Bluebeard (1944)

Bluebeard is a 1944 PRC release directed by Edgar G. Ulmer and starring John Carradine. It combines melodrama and horror in a characteristically Ulmer way and it’s also interesting as being a serial killer movie which was fairly rare at the time.

Ulmer wrote the original story. It is of course inspired partly by the fairy tale but also by a real-life serial killer who was executed in France in 1922.

The movie clearly takes place in the 19th century and during the Third Republic so it has to be the late 19th century.

Gaston Morel (John Carradine) is a talented painter who has given up painting to concentrate on his marionette theatre. We know right from the start that Morel is a killer (in fact he’s the notorious murderer who has been dubbed Bluebeard). He has killed more than once.

We later find out that his killings are connected with his paintings and that he wants to stop painting so that he can stop killing.

He meets a pretty young seamstress named Lucille (Jean Parker). There’s an immediate attraction between the two of them. Morel is anxious to avoid painting her because he has no desire to kill her. She is not like those other women. She is a woman worth loving.

Inspector Jacques Lefevre (Nils Asther) is investigating the murders. Assisting him is Francine (Teala Loring) who just happens to be Lucille’s sister. Francine works for the Sûreté. She’s a kind of undercover cop. Neither sister is aware that they are both going to be involved in very different ways with the Bluebeard killer.

He is tempted to paint one of the sisters. He knows it’s a bad idea but he needs money and he’s been offered a very generous fee by art dealer Jean Lamarte (Ludwig Stössel). Lamarte is a less than ethical art dealer and he knows Morel’s secret.

The inspector and Francine have a plan to trap Bluebeard but it’s a very risky plan and Morel is a smart guy, and very cautious.

Gaston Morel is a tortured soul. He is driven to kill against his will. It’s a kind of madness that comes over him. It has to do with a woman in his past, and a painting. Morel is perhaps over-sensitive with an artistic but unstable personality. John Carradine gives his career-best performance and imbues Morel with a strange tragic dignity. Morel is doomed but although in his rational phases he tries to escape that doom he cannot escape his periodic bouts of madness. Carradine had been Shakespearian actor and he plays Morel as a Shakespearian tragic hero. It’s also notable that at no point in this film does Carradine overact. It’s a superbly controlled performance.

Jean Parker is very good. In fact the whole cast is good, and the performances are better than you might expect in a movie made by PRC, usually considered to be the cheapest and shoddiest of the Poverty Row studios.

It’s common to assume that all PRC productions were made on ludicrously low budgets. This has been considerably exaggerated and Bluebeard was not the ultra-cheap production it’s often assumed to have been. It cost $167,000 and the shoot took 19 days.

There’s some fine very moody cinematography courtesy of Eugen Schüfftan (who was the cinematographer but had to remain uncredited due to problems with the union). There are some definite hints of German Expressionism in the flashback sequences. There’s one particularly fine shot with shadows and puppets.

The script ran into some problems with the Production Code Authority. Joe Breen wanted some changes made. Ulmer agreed but when he shot the movie he largely ignored Breen’s objections and most of the material he had agreed to remove is still there in the final film.

Despite his rocky career path Ulmer managed to make some very fine movies and Bluebeard is one of his best. And there’s Carradine’s magnificent performance. Highly recommended.

Kino Lorber have released this movie on Blu-Ray and it certainly looks better than it has ever looked before. It is now possible to appreciate to the full the fine cinematography and art direction. We can now see that this was really quite a classy production.

I’ve reviewed lots of Ulmer’s movies including Ruthless (1948), the very underrated The Strange Woman (1946) and his most acclaimed movie, Detour (1945).

There have of course been quite a few movies inspired by the Bluebeard fairy tale, one of my favourites being Fritz Lang’s Secret Beyond the Door… (1948).

The Amazing Transparent Man (1960)

Despite having directed one of the most commercially successful of the Universal horror movies of the 30s, The Black Cat, Edgar G. Ulmer was destined to spend most of his career making ultra low budget movies. Towards the end of his career these included quite a few science fiction movies that are often far more interesting than their minuscule budgets might suggest.

The Amazing Transparent Man was released in 1960. Invisible man movies were nothing new but this one does add a few new twists.

Joey Faust (Douglas Kennedy) is a bank robber whose escape from prison has been engineered by Major Krenner (James Griffith). Krenner is a man of indeterminate nationality who has served in the military forces of a number of countries. Joey Faust has no idea why Krenner would have wanted to spring him from prison. The explanation is something he could never have imagined in his wildest dreams.

