theaters, behind rivals Monogram and Republic, reviled for the ragtag look of its movies and the production value -- or lack thereof -- that went into them. Yet despite the reputation it attained and a shaky economic standing, the little production outfit hung on for the duration and began a slow but noticeable uptick in quality that lasted into the post-World War II years.

The subject of Ulmer's work at PRC from 1942 until 1946 has been covered and discussed extensively by other sources, particularly by Gary Don Rhodes in his 2009 study EDGAR G. ULMER: DETOUR ON POVERTY ROW from Rowman & Littlefield. It is not this writer's purpose to improve upon the more scholarly and well-informed works produced around the topic, but simply to explore the background of some of the six-day wonders Ulmer put his hand to in preparation for bigger and better assignments that eventually came his way, and examine to some degree the style he brought to his PRC pictures.

Ulmer, who had become known as a reliable and pictorially strong director of ethnic films made in the New York area in the mid-to-late 1930s, unexpectedly found a home at PRC that allowed him to make movies he believed in while turning out or assisting on the more commercially-viable product that theaters buying PRC releases expected. The experience not only reintroduced Ulmer to Hollywood but prepared him for a later and all-too-brief shot at A movie status in the latter part of the decade.

PRC became a stable base for Ulmer to perfect his craft under difficult conditions that included short shooting schedules, wartime limitations on film stock and other drawbacks created by its lack of resources. As pointed out by historians and critics, Ulmer was well on his way to being known as a budget director when he joined forces with PRC, creating unusual and entertaining pictures with little money, but also stuck with that designation for the remainder of his cinematic career.

Nevertheless, Ulmer made two of his favorite films at PRC, BLUEBEARD (1944) and DETOUR (1945) because of the freedom he was allowed by the front office to make what he wanted within the confines of the budget he was allowed. The minimalism forced upon him by these conditions resulted in 11 productions bearing his name under the PRC banner. Some were fodder the studio was obliged to make for neighborhood and rural theaters where PRC's largest audiences were found; others carry the brand of a mature filmmaker looking to offer something different and classy to those same ticket-buyers.

As Ulmer related in an extensive and famous 1970 interview with Peter Bogdanovich, his banishment from Universal after directing the 1934 horror classic THE BLACK CAT with Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi didn't close all doors to him in Hollywood. But what the other major studios offered Ulmer failed to interest him, as he told it; he claimed Twentieth Century-Fox's Darryl F. Zanuck offered Ulmer the director's chair on Shirley Temple features that Ulmer refused on the spot, according to the Bogdanovich interview. Instead, the Jewish culture-themed GREEN FIELDS (1937) he made in New York stimulated Ulmer's creative force and led to his working on similar films as well as a few geared for Ukranian audiences, culiminating with MOON OVER HARLEM (1940), an all-black drama made for a theater chain in the southern U.S. Ulmer suggested that the pastoral images created for GREEN FIELDS led to the offer from Zanuck.**

After MOON OVER HARLEM, Ulmer made a living crafting industrial and commercial films for the Army and Ford Motor Co., which he left in the early '40s when he heard that Seymour Nebenzal (1899-1961), New York-born producer of such Fritz Lang-directed German classics as M (1931) and THE TESTAMENT OF DR. MABUSE (1933), had come to the U.S. and following a one-picture experience with M-G-M (WE WHO ARE YOUNG, 1940, starring Lana Turner and John Shelton) set up his own production company. The producer, whom Ulmer characterized as the "Selznick of Europe," assigned Ulmer as story creator for PRISONER OF JAPAN, the first Atlantis Pictures Corp. feature that was released on July 22, 1942. The screenplay was credited to Robert Chapin and director Arthur Ripley.

However, there is some thought that Ulmer took a larger hand in PRISONER OF JAPAN's production, even to actually co-directing the feature, although Ripley has sole credit in that regard. If this isn't true, one can yet find what became the Ulmer influence in the final product, especially its inescapable air of doom for all concerned, both good and bad. Judged a "strange and largely unsuccessful war drama" by Poverty Row historian Don Miller,*** PRISONER OF JAPAN still deserves a look today.

