It's not exactly a household name, but Edgar G. Ulmer means a lot to cultists who appreciate this director who made much of little, lending unmistakable personal style to movies whose budgets were meager at best. To celebrate the centenary of his birth, TCM offers such Ulmer gems as The Black Cat (1934), now considered one of the classics of the horror genre. The film, which brought Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi together for the first time, tells the story of a bizarre rivalry between an architect and a doctor.

Ulmer (1904-1972), who studied architecture and philosophy in his native Vienna, designed sets for famed stage director Max Reinhardt and was an assistant to filmmaker F. W. Murnau, who brought Ulmer to Hollywood. His prolific career as a director included several Yiddish-language films, such as Green Fields (1937), a pastoral romance based on Peretz Hirschbein's legendary tale of a young student in search of "true Jews."

But it was his work for American Poverty Row Studios that later caused French critics to declare Ulmer an auteur. Detour (1945), thanks to Ulmer's lurid imagination, is the definitive low-budget film noir. It tells the story of a luckless man (Tom Neal) who picks up a predatory female hitchhiker (Ann Savage). Another of Ulmer's famed low-budget noir thrillers is Strange Illusion (1945), a contemporary variation of Shakespeare's Hamlet in which a young man finds his nightmare coming to life. Also showing is Goodbye, Mr. Germ (1940, TCM premiere), a 15-minute film made to educate children about the dangers of tuberculosis and Ulmer's only foray into animation.

by Roger Fristoe