Major Krenner has Faust brought to his secret laboratory where his reluctant collaborator Dr Peter Ulof is working on bizarre scientific experiments on invisibility. This interests Faust insofar as he can se the potential that invisibility could have for someone in his own line of work. An invisible bank robber should have a lucrative career.

Major Krenner has other ideas in mind. His plans are far more ambitious, and far more sinister. For Krenner invisibility is the key to power.

Krenner and Faust are both equally treacherous and they spend most of the movie trying to double-cross one another. Krenner’s girlfriend Laura (Marguerite Chapman) is trying to double-cross both of them. Poor Dr Ulof just wants to save his daughter, held hostage by Krenner.

The plot is far-fetched but Jack Lewis’s screenplay is reasonably interesting and as the story digresses it becomes a lot darker and a lot more morally complex than you generally expect in low-budget potboilers of this type.

Even on a budget of almost nothing Ulmer could make his films look fairly stylish. The laboratory set is obviously cheap but Ulmer uses it skillfully and creates the right sort of atmosphere. The scenes in which Dr Ulof and Krenner watch the results of their experiments through tiny windows in a lead-lined cubbyhole are quite creepy.

Ulmer’s big problem was always that he was rarely able to work with decent actors but in this film the principals give quite effective performances. James Griffith as Major Krenner is clearly both cynical and slightly deranged. Douglas Kennedy as Joey Faust is  just as cynical but he has some decency in his character even if he himself is not aware of it.

The special effects are what you expect in an ultra low budget sci-fi movie but they get the job done. The very short running time (just 58 minutes) is a definite asset. If you don’t have the money for fancy special effects or action sequences then you’re always well advised to keep your movie short and snappy.

The ending manages to be both very 1950s and unexpectedly drastic.

The movie dispenses with the technobabble so beloved of 1950s science fiction movie-makers. There is no attempt at offering any kind of explanation of Dr Ulof’s invisibility machine. In some ways that’s a pity - I personally love technobabble and silly pseudoscience. Perhaps Ulmer felt that such things would distract the viewer from the interpersonal dynamics between the characters. Which is fine, but if you want human drama you probably need actors of slightly higher calibre than this. 

Ulmer made two other science fiction movies at the beginning of the 1960s that are well worth checking out, Beyond the Time Barrier and Journey Beneath the Desert.

Shout! Factory and Timeless Media have included this film in their Movies 4 You - More Sci-Fi Classics release. The transfer for The Amazing Transparent Man is very good. 

The invisibility angle is used cleverly, the movie is fast-paced and the end result is very entertaining in a low-budget B-movie kind of way. By no stretch of the imagination can The Amazing Transparent Man be described as a classic but it is fun. Recommended.

The Naked Venus (1959)

The Naked Venus is something of an oddity. It’s a nudist camp movie but it’s also an Edgar G. Ulmer movie. It bears some similarity to the nudie-cutie genre that would explode in the wake of the release of Russ Meyer’s The Immoral Mr Teas, but it’s not a nudie-cutie. It’s a romantic melodrama with nudity. It’s really in a sub-genre of its very own.

Bob Dixon (Don Roberts) is a young American painter living and working in Paris. He’s just beginning to earn a reputation as an artist with the success of his painting The Naked Venus. He is married, apparently very happily, to Yvonne (Patricia Conelle) and they have a small daughter. Yvonne had been an artist’s model. Bob’s father has just does and he announces that his mother now needs him so they must move to California.

This is where the problems start. Bob’s domineering mother takes an immediate dislike to Yvonne. This dislike intensifies when she discovers that Yvonne had not only been an artist’s model but had posed nude. She is determined to sabotage her son’s marriage.

Eventually Bob and Yvonne become involved in a bitter divorce and custody battle. The odds seem to be stacked against Yvonne - not only was she a nude model she was (and still is) a practising nudist. These are not things likely to count in her favour in court. Even worse, after fleeing from the palatial Dixon family home she has taken refuge in a nudist camp, along with her daughter.

The plot provides ample opportunities for showing nudity and the movie takes full advantage of these opportunities. Nudist camp movies tend to be a bit dull, since not much happens in a nudist camp apart from naked volleyball and one can only take so much naked volleyball. It does help if the nudist camp happens to be full of women who are not only nude but pretty and in this case the women are most certainly pretty. And it has to be said that Patricia Conelle looks very good naked.

Courtroom scenes are generally even duller than naked volleyball but fortunately in this case they’re handled reasonably well.

