I watched a documentary I had seen years ago about the great B movie director Edgar Ulmer. They spoke with directors Peter Bogdanovich, John Landis, Joe Dante, Win Winders, Roger Corman and actors who worked with Ulmer, John Saxon, Jimmy Lydon, William Shallert and Peter Marshall.
I wrote about this documentary before a few years ago and thought it was strange and disturbing that they talked about him as a tragic figure in film. He has 57 directing credits, made dozens of B movies, mostly for PRC, the most impoverished of the poverty row studios. He's best known for directing Detour. But he was still seen as a pitiable failure because his movies were low budget.
Maybe they should have gone the other direction. Instead of these big shot directors, they should have interviewed people who worked in television or low budget movies, people who would have seen his career as an inspiration instead of a pathetic sob story.
I especially could have done without John Landis who had nothing interesting to say, smiled constantly and is a murderer.
Ulmer's daughter was a producer the documentary, so I don't think they went into this, but Ulmer was on his way to directing "A" pictures at Universal when it became known that he was sleeping with Shirley Kassler, the wife of producer Max Alexander who was the nephew of Universal president Carl Laemmle. Kassler divorced Alexander and married Ulmer the same year.
His career always sounded pretty good to me! Really varied filmography, and he did some great things with the resources he had at PRC. Plus "Detour" is one of my all-time favorites.
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