The story concerns itself with American planter David Bowman (Alan Baxter) on a Pacific island who professes indifference to the outcome of the conflict between the U.S. and Japan. In reality, Baxter is the prisoner of vicious enemy agent Matsuru (Ernst Deutsch, billed here as Ernest Dorian) who, with the assistance of the Japanese soldiers Bowman unknowingly hired to work for him, have taken over the island, a key spot on the route taken by the Pacific Fleet. Successful in scuttling some warships as the film opens thanks to the radio station they've established, the agent and his minions prepare to inflict more damage until Baxter, aided by world-weary and similarly-entrapped entertainer Toni Chase (Gertrude Michael) manages to turn the tables on the interlopers and alert the fleet to destroy the radio base -- fully realizing they will perish in the bombardment.

A moody reflection on the personal sacrifice involved in winning the war, PRISONER OF JAPAN still offered action and suspense for less-demanding audiences that fit the bill for PRC, which distributed the film. The studio, like others large and small, was trying to meet demand for war-themed movies and increase homefront morale, and while PRISONER OF JAPAN's downbeat ending is more thought-provoking than uplifting, the proceedings are bolstered by the performances of Baxter, Michael and especially Deutsch/Dorian, a study in quiet cruelty secreted behind a mask of calm.

Ulmer's participation in PRISONER OF JAPAN paid off in Nebenzal assigning him his first feature directorial credit in two years on the next Atlantis production, TOMORROW WE LIVE, which PRC distributed on Sept. 23, 1942. Described by Ulmer as "a horror picture in the desert," TOMORROW WE LIVE's suggested supernatural element only lies in the ability of a smooth racketeer (Ricardo Cortez) to survive various and sundry murder attempts, earning him the nickname "The Ghost." He even manages to shrug off a severe beating from a rival's goon in the course of the proceedings, only to see his luck run out at the hands of Julie Bronson (Jean Parker) who alternately loves him and is repelled by him.

An audacious yarn is spun by the original screenplay provided by Bart Lytton: Julie, a college student, returns home to the humble roadside cafe operated by her father Pop Bronson (Emmett Lynn), only to discover the property serves as storage for loot stolen by The Ghost's gang, and of her father's participation in his schemes. Not wanting harm to befall Pop, Julie finds herself attracted to The Ghost, whose semi-legitimate operation is a nightclub/gambling den. Julie even breaks her engagement with her soldier boyfriend Bob Lord (William Marshall). Things soon go sour, especially when a dispute between The Ghost and Pop turns deadly for Pop, and Julie takes it upon herself to make things right.

Ulmer's artful approach keeps things going even if the story seems to veer from the fantastic and then to hardboiled in order to keep the crime element going, making for a unique but watchable piece of melodrama that showed PRC's seemingly hands-off policy was concerned with getting the thing made and with as little fuss as possible. It's likely TOMORROW WE LIVE wouldn't have been made if it had a chance at consideration by an A-level studio. Or if produced at one, transformed and released as a more typical example of studio product and lacking the touch of the unusual and visual Ulmer and his associates brough to it at PRC. Studio standby Jack Greenhalgh, who also shot PRISONER OF JAPAN, brings a certain dreamy aspect to his cinematography on TOMORROW WE LIVE that also serves the previous production.

