Director Edgar G. Ulmer gets his due at LACMA

To call director Edgar G. Ulmer “versatile,” as the subtitle of the new repertory series spotlighting his work does, is like calling Buster Keaton funny or Marilyn Monroe attractive. It doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface.

A wizard of low-budget filmmaking, the Austrian-born Ulmer once claimed to have turned out 128 inexpensive features for “poverty row” companies such as PRC Pictures and Eagle-Lion in a career that lasted from the late-1920s to the mid-1960s. “Nobody ever made good pictures faster or for less money,” wrote Peter Bogdanovich, who interviewed Ulmer in 1970, two years before he died.

Noah Isenberg’s authoritative new biography (“Edgar G. Ulmer: A Filmmaker at the Margins”) credits the director with more than 50 pictures. A potent half-dozen of these are featured in a series starting Friday called “After Expressionism: The Versatile Edgar G. Ulmer.”

Curated by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, these six films are playing over three consecutive Friday nights at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Bing Theater in conjunction with the LACMA exhibit “Haunted Screens: German Cinema in the 1920s.”

Not showing, as they rarely are, are some of the more obscure efforts in Ulmer’s filmography, things like “Damaged Lives,” a controversial anti-syphilis film sponsored by the American Social Hygiene Society, or the all-black “Moon Over Harlem,” well ahead of its time in its naturalistic treatment of people of color.

And though he spoke neither language, Ulmer made significant films in Ukrainian (“Natalka Poltavka,” “Cossacks in Exile”) and Yiddish, one of which, “The Light Ahead” is part of the series. In fact, he told Bogdanovich he once made pictures in both languages almost simultaneously on a pristine site in rural New Jersey owned by an open-minded Benedictine monastery.

It was French critics, always on the alert for American exotica, who first championed Ulmer and his work. Writing in Cahiers du Cinema in 1956, Luc Moullet called him “les plus maudit des cinéastes,” the most cursed of filmmakers.

As the director told Bogdanovich (in an extensive interview reprinted in “Who the Devil Made It”), “I did not want to be ground up in the Hollywood hash machine.”

The Bing Theater series starts Friday at 7:30 with Ulmer’s most celebrated film, 1945’s astonishing “Detour,” possibly the bleakest, most doom-laden film noir ever. In less than 70 lean, stripped-down minutes, it relates the devastating tale of what happens to musician Al (Tom Neal) when he tries to hitchhike across the country and runs into Vera, a fury incarnate. Ann Savage’s sensational performance in that role, combined with the real-life trajectory of Neal, who ended up going to prison for murdering his wife, have made this a tormented film with the despairing logic of nightmare.

If you have any strength left after “Detour,” you can stick around for the 9 p.m. screening of another noir, this one with the unlikely setting of 19th century Bangor, Maine. “Strange Woman” stars Hedy Lamarr as the bewitching Jenny Hager, the kind of woman who regularly twists men around her little finger.

The program for Nov. 14 features a complete change in tone to a pair of warm, sympathetic films. Screening at 7:30 is 1930’s completely engaging German silent “People on Sunday.” Focused on ordinary people having fun on a weekend, its behind-the-camera crew is more than impressive: Ulmer co-directed with Robert Siodmak, Billy Wilder co-wrote the script and Fred Zinnemann was also involved.

Screening at 9 p.m. and equally engaging is the Yiddish-language “The Light Ahead,” featuring two beautiful stars of the Yiddish cinema, Helen Beverly and David Opatoshu. Based on Mendele Mocher Seforim’s classic short stories and detailing the touching romance between a blind girl and a lame beggar, this is one of the most emotionally satisfying of all Yiddish films.

Concluding the series on Nov. 21 are two films that go back to bleakness. Screening at 7:30 p.m. is 1934’s “The Black Cat,” one of Ulmer’s first films in this country. Vividly atmospheric and wonderfully disturbing, it features Boris Karloff as Satan-worshiper Hjalmar Poelzig and Bela Lugosi as his marginally less demented nemesis Dr. Vitus Werdergast. A gloss on the horrors of the first World War, it’s one of the jewels of Universal’s 1930s horror cycle and retains all its power to unnerve.

Closing things out at 8:50 p.m. is the vivid “Ruthless,” which stars Zachary Scott as an unapologetically heartless tycoon. It shows Ulmer in a “Citizen Kane” mood, relishing the energy of pure propulsive melodrama that was one of his strengths.

Ulmer is more appreciated now than he ever was as a working director. What one of the characters in “Detour” says applies as well to the career of its creator. “Those guys in Hollywood,” the line goes, “don’t know the real thing when it’s right in front of them.”

Twitter: @kennethturan

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‘After Expressionism: The Versatile Edgar G. Ulmer’

When: 7:30 p.m. Friday and Nov. 14 and 21

Where: Bing Theater at LACMA, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles

Tickets: $5 general admission, $3 for academy members and students with valid ID

Info: www.oscars.org/events, (310) 247-3000