The Pirates of Capri (1949)

The Pirates of Capri is an oddity in Edgar G.Ulmer’s career as a director but then when you think about it his entire career was full of oddities. Usually extremely interesting oddities. The Pirates of Capri is a swashbuckling adventure. It’s an Italian-American co-production shot in Italy.

It is 1798 and a warship is on its way to Naples carrying a shipment of arms, the fiancée of the Count of Amalfi and a troupe of acrobats. The acrobats are actually pirates and they seize the ship. The pirates are led by the notorious masked Captain Sirocco.

Captain Sirocco (Louis Hayward) is in fact the Count of Amalfi. In his Sirocco guise he is a handsome dashing very masculine pirate. In his Count of Amalfi guise he is a fop and a fool.

Of course this is hardly an original idea. It’s the same idea behind the Zorro books and movies. And Zorro was just a riff on Baroness Orczy’s the Scarlet Pimpernel. What matters with such dual rôles is finding an actor who can be equally convincing as both fop and hero. Is Louis Hayward up to the job? The answer is a resounding yes.

The pirates are not regular pirates. They’re revolutionaries seeking to overthrow the government of the Queen of Naples. There’s an interesting split in the ranks of the revolutionaries. Sirocco is a moderate. He wants to keep the queen on her throne. He just wants to get rid of her government, and mostly he wants to get rid of the vicious sadistic chief of police, Baron Holstein (Massimo Serato). He wants to avoid a bloodbath. The extreme revolutionaries want a bloodbath and they model themselves on the French revolutionaries so they’d be quite happy to lop off the queen’s head.

There’s a romantic complication. The Count of Amalfi’s intended bride is Countess Mercedes Villalta de Lopez (Mariella Lotti). She’s not keen on marrying the foolish count of Amalfi. Although initially horrified by Sirocco she has started to lose her heart to him. He’s the kind of action hero that any girl would fall for. Of course she has no idea that the Count of Amalfi and Sirocco are the same man.

There are plenty of fairly full-blooded action scenes. There’s a cruel villain who likes to torture young women. There’s the whole fighting for freedom thing (with a few twists). And there’s a suitably heroic hero. It’s a formula that should work, and it does.

On this occasion Ulmer has a reasonable budget to work with and it shows. The movie is visually reasonably impressive.

Louis Hayward is in splendid form. The other cast members are all quite competent.

The movie is fairly sympathetic to the revolutionaries, or at least to moderate revolutionaries such as Sirocco. Politically Sirocco falls halfway between being a reformist and a true revolutionary. You don’t really have to worry too much about the politics. The movie is perhaps a little naïve in that department anyway. This film can be enjoyed as a straightforward romantic swashbuckler.

The Pirates of Capri is energetic fun. It’s Ulmer’s only swashbuckler although a few years later he did attempt an historical epic with Hannibal, an unjustly neglected movie.

Louis Hayward’s performance and Ulmer’s lively direction make The Pirates of Capri an enjoyable experience. Highly recommended.

This is a hard-to-find movie. I came across a French DVD from Artus Films which includes the English version (with removable subtitles) and it offers an acceptable transfer. There are no extras. That DVD is still in print and it’s your best chance of seeing this movie.

Detour (1945)

According to legend Edgar G. Ulmer’s Detour was made for peanuts (some claim the budget was as low as $30,000) and shot in around six days. In reality it had an average sort of budget for a Poverty Row feature (just under $120,000) and was shot in fourteen days. Be that as it may Detour remains of the greatest noirs of them all. And one of the finest American movies of the 40s.

Detour ticks just about every noir box there is. We get voiceover narration (from the protagonist, Al), flashbacks, a femme fatale, night shot, shadows, fog, seediness, paranoia and despair.

Al Roberts (Tom Neal) is hitchhiking to LA. Al plays piano in a small club (more of a dive really) in New York. It’s not much of a career for a man who once had ambitions but Sue makes it bearable. Sue sings in the club. Al and Sue are going to get married. Al is crazy about Sue. Then Sue decides to head for Hollywood in the hope of finding stardom.

Al sticks it out on his own for a while but he can’t stand it. He has to go to LA to be with Sue. He has no money so he has to hitchhike. He knows about the annoyances and hazards of hitchhiking but he has no choice.