This was Patricia Conelle’s only movie role and while her willingness to disrobe for the cameras was undoubtedly the major factor in her casting she’s quite adequate. Don Roberts is quite good in a very unsympathetic role while Wynn Gregory drips venom as the scheming and destructive mother-in-law from Hell. It’s Ulmer’s daughter Arianne Ulmer however who walks off with the acting honours, giving a spirited performance as Yvonne’s young but determined lawyer Lynn Wingate.

As you would expect the major theme of the movie is that nudity is not immoral and that being a nudist does not disqualify a woman from being a good mother. Luckily there are some secondary themes that are much more interesting.

There was considerable concern during the 1950s abut the decline in masculinity among American men and about what was seen as the increasing feminisation of American society. This is a theme that appears in quite a few juvenile delinquent movies but it also pops up in some major productions such as Harriet Craig, Rebel without a Cause and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. The Naked Venus tackles this concern with intelligence and sensitivity. Bob Dixon is definitely a young man with a severe masculinity deficit. Lynn Wingate makes it clear that she despises weak men like Bob and one has to admit that she has a point. Bob has a devoted and beautiful wife but unless he can escape his mother’s dominance he will never be a man and he will never be of any use to Yvonne as a husband.

In the 1950s American exploitation film-makers operated entirely outside the Hollywood system. They were not members of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), they were not bound by the Production Code and they had their own distribution systems. Edgar G. Ulmer had mostly worked for Poverty Row studios that were members of the MPAA but clearly The Naked Venus had no chance of getting a Production Code Seal of Approval and it was in fact produced and distributed as an exploitation movie. On the other hand it was certainly not made as an exploitation movie. Production values are modest but higher than you expect from as an exploitation movie and Ulmer approached the project the way he would have approached any other movie.

While it cannot really be regarded as in any way a typical sexploitation movie it needs to be said that it does contain quite a substantial amount of nudity. Of course given that this is an Edgar G. Ulmer movie the nudist camp scenes are rather professionally shot.

Something Weird Video have paired this movie with a Doris Wishman nudie-cutie (Diary of a Nudist) and it’s a pairing that makes some sense. While nobody in their wildest dreams would suggest that Doris Wishman was in the same class as Edgar G. Ulmer they were both in their very different ways highly individualistic film-makers and both were examples of the opportunities that low-budget movies of that era offered for eccentric and idiosyncratic movie-makers. The transfer of The Naked Venus is quite superb for such a cinematic obscurity.

The Naked Venus works quite well as a melodrama, it makes some pertinent observations on the state of American society (and American manhood) in its day, and it has naked people. It’s really more entertaining than it has any right to be. Recommended.

Beyond the Time Barrier (1960)

Beyond the Time Barrier is one of Edgar G.Ulmer’s late science fiction films, made by a small independent production company. Like a number of his later movies it has not received an official DVD release although it can be obtained as a grey market release.

The United States Air Force is conducing research into space travel using the experimental X-80 aircraft. This uses a conventional turbojet engine to reach a very high altitude at supersonic speeds at which point a powerful rocket motor takes over to propel the aircraft to an altitude of 500,000 feet at a speed in excess of 5,000 miles per hour. This will enable a sub-orbital mission to be undertaken. The X-80 will in effect reach outer space. This research will pave the way for true orbital lights.

The X-80 actually looks exactly like a stock standard example of the US Air Force’s then current front-line interceptor fighter, the Convair F-102 Delta Dagger, which enables the movie to use lots of stock footage. This is of course a very handy way to get plenty of good aerial shots of the X-80 without spending any money! Luckily the F-102 had a very high-tech look for its day. In one or two shots an F-106 Delta Dart is used instead but the two aircraft look so similar that only aviation geeks will notice.

Test pilot Major William Allison (Robert Clarke) is to fly the first mission. All goes well until the X-80 suddenly disappears from the radar screens and radio contact is lost. Major Allison is not aware of any problems and lands successfully after completing his sub-orbital flight but what he finds on the ground is enough to make him question his sanity. The Air Force base from which he took off less than an hour earlier is now in ruins. Even more disturbingly, it looks like it has been in ruins for years. At first he can find no signs of life but eventually he is captured and taken to an underground citadel. No-one there will believe his story. His claims to have taken off a short while ago from the ands Air Force Base in the year 1960 are greeted with suspicion and even outright disbelief. He soon discovers why. He is indeed on Earth, but it is now the year 2024!

The explanation for his predicament will come later in a delightful piece of sci-fi technobabble. Travelling at close to the speed of light can cause all kinds of strange things to happen to time. Major Allison had only been travelling at a few thousand miles per hour but when you add the speed at which the Earth is rotating, the speed at which the planet is orbiting the sub and the speed at which our solar system is travelling through the Milky way then the few thousand miles of airspeed of the X-80 was enough to take Major Allison close to the speed of light! As a result he has not only broken the sound barrier, he has broken the time barrier!

