Edgar G. Ulmer

[From a debate at The Blackboard about the merits of Edgar G. Ulmer and, specifically, Detour.]

Although I am the farthest thing from an Ulmer expert, I do think that arguments about him, and this one in progress is pretty stimulating, amount to arguments about "auteurism" itself. There is a kind of economic determinism involved. Everyone pretty much agrees that Ford and Hawks and Hitchcock were auteurs, and could be auteurs because their talent and (equally important) their ability to "work the system" enabled them to work with other top talents, both crafts-people and actors, and to have budgets at their command to realize their visions.

Where does that leave an Ulmer? He is coming from a background very similar to that of Douglas Sirk -- Central European exile, roots in theater -- and although perhaps not quite as intellectual as Sirk (who was a formidable mind indeed), he is also a serious fellow, as the interview with him in Kings of the Bs bears witness. That interview is also heart-rending, because reading it one "feels Ulmer's pain" at the gulf between his intentions and his means. He is very clear in the interview about which films he feels that he best overcomes those limitations in. Maybe he is not as talented as Sirk -- but let us remember that Sirk worked on a lot of junky projects in his first decade in Hollywood, and then caught some breaks (his teaming up with the energetic but taste-free Ross Hunter was, oddly, among those breaks -- maybe the most important one). Ulmer seems hardly to have caught a break in his life.

The debate around Detour specifically is whether something in the necessarily threadbare manner of the film incarnates its theme in a way that a more polished, accomplished production could not. Gilbert Adair writes very well on this point in his one-page take on Detour in his fine visual history of film, Flickers. Many viewers and critics have decided that yes, the manner and the matter of this movie "click." Those who don't see that may never see it, but they are not going to un-persuade those who have seen it.