Tag: Edgar G. Ulmer
-
His Chilling Story Points Toward a Covert Murderer
(Warning: Spoilers Ahead) By his own account, Al Roberts, the unlucky hitchhiker in “Detour” (1945), is fated to aimlessly wander the streets of America until police catch up with him. When they do, he’ll likely hang for two murders. It’s one of noir’s most familiar and definitive stories: an average man, through no fault of…
-
Kings of the Road: Noir’s Alienated, Disenchanted Drifters
Film noir is full of cheap hotel rooms, train stations, roadside diners, filling stations, bus depots — places that transients inhabit while on their way somewhere, or perhaps rambling toward nowhere in particular. A compulsive desire to take to the highways is part of the American psyche, frequently rhapsodized in popular culture as the restless…
-
When Hollywood’s B-Movie Factories Mined Noir Gold
So many westerns were filmed at the small, independently owned studios near the intersection of Sunset Blvd. and Gower St. in Hollywood that people began calling it Gower Gulch. From the 1930s to the ’50s it was the epicenter of low-rent film production and the gaggle of studios there was disparagingly known as Poverty Row.…