The world of 2024 is not a happy place. A great plague had swept across our planet destroying civilisation as we know it. The movie avoids the expected clichéd explanation that this had been caused by a nuclear war but in typical 1950s apocalyptic sci-fi style it’s still all our fault. The plague was caused the destruction by nuclear testing of the Earth’s protective barrier against cosmic rays. The cosmic rays then caused devastating mutations. The people in the underground citadel appear normal buy they are in fact first-stage mutants. Most are sterile, and many have developed telepathic powers. This is a doomed civilisation, with no child having been born for twenty years.

There are a handful of people in the city who have escaped the plague. They also arrived in 2024 by breaking the time barrier. They are led by General Karl Kruse (Stephen Bekassy). There is immense hostility and mistrust between this handful of people and the doomed survivors of the plague. The survivors do have one hope left however. The young Princess Trirene appears to be fertile.

The plague survivors and the group led by Karl Kruse have their own plans for making use of Major Allison. Allison is uncertain if he can trust either group but the fact that the X-80 is still intact gives him hope that he may be able to return to 1960. He may also be able to save civilisation.

Despite the technobabble it’s a reasonably interesting idea. Doomed civilisations were a major obsession in American sci-fi movies from the 50s right through to the 70s. Arthur G. Pierce’s screenplay sets up some interesting conflicts and he provides an array of characters who are motivated by mixtures of selfishness, idealism, resentment and fear.

Naturally Major Allison and Princess Trirene fall in love, providing not only the obligatory romantic subplot but also creating conflicting loyalties.

It’s a moderately ambitious movie. Its ambitions are hampered by its low budget but as is the case with so much good 1950s cinematic sci-fi the film-makers are not dismayed by their budgetary constraints. Ulmer was never dismayed by a low budget. The movie looks reasonably good considering the incredibly limited resources Ulmer had to work with. There’s extensive use of matte paintings but that’s not something that has never bothered me; in fact it gives sci-fi movies of this era a nice other-worldly feel. The legendary Jack P. Pierce did the makeup effects.

The acting is adequate. Vladimir Sokoloff as the Supreme, the leader of the semi-mutant survivors, is a sympathetic character - he’s a good man faced by difficult choices. Boyd “Red” Morgan make a good villain, all the more effective in that he is not so much a villain as a ruthless man who believes his ruthlessness is necessary. Robert Clarke is a bit flat as Major Allison. Darlene Tompkins is reasonably good, giving Princess Trirene the necessary mysterious quality.

Sinister Cinema’s DVD-R provides a perfectly watchable fullframe image (which is quite correct since the movie was shot in black-and-white in a 1.37:1 aspect ratio) and given that this is an intriguing movie by an interesting director with a major cult following we can be grateful to them for at least making thus movie available, even in a slightly imperfect form.

Fans of 1950s will certainly want to give Beyond the Time Barrier a look and Sinister Cinema’s DVD-R is acceptable enough to make this a worthwhile purchase. Highly recommended.

Daughter of Dr Jekyll (1957)

Edgar G. Ulmer spent most of his career making low-budget movies that were a lot better and more interesting than they had any right to be. Daughter of Dr Jekyll, made in 1957, is not one of the highlights of his career but it’s still worthy of note.

Despite the title this is more of a werewolf movie than a Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde or mad scientist movie.

Janet Smith (Gloria Talbott) arrives at the home of her guardian Dr Lomas (Arthur Shields) with her boyfriend George Hastings (John Agar) in tow. It’s her twenty-first birthday and she announces that she and George are engaged to be married. Before that can happen Dr Lomas suggests that she should hear her father’s will. It turns out that she is the daughter of the infamous Dr Jekyll, whom the local villagers considered to be a werewolf. It also turns out that Dr Lomas’s big house actually belongs to her. She is now a wealthy young woman, but given her ancestry Dr Lomas tries to persuade George that marrying her would not be a wise idea.

The locals not only believe Dr Jekyll to have been a werewolf; they suspect that his daughter might be one as well. In fact they’re in the mood for lighting those torches and burning down the house in true horror movie style.

George is determined to marry Janet anyway. They decide they might as well explore the house, since it now belongs to her, and they discover Dr Jekyll’s secret laboratory.

Janet starts to have nightmares and when people start to get killed and she wakes up with blood on her hands she starts to get fairly thoroughly creeped out. It’s not going to take much to convince her that she’s really a werewolf.