Helping matters, too, is the professionalism of leads Cortez, onetime smooth lead at Paramount, RKO and Warner Bros. now working his way down to the Bs, and spunky Parker, who had also seen better days at the majors but like Cortez, never gave the impression of slumming. In a new biography of TOMORROW WE LIVE's leading man, Parker reveals she enjoyed working with Cortez, if not with Ulmer.@

Although TOMORROW WE LIVE won its share of raspberries from the critical fraternity who reviewed it, Ulmer shrugged them off and continued working with Nebenzal and solidifying his position at PRC, where he enjoyed a certain level of ease with its new production chief, Leon Fromkess. For Nebenzal, Ulmer and some of his friends from the Yiddish pictures he'd made a few years back revised the screenplay for what became HITLER'S MADMAN (1943), directed by German emigre Douglas Sirk, helping make it an impassioned study of the horrors let loose in the nations conquered by Adolf Hitler.

In HITLER'S MADMAN, Reinhold Heydrich (John Carradine) is the Nazi overseer of Czechoslavakia whose depredations prompted his own end at the hands of that country's underground movement in 1942. The action spurred the vengeful German oppressors to wipe the town of Lidice, and 1,600 of its residents, off the map in retaliation, while the survivors were carted off to concentration camps. The incident, which elicited outrage from the free world battling to up-end the Fuhrer and his allies, also inspired Fritz Lang to make a similarly-themed movie for United Artists, HANGMEN ALSO DIE! (1943) that starred Brian Donlevy, Walter Brennan and Anna Lee and largely dealt with the massacre's aftermath.


Set for release by PRC, HITLER'S MADMAN benefited from a larger-than-usual budget provided by Nebenzal and a production that bespoke more money and time than PRC was known to invest in any of its pictures. The potential embarrassment of such a quality film going out under the PRC label -- and as pointed out by historian William K. Everson @@, inability to recover its costs as a PRC release due to the limited number of theaters in which it would have played -- was averted when PRC was successful in selling it to M-G-M as product for its theater chain.

As critic and historian Michael H. Price observed, HITLER'S MADMAN "...places tremendous craftmanship  and heavy-duty dramatic resources at the service of an unyielding portrayal of the Nazis' brutality as a matter of Germanic national pride."@@@ It was released under the Metro logo in June 1943, three months after UA's distribution of HANGMEN ALSO DIE! Ulmer's participation was limited to the script revision, but for him and all of the individuals involved in bringing the film to reality, HITLER'S MADMAN was a point of pride. The Lidice incident influenced other movies of the time, even one of Sam Katzman's East Side Kids comedies for Monogram. In KID DYNAMITE (1943), a newspaper account of the atrocity inspires wise guy hero Leo Gorcey to follow the lead of his stand-up pal (Bobby Jordan) and join the fight against the Axis.



Nebenzal eventually cut his connections with PRC to focus on bigger projects (e.g., 1944's SUMMER STORM, helmed by Sirk for a UA release and featuring George Sanders and Linda Darnell in the leads), but allowed Ulmer to stay on with the studio since he'd proven himself useful as both a director, writer and fixer on other films. One of his upcoming productions for Atlantis, GIRLS IN CHAINS, proved to be a moneymaker, and his tenure with PRC gave him the opportunity to work on projects of his choosing -- an option he wouldn't always have in his corner as his film career progressed.

(To be continued)

* Peter Bogdanovich, "Interviews: Edgar G. Ulmer," in Todd McCarthy and Charles Flynn, eds., KINGS OF THE Bs: WORKING WITHIN THE HOLLYWOOD SYSTEM, New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1975, p. 396.
** Ibid.
*** Don Miller, B MOVIES, New York: Ballantine Books, 1988, p. 284.
@ Dan Van Neste, THE MAGNIFICENT HEEL: THE LIFE AND FILMS OF RICARDO CORTEZ, Albany, Ga.: Bear Manor Media, 2017, p. 243, quoting from a 1990s interview with Parker by the author.
@@ William K. Everson, CLASSICS OF THE HORROR FILM, Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel Press, 1974, p. 174.
@@@ Michael H. Price and John Wooley, with George E. Turner, FORGOTTEN HORRORS 3!: DR. TURNER'S HOUSE OF HORRORS, Baltimore, Md.: Luminary Press, 2003, p. 56.