Edgar G Ulmer

St Benny the Dip

by
Lionel Stander, Dick Haymes, Roland Young

I didn’t know, going into St Benny the Dip, that a “dip” is a pickpocket. In these circles the dip is the one who goes in for the goods, the “stall” having provided a distraction, while the “mule” is the one to whom the hot item is swiftly transferred, in case the dip is caught in the act. That established, into the film, which doesn’t seem to be about pickpockets at all, though it is about street criminals. When we meet Benny (Dick Haymes) the smooth, Matthew (Roland Young) the plausible and Monk (Lionel Stander) the operator, they are midway through a gambling sting, trying to bilk a high roller, when the police … Read more

The Black Cat

by
Lugosi and a shirtless Karloff

If you’re looking for a slightly leftfield scary movie for Halloween, you could do a lot worse than 1934’s The Black Cat, which not only stars horror titans (veterans division) Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi in the first of a run of movies they’d do together but is directed by Edgar Ulmer, a largely wasted talent who could put on a real show when he wanted to, and he does here. Freud lurks in the undergrowth of the story of a man back from the Great War facing down the man who stole his wife while he was away. But first let’s meet the teams, as they say. In the vanilla corner, a … Read more

Detour

by
Ann Savage and Tom Neal

While scrolling through a list of “100 Best Film Noirs of All Time” I was struck by Detour. Number 10 on a list that kicked off with In a Lonely Place, Out of the Past, The Big Sleep and The Third Man (so, not one of those mad lists), it stood out because I’d not heard of it before, even though it was the first B movie (and film noir) to be chosen by the US Library of Congress for its National Film Registry. I’d only barely heard of its director, Edgar G Ulmer, and its stars, Tom Neal, Ann Savage, Claudia Drake and Edmund MacDonald, were hardly A listers, even in 1945. … Read more