The big problem with this movie is the fairly terrible script by Jack Pollexfen, and the fact that things that the audience should discover gradually are given away much too soon. But Ulmer was used to having to take second-rate material and they to do something interesting with it and in this case he concentrates on mood and atmosphere. That’s not easy to do on a very low budget but that never deterred Ulmer from trying. And he manages pretty well, making extensive use of fog (always a good way to disguise an inadequate budget) and miniatures. The miniatures are obviously miniatures but they always were in Ulmer’s movies and it doesn’t matter, he still gets away with them.

The movie does have a major asset in Gloria Talbott. Her performance is pretty good and she has the perfect look for a horror movie heroine who may or may not turn out to be more monster than heroine. Arthur Shields slices the ham good and thick but he’s entertaining. John Agar is a little on the dull side but he’s adequate considering that Gloria Talbott and Arthur Shields are carrying the movie.

The dream sequences give Ulmer the chance to show what he can do and they’re the highlight of the movie. While there are some genuinely eerie moments there’s also a great deal of enjoyable low-budget cheesiness on offer here.

On DVD the movie looks about as good as such a low-budget movie could be expected to look.

This movie is not quite first-rate Ulmer but even second-rate Ulmer is worth watching, and Daughter of Dr Jekyll is recommended for fans of this always fascinating and very unfortunate director.

Isle of Forgotten Sins (1943)

Edgar G. Ulmer’s Isle of Forgotten Sins (AKA Monsoon) is a typical example of Ulmer’s low-budget movies. Ulmer couldn’t do the spectacular visuals that he’d been able to do on his early big-budget movies like The Black Cat but he still managed to come up with a stylish and very entertaining (and rather outrageous) adventure romp.

Ulmer made the movie on a six-day schedule, which was more than enough time for Ulmer who was a master at making interesting movies on impossibly low budgets with impossibly tight shooting schedules.

Marge Willison (Gale Sondergaard) runs a bar, gambling  joint and brothel called The Isle of Forgotten Sins on a South Pacific island. Marge is in love with Captain Mike Clancy (John Carradine), a rambunctious  rogue who spends his life drinking, fighting and looking for ways to make easy money. When he recognises the voice of Captain Krogan (Sidney Toler) he thinks he’s found his chance. Krogan was the skipper of the Tropic Queen, which supposedly went down with all hands and with $3 million in gold bullion. But Captain Krogan and his purser are obviously very much alive and Mike figures that Krogan knows where the gold is.

In fact this is just what Krogan hoped would happen. His plan is to let Mike and his partner Jack, who are expert deep-sea divers, retrieve the gold and then Krogan and his confederates will steal it. Mike knows this was Krogan’s plan but he’s confident that he can outfox him.

Mike and Jack spend much of the movie trying to kill each other since they are rivals for Marge’s affections. Now they have to stop trying to kill each other long enough to get that gold. While this is going on one of Marge’s girls kills a client so Marge and her girls have to flee. Mike decides to cut them in on the deal.

The diving sequences and the various miniatures sequences are pretty good when you consider the movie was made on a zero budget. In any other movie they’d have looked hopelessly hokey but Ulmer always could get away with stuff like this. There’s plenty of fun in this movie and plenty of action. The strange storm sequence with the clouds mirroring each other like a crazy Rorschach blot in the sky is a typical clever Ulmer touch.

John Carradine chews every piece of scenery in sight, and Sidney Toler approaches his role with the same gusto. Gale Sondergaard males a great madam and their spirited performances are a delight to watch.

While Mike and Jack try to raise the sunken gold a huge storm approaches the island. The native chief warns Krogan that a big wind and a big wave are going to wash the island away - there is much bad magic in sea and sky. But everyone else is too intent on getting their hands on that gold to worry about the impending cataclysm.

Ulmer was a major director who found himself trapped in the world of ultra-low budget movies but instead of bewailing his fate he got on with the job and turned out a series of fascinating oddities, with this film as well as Bluebeard (also with Carradine in one of his best-ever roles) and the amazingly paranoid film noir Detour being among the highlights of his 1940s work for PRC. No matter how small the budgets all of Ulmer’s movies are worth a look. All contain touches that show a master film-maker at work.

Alpha Video’s DVD is typical Alpha Video. It’s a horrible print but at least it’s watchable and the dialogue is understandable.

If you’re an Ulmer fan this one is worth chasing up, especially if you can get hold of the DVD at a bargain price. Highly recommended as an exercise in sheer fun.