Biography

Historian/critic/director Peter Bogdanovich praises Ulmer's directorial work on low-budget movies like The Naked Dawn (1955) and The Cavern (1964), which he considers "classics", adding that "the astonishing thing is that so many of Ulmer's movies have a clearly identifiable signature [despite being] accomplished with so little encouragement and so few means . . . ". Ulmer worked in set design beginning as a teenager for Austrian director Max Reinhardt. He came with Reinhardt to the US in 1923 with the play "The Miracle", which opened on Broadway. He was blackballed from Hollywood work after he had an affair with Shirley Castle (he eventually married her and she became known as Shirley Ulmer), who at the time was the wife of B-picture producer Max Alexander, a nephew of powerful Universal Pictures president Carl Laemmle. Ulmer spent the bulk of his remaining career languishing at PRC, the lowest rung on the ladder of Hollywood's "Poverty Row" studios. He signed a long-term contract there in October 1943 after directing the "big-budget" (by PRC standards) Jive Junction (1943), becoming the company's #1 director. Ulmer remains the principal reason PRC is mentioned in Hollywood history at all.

While at the poverty row Producers Releasing Corporation (PRC), he became the de facto head of production, overseeing productions by other directors and aiding the president of the company in planning the year's production schedule.

Interviewed in Peter Bogdanovich's "Who the Devil Made It: Conversations With Robert Aldrich, George Cukor, Allan Dwan, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Chuck Jones, Fritz Lang, Joseph H. Lewis, Sidney Lumet, Leo McCarey, Otto Preminger, Don Siegel, Josef von Sternberg, Frank Tashlin, Edgar G. Ulmer, Raoul Walsh." NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997.

Ulmer found a niche making melodramas on tiny budgets and with often unpromising scripts and actors for Producers Releasing Corporation (PRC), with Ulmer describing himself as "the Frank Capra of PRC". His PRC thriller Detour (1945) has won considerable acclaim as a prime example of low-budget film noir, and it was selected by the Library of Congress among the first group of 100 American films worthy of special preservation efforts.

Ulmer's father was a soldier in the Austro-Hungarian army during World War I and was killed in battle in 1916, when Ulmer was just 12 years old.

The Man from Planet X (1951) - $300

The Strange Woman (1946) - $250 /week

Detour (1946) - $750

Natalka Poltavka (1937) - $35 /week

Thunder Over Texas (1934) - $300