Strange Illusion
Edgar G. Ulmer made Strange Illusion in six days, on a miniscule budget, for the sub-B film studio, Producers Releasing Company. Like other Ulmer cult classics - Detour, Ruthless, Strange Woman, Bluebeard, The Naked Dawn - this film transcends the lurid tackiness of its production and screenplay - a take-off on Hitchcock's Suspicion, involving a teen-age boy's real and imagined “concerns” about the smooth-talker who's wooing his widowed mother. According to Ulmer, the film was very well received critically, and reflected his deep fascination with psychoanalysis.
The story is a Hamlet-like tale of a son's supernatural bond with his dead father, and his fear of the “intrusion” into the family of his mother's new man. “The dreams that open and close Strange Illusion make explicit the film's concern for the psychological purgation of its central character. Using melodrama invested with psychological overtones...Ulmer works Paul's nightmare through in the ‘real' world.... Ulmer's mise-en-scene...roots itself not in logic...nor in the physical world...but in the abstract, supernatural forces that control the minds of his characters....” --John Belton, “The Hollywood Professionals: Hawks, Borzage, Ulmer”