He will soon discover some hazards of hitchhiking that he didn’t know about. It all begins when he gets a lucky break. He gets picked up in Arizona by a guy named Haskell. Haskell is going all the way to LA and he’d be glad of the company.

Being picked up by Haskell turns out to have been not so lucky after all.

And then he meets Vera (Ann Savage) and she gets him out of one jam and into a much bigger one. There’s nothing he can do about it. She holds the whip hand.

Vera isn’t the kind of femme fatale who manipulates a man with soft words and caresses. Vera is like a rattlesnake. Fate has given her power over Al and she intends to use it. It’s one of the most over-the-top performances in film history. It’s breathtaking in its excessiveness.

Which brings us to Al. With its very tight 66-minute running time this movie can’t waste any time. It has to let us know certain things quickly and economically. The first thing we notice is Al’s self-pity and we know from the flashbacks that this is a core part of his personality. He felt sorry for himself long before life started to give him a hard time. He is bitter and resentful.

The key to Detour is of course the question of whether Al is an unreliable narrator. The entire story is told from his point of view. We have some slight cause to wonder how truthful he’s being, but we have much stronger cause to wonder whether we’re basically being told the truth, but a very distorted version of the truth. We wonder how clearly Al sees the world. We certainly have doubts about how clearly he sees himself. We might even have tiny niggling doubts about his sanity.

But we don’t really know because Ulmer has no intention of making things easy for us. It’s possible that Al really is an unlucky guy who just can’t catch a break, but we’re certainly meant to regard his self-justifications with scepticism.

In 1944 Martin Goldsmith wrote a screenplay for Detour based on his own novel. It was very very different from the film that Ulmer eventually made, with lots of additional characters and two viewpoint characters. Lew Landers was given the director’s job. At a very late stage Landers was reassigned to another project and Ulmer took over as director. The final shooting script still bore very little resemblance to the completed film. It seems that at the last moment Ulmer decided the movie would be much more interesting with a single relentlessly subjective viewpoint. Anything outside Al’s direct experience was simply jettisoned from the script. Ulmer’s last-minute decision was undoubtedly correct.

Tom Neal is superb as the shifty self-pitying Al. Neal has the distinction of being one the few film noir stars to be charged with murder in real life (he shot his wife).

Ann Savage gives one of the wildest most extraordinary performances in film history. She’s positively terrifying. Of course you have to remember that we’re seeing Vera through Al’s eyes so we may be getting a totally distorted view of her. But Savage’s job as an actress was to show us Vera through Al’s eyes and that’s what she does.

The Criterion DVD (which is the edition I own) includes some extras. By far the most interesting is found in the liner note - a detailed description of the film’s production history and the many many changes the screenplay went through.

Detour is one of the three or four finest American noirs ever made. A superb movie. Very highly recommended.

The Strange Woman (1946)

The Strange Woman is a 1946 melodrama directed by Edgar G. Ulmer. It sometimes gets described as a film noir which is a bit of a stretch although it can be considered to belong to that odd sub-genre sometimes known as gaslight noir - period melodramas with a touch of film noir in both content and style.

In the early 1930s Ulmer had been well on the way to establishing himself as one of Hollywood’s top directors until an affair with the wife of a producer got him blackballed from all the top studios. He ended up at PRC, the lowliest of the Poverty Row studios and the absolute bottom of the Hollywood food chain. But in 1946 he had a stroke of luck. Hedy Lamarr had bought the rights to a novel called The Strange Woman by Ben Ames Williams and she hired her childhood friend Ulmer to direct. This gave Ulmer a luxury he hardly ever enjoyed - the chance to work with big name stars who actually knew how to act.

Ben Ames Williams who also wrote the novel Leave Her To Heaven (the basis of the magnificent film of the same name).

Lamarr knew what she was doing when she bought this property. She knew that the role of Jenny Hager would give her the chance to demonstrate her acting chops and she makes the most of that opportunity.

Jenny Hager is a young girl growing up in the seaport of Bangor in Maine. Jenny is ambitious. She wants money and luxury and she knows that the way to get those things is through a rich man. And she knows that the way to land a rich man is by using her very considerable sex appeal. Jenny is gorgeous and she oozes sex.

