Zachary Scott is the inexorable young man who wields his way to the top on the Wall Street of the Twenties. Blessed with a business-sense of avarice and unencumbered by feelings of guilt, he is the American dream turned monster (“In short,” wrote the New York Times, “it is impossible to become concerned about a character so patently fabricated”). Sydney Greenstreet plays the utilities magnate whose kingdom Scott invades.
Of the films maudits of the Thirties and Forties, perhaps none were so forsaken as those of Edgar G. Ulmer. There has been for years a scattered cult following, thriving on the continued obscurity no less than the demented artistry of Ulmer's films - which include The Black Cat (see December 17), Ruthless, Detour, Bluebeard, The Naked Dawn, and Behind the Time Barrier, to name his best; Girls in Chains, Babes in Bagdad, Jive Junction, to name some lesser-known (for obvious reasons) works. In his article, “Edgar G. Ulmer, The Primacy of the Visual” (in “Kings of the Bs”), Myron Meisel writes,
“Far more than any other film director, Ulmer represents the primacy of the visual over the narrative, the ineffable ability of the camera to transcend the most trivial foolishness and make images that defy the lame literary content of the dramatic material.
“Ulmer worked on the lowest depths of Poverty Row, far beyond the pale of the B film into the seventh circle of the Z picture, shooting his films in dingy studios on makeshift sets, on lightning-swift schedules (Detour is rumored to have taken a mere four days).... Ulmer transformed his camera into a precise instrument of feeling, and his convulsive abstractions of screen space intensify that feeling by investing it with particular gestures of light, shadow, form, and motion that define his own director's soul, and none other.
“What is little understood about the Ulmer of the 1940s and 1950s, however, is that he did not make these films as a hack director on salary, on commissioned assignments. Ulmer chose to make these films, frequently serving as his own producer....
“Ulmer employed absurd scripts and monotonal acting to reach the kind of controlled expression he felt compelled to create....” (J.B.)