Listen to This: Biographer Noah Isenberg on the Cursed Career of Edgar G. Ulmer

The October 2019 Essential Cinema series, Edgar G. Ulmer: Prince of Poverty Row starts October 10 with RUTHLESS at the AFS Cinema. Check out the full line-up and purchase tickets here.

On this episode of the AFS Viewfinders podcast, AFS’ Lars Nilsen talks with Noah Isenberg, Chair of the University of Texas at Austin’s Radio-Television-Film department and author of Edgar G. Ulmer: A Filmmaker at the Margins, about our upcoming Ulmer series. Guest-programmed by Isenberg, the series showcases films by the famously obscure émigré filmmaker and “King of the Bs,” Edgar G. Ulmer, including RUTHLESS, THE MAN FROM PLANET X, THE NAKED DAWN, AMERICAN MATCHMAKER, and THE BLACK CAT—a bizarre gothic-nouveau psychological terror masterpiece starring Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi just in time for Halloween season.

If he was known at all, it was mainly due to his breathtaking low-budget noir film DETOUR from 1945. Listen in as Nilsen and Isenberg explore Ulmer’s near thirty-five-year career as a director, which encompassed everything from a masterfully brilliant but doomed entry in the Universal horror cycle, four Yiddish features, a Mexican western (Truffaut called it “a small gift from Hollywood”), a few sci-fi quickies, and other minor wonders from Poverty Row. Select screenings in the series will be hosted by Isenberg.