Her father Tim Hager is a self-pitying drunk who beats Jenny regularly. He beats her once too often. He over-exerts himself and drops dead of a heart attack. It’s a rather daring scene for 1946 since there are definite hints that the beatings have sexual overtones.

Jenny schemes her way into marriage with the rich middle-aged Isaiah Poster (Gene Lockhart). To be fair to her she really does try to be a good and loving wife. Things start to spiral out of control when Isaiah’s son Ephraim (Louis Hayward) returns from Cambridge Massachusetts where he has just qualified as an architect. Jenny and Ephraim has been childhood friends, even childhood sweethearts. There’s a key scene in which Jenny, still a small child, throws Ephraim into the river where, unable to swim, he almost drowns. Ephraim’s cowardice enrages Jenny. It’s a scene which makes some of her later actions more comprehensible. She despises cowardice in men.

Jenny and Ephraim soon decide that they’re in love but Jenny is married to Ephraim’s father Isaiah. If only Isaiah were out of the way Jenny and Ephraim could be happy.

After a complicated series of events Jenny ends up married to Isaiah’s right-hand man John Evered (George Sanders). John had been engaged to Jenny’s girlhood friend Meg Saladine (Hillary Brooke) but Jenny soon takes care of that obstacle.

But this is melodrama and there are further complications in store, and further tragedies.

The Strange Woman’s claims to being film noir are very very thin. Those claims rest entirely on the notion that Jenny is a femme fatale but I think that’s a misunderstanding. She is a character straight out of melodrama. And this movie is pure melodrama. It’s full-blown deliriously overheated overcooked melodrama. And that’s the best kind of melodrama. It is also very much a women’s picture as that term was understood in the 40s. The terms melodrama and women’s picture have always tended to bring out the snarkiness in reviewers but melodrama is a perfectly legitimate genre and it’s a genre of which I’m very fond.

Jenny is certainly a schemer but that judgment has to be qualified. Given her nightmarish childhood and the appalling situation in which she finds herself after her father’s final beating her decision to use sex to get herself out of that situation is entirely understandable. In the mid-19th century a woman in her position would have had no other option unless she wanted to end up as a menial servant.

And while Jenny does wicked things her motivation is always love. In that respect she bears a very close resemblance to Ellen in Leave Her To Heaven. You could say that they’re both women driven to a kind of madness by their need for love. And given Jenny’s relationship with her father she has more excuse than Ellen for being consumed by the need for love.

Hedy Lamarr gives what some consider to be her career-best performance. And they may well be right. She’s terrific. Jenny is a complex woman. There’s bad in her but there’s good as well. Her motivations are not always straightforward. It’s likely that she doesn’t always understand her own motivations.

As far as morality is concerned it’s worth pointing out that Ephraim does at one point admits to Jenny that during his time in Cambridge his leisure hours were occupied with drink and prostitutes. There’s a considerable amount of moralistic hypocrisy in the attitudes of the good folk of Bangor.

George Sanders, Louis Hayward, Gene Lockhart and Dennis Hoey (as Jenny’s father) are all good. George Sanders was perhaps oddly cast here but he manages pretty well. This is however a movie that is entirely focused on Jenny and it’s Hedy Lamarr’s performance that matters and she delivers the goods.

When making judgments on the outrageous plot you always have to keep in mind that this is melodrama, a genre with its own conventions. It’s a fine melodrama plot.

This is a movie about a woman who makes certain choices of which viewers in the 1940s would certainly have disapproved but it’s also a movie about love, about romantic obsession. It’s also, by the standards of 1946, surprisingly frank about sexual desire and surprisingly erotic.

The Film Chest Restored Version DVD offers a fairly good transfer of a movie that was at one time only available in rather dire public domain versions. It would be nice to see this movie get a Blu-Ray release. The DVD is OK but a special edition Blu-Ray with some nice extras might help this overlooked movie reach a wider audience.

It’s impossible not to keep comparing this movie to Leave Her to Heaven (1945). Since they’re both based on novels by the same author it’s not surprising that there are countless thematic similarities. Both are melodramas which have wrongly been labelled film noir and both are movies about women tempted into evil by an overwhelming need for love. Both feature powerhouse performances by superb actresses. Leave Her to Heaven is one of the two or three best Hollywood movies of the 40s but The Strange Woman stands up pretty well in a comparison.

