Edgar G. Ulmer

The story of his [Edgar G. Ulmer's] life is told with remarkable research and insight. -- Richard Brody New Yorker 20140122 [A] cogent treatment of a singularly unlikely career. Isenberg's writing...allows the monumental eccentricities of Ulmer's underground journey to shine through. -- Howard Hampton Bookforum 20140301 The season's must read [for film buffs] ... Noah Isenberg's long-awaited biography 'Edgar G. Ulmer: A Filmmaker at the Margins.' Ulmer-whose CV includes People on Sunday, The Black Cat, Detour, four Yiddish talkies, a half dozen bargain basement classics and as many indescribable oddities-had a life that was every bit as interesting as his film. The writing is scholarly but, given the material, charged with irony and full of pep. -- J. Hoberman Artinfo 20131220 Long considered as something of a guilty pleasure among filmmakers, critics, and fans, director Edgar G. Ulmer finally gets the attention and scholarship he deserves in Noah Isenberg's new book. -- Matthew Steigbigel The Credits 20140128 A rare coupling of intellectual treatise and entertaining biography that beckons to both the film scholar and the public. -- Miguel Rodriguez KPBS 20140130 With sober intrepidness, Isenberg tethers down to earth some of the more wild claims made by and about his subject. In recounting the filmmaker's amazing career, he moves easily between describing the drama going on behind the scenes and analyzing the provocative work that Ulmer put on screen... This fascinating biography gives us the chance to weigh the many frustrations in Ulmer's career against the joy he found in the act of creation. -- Betsy Sherman Arts Fuse 20140202 Operating mostly outside of the Hollywood system, Edgar G. Ulmer (the original King of the B's) is a fascinating character whose rather notorious mysterious life is somewhere between fact and fiction. All of this is explored and solved ... in scholar Noah Isenberg's brilliant new critical biography Edgar G. Ulmer: A Filmmaker at the Margins. -- Caryn Coleman Vice 20140218 A most welcome book, which can lay claim to being a definitive study of Edgar G. Ulmer... Isenberg has given us more than an academic study of the filmmaker's eclectic career. He manages to paint a rounded, sympathetic but honest picture of the man whose endless dreams were so often dashed... Edgar G. Ulmer: A Filmmaker at the Margins is scholarly but never dry. It is a valuable reference and a good read. -- Leonard Maltin Indiewire 20140311 As Isenberg reveals in this utterly necessary book, Ulmer was a nonpareil slinger of [exaggerated stories] even for a business that thrives on everything inauthentic except avarice... In so many ways he was the Micawber of Poverty Row, and the something that turned up was not the big budget spectaculars with A-list casts that he fervently hoped for, but the wormy little movies about failure that he actually made. They were more than good enough to justify a life, and this very good book. -- Scott Eyman ScottEyman.com 20140304