The Strange Woman is an intriguing visually stylish melodrama and it’s highly recommended.

Ruthless (1948)

In the early 1930s Edgar G. Ulmer was rising fast until an affair with the wife of a producer ended his career as a director as far as all the top studios were concerned. He spent almost the whole of the rest of his career making very low-budget movies for outfits like PRC, the most poverty-stricken of the Poverty Row studio.

In the 1940s he did however get a couple of opportunities to make movies with reasonably generous budgets. One was The Strange Woman, which his childhood friend Hedy Lamarr hired him to direct. The second was Ruthless, in 1948.

And Ruthless really is a pretty lavish production. Ulmer had real money to play with, and plenty of it.

The parallels between Ruthless and Citizen Kane are obvious but shouldn't be pushed too far.

In 1948 Horace Woodruff Vendig (Zachary Scott) is a fabulously wealthy financier about to launch an ambitious foundation dedicated to achieving world peace. Is it another cynical move, perhaps an elaborate tax dodge, or is Vendig genuinely tying to do something decent for once? His childhood friend Vic Lambdin (Louis Hayward) isn’t sure. Vic has turned up at the launch with his new lady love, Mallory Flagg.

Vendig’s story is then told in flashback.

He had a pretty miserable childhood, with an irresponsible gambler father and an embittered mother who blamed the boy for all her troubles. Then young Horace Vendig got a lucky break. He was out canoeing with Vic and a little girl named Martha. Martha went overboard and almost drowned but Horace saved her. Martha’s parents were so grateful they more or less adopted Horace (which was possible since his mother was keen to get rid of him) and Martha’s dad paid for the lad to go to Harvard. One assumes that the point of the childhood flashback is to explain why Horace Wendig grows up believing that the only way to get what you want is to take it regardless of the consequences and without being constrained by any moral qualms.

The young Wendig also learns how to manipulate women. He and Vic both fall in Martha but there’s never any doubt that if Wendig wants her he’ll get her. Given the appalling way his mother treats him perhaps it’s not surprising that he treats women very badly.

Wendig rises fast in the world of high finance. He tramples a lot of people on his way to the top. He’s clever and unscrupulous and willing to take risks but he also knows how to make use of women in order to destroy men who get in his way.

Wendig approaches relationships with women the way he approaches business. He takes what he wants and when the women is no longer useful to him he discards her, in the same way he would dispose of an unprofitable shareholding. He uses the glamorous Susan Duane (Martha Vickers) as his entreé into New York high society. He uses Christa, the wife of financier Buck Mansfield, as a weapon against her husband.

Vic remains loyal to his boyhood friend for years, refusing to admit to himself that Wendig is a monster. In fact Vic can never quite shake the belief that maybe there’s some good in Wendig.

Alvah Bessie, who co-wrote the screenplay, was a communist and I think it’s fair to say that the screenplay was intended to be a highly political attack on capitalism. I get the impression that Ulmer wasn’t interested in overt political themes and the movie is more of a case study of greed and the lust for power. Mercifully we don’t get a single political speech.

Like The Strange Woman this movie is sometimes mislabelled as film noir. It isn’t film noir at all.

Louis Hayward as Vic is very impressive in what was a rather tricky role. Vic spends years refusing to face the truth about Wendig but somehow Hayward has to convince us that Vic isn’t a fool. He also has to be careful not to allow Vic to come across as a prig. Hayward succeeds on both counts.

Sydney Greenstreet is fine as Mansfield, a very sharp ruthless operator who discovers to his cost that Wendig is just a little bit sharper and more ruthless. Martha Vickers as Susan, Lucille Bremer as Christa and Diana Lynn (in a dual role as Martha and Mallory) are all good. Raymond Burr is fun in a small part as Wendig’s dad.

It is however Zachary Scott’s movie. It’s a bravura performance but there is some subtlety to it. Wendig is almost a conscienceless monster but perhaps not quite. There are moments when he sees himself clearly and isn’t sure he likes what he sees. That doesn’t mean that he acts on these twinges of conscience. He represses them and he seems able to do so very successfully.

When he finally gets to the top of the heap does he suddenly realise that the pursuit of money has left him an empty shell as a human being? Does he suddenly feel the need to make amends, or to seek redemption? That would be a conventional Hollywood approach but one of the things that makes Ruthless such an interesting movie is that Wendig remains an enigma. Is his peace foundation a genuine attempt at redemption? Was inviting all the people he’d trampled to the launch an indication that he felt real remorse about the way he’d treated them? These things are left rather ambiguous. Personally I feel he’s as monstrous as ever and that he’s just added a couple of layers of hypocrisy and self-glorification but others might interpret the ending very differently.

The actual ending comes as a surprise which I won’t spoil. Whether you think it works or not is up to you.

Olive Films released this movie as a barebones Blu-Ray and the transfer is very very good indeed.

Edgar G. Ulmer could make great movies on budgets of almost nothing. Ruthless demonstrates that with a generous budget he could make movies as polished as anyone in Hollywood. Highly recommended.

I watched this movie after reading the fine review at Riding the High Country.

Girls in Chains (1943)

I’m a big fan of Edgar G. Ulmer’s movies. After a dispute with a studio boss Ulmer spent almost his entire career making ultra low budget movies including quite a few for PRC, which even by Poverty Row standards was about as far down the food chain as you could go. Somehow Ulmer still managed to make some remarkably interesting movies (and a handful of great ones like Detour). Girls in Chains, made for PRC in 1943, is obscure even for an Edgar G. Ulmer film.

It’s a Social Problem Movie, a genre to which I’m usually highly allergic. On the other hand it’s also a women-in-prison movie and they can be fun.

In this case the social problem is wayward girls. Helen Martin (Arline Judge) is the sister-in-law of racketeer Johnny Moon. That’s why she’s just lost her job as a teacher. To the respectable folk of this city anyone associated with Johnny Moon has to be a bad influence on innocent girls. In fact Helen Martin is about as respectable a woman as you could possibly find anywhere. She hates Johnny Moon with a burning white-hot loathing. She hates gangsters anyway but she also blames Johnny for corrupting her sister Jean.

The principal of the school, who was forced to fire Helen, manages to find another job for her - teaching school in a women’s prison. It’s an institution for young offenders, the sorts of young girls who get corrupted by people like Johnny Moon. Helen is sceptical but good-hearted reformist cop Frank Donovan (Roger Clark) persuades her to take the job.

Helen is also a psychologist so she has all the do-gooder qualifications.

The reformatory turns out to be a brutal institution and girls sent there, if they’re lucky enough to survive (some don’t as Helen finds out as soon as she arrives) leave the place worse than when they came in. Frank Donovan and Helen Martin want to change all that but it’s going to be an uphill battle. The superintendent is corrupt and vicious and the warders are sadistic (yes, this I definitely a women-in-prison movie). The girls aren’t just wild, they’re angry and dangerous.

It turns out that it’s actually Johnny Moon who runs the reformatory, like he runs everything else in this town. That’s why the respectable people turned on Helen - they didn’t like admitting that this is Johnny Moon’s town and that he owns them.

Now a new girl has arrived. Rita (Robin Raymond) is a waitress and she’s Johnny Moon’s latest mistress.

Helen of course tries to improve things for the girls and that gets her into trouble with the reformatory staff who are on Johnny Moon’s payroll.

Somehow Frank and Helen have to get some hard evidence against Johnny Moon. Maybe Rita will help. But then again, maybe she won’t. And Johnny is a killer so i’s a dangerous game.

The ending has a touch of German Expressionism to it and is a fine example of what a director with real talent could so with no money at all.

Making films on miscroscopically low budgets wasn’t a problem for Ulmer. The real problem was that it means working with second-rate (and sometimes third-rate) actors. The rare occasions when he had the right actors and actresses to work with (Hedy Lamarr in The Strange Woman, Tom Neal and Ann Savage in Detour, John Carradine in Bluebeard) tend to be his best work. The problem with Girls in Chains is that he doesn’t have much to work with at all.

Arline Judge’s career never really took off and it’s easy to see why. She’s just a bit wooden and can’t manage to bring Helen to life. Roger Clark has the same problem as Frank Donovan. Dorothy Burgess steals the picture is a minor rôle as Mrs Peters, the most dangerous and sadistic of the warders. 

This movie isn’t easy to find on DVD but there is a grey market version from Sinister Cinema in their four-movie Poverty Row Collection, PRC volume 3 pack which is cheap and also includes Jungle Siren which is a fun little jungle girl movie. And it includes another Ulmer movie, Isle of Forgotten Sins plus the odd but enjoyable musical Swing Hostess, so it’s well worth grabbing.

Girls in Chains isn’t great but it’s intriguing as an example of a Poverty Row feature which is a bit better than it has any right to be. Ulmer’s films are never less than interesting so this one is recommended.

Murder Is My Beat (1955)

Murder Is My Beat is a 1955 Edgar G. Ulmer film noir but sadly it cannot be described as one of the highlights of his career.

The movie was released by Allied Artists, formerly Monogram Pictures. Allied Artists aimed to make marginally more prestigious pictures than the average Monogram picture, but Murder Is My Beat is all too obviously a very low budget production.

We start with Police Captain Bert Rawley (Robert Shayne) tracking down Ray Patrick (Paul Langton) to a seedy motel in a small town in northern California. Patrick is a Homicide detective who’d worked under Rawley but he’s gone off the rails and assisted a blonde female prisoner to escape. Patrick then tells his story in an extended flashback.

It started with a routine case. Middle-aged businessman Frank Dean had been murdered. His lady friend Eden Lane (Barbara Payton) is the obvious suspect. The only unusual aspect of the case is that Dean had been thrust into a fireplace and his hands and face had been so badly burnt as to make identification a problem. This is a definite weakness in the plot - everybody acts on the assumption that of course the body belongs to Frank Dean since it was found in his apartment but would any real-life police officer, or any real-life court, accept such a dubious identification?

Nonetheless the police do assume the body is Dean’s, and Ray Patrick is given the task of making a fairly perfunctory investigation. He talks to Eden’s roommate Patsy Flint (Tracey Roberts) and is soon on Eden’s trail, tracking her down to a mountain cabin. He arrests her and she is convicted.

Shortly afterwards Detective Patrick is assigned to accompany the prison matron escorting Eden to another prison. When the train makes a brief stop in a small northern California town Eden spots a man on the platform. The man is Frank Dean! She is so convinced of this that she manages to persuade Ray Patrick that she really has seen the man she supposedly murdered. Patrick realises that the woman he arrested and caused to be convicted could be innocent. Of course the sensible thing to do would have been to escort her to the prison and then go back and investigate. But if film noir protagonists made sensible choices we’d have no film noir, so Patrick helps Eden to escape.

He tells her he’ll give it one week. If by the end of that week he hasn’t turned up any evidence that would clear her he’ll take her to the prison.

Of course Patrick’s motives are not as straightforward as a mere desire to prevent an innocent women from being imprisoned - he has fallen for her and he has to believe she’s innocent because he loves her.

After six days he has found a few interesting leads but he is a long way from proving a case. And then Eden disappears. And then Captain Rawley shows up. In true noir style the world is starting to come crashing down on Ray Patrick. He’s thrown away his career, he is likely to face criminal charges and the woman he did all this for has vanished. He does get one lucky break - he persuades Captain Rawley to give him another 24 hours and Rawley agrees and offers to help Patrick in his attempt to break the case.

The story is fine. It is a bit contrived but it has an authentically noir feel to it, with betrayal, murder and blackmail. The characters are fine. Ray Patrick is a standard noir hero who is dragged down into a nightmare world by an attractive blonde. Eden is not a femme fatale but in plot terms she serves the purpose well enough - she tempts Ray Patrick in giving up everything he has for her.

The problems here are that the acting is not good enough to sell the story, and Ulmer seems to have lacked the motivation to give the film the sorts of stylistic flourishes and the sense of weirdness that characterise his best low-budget work. This is a rather conventionally made low-budget crime flick. Without those stylistic flourishes to balance them the cheapness of the sets and the excessive reliance on rear projection become only too apparent.

Paul Langton is adequate but lacks any charisma, while Barbara Payton was already far advanced in her systematic campaign of self-destruction and lacks the verve (and much of the sex appeal) that she displayed in her earlier movies.

The Warner Archive made-on-demand DVD looks about as good as such a low-budget can be expected to look.

Murder Is My Beat is unfortunately merely a routine ultra-cheap B movie and while Ulmer completists will want to at least rent it it’s difficult to recommend this movie.