The MacGuffin: News and Comment (25/Jul/2000)
(c) Ken Mogg (2000)
July 25
Clearly, I'd say, director Edgar G. Ulmer's name should be grouped with other émigré; directors from Germany whose American careers Hitchcock followed with interest: Robert Siodmak, William Dieterle, Curtis Bernhardt, and others. (See the article on "Vertigo and its 'Sources'" that's on this website.) Sometimes the interest was not only mutual but inter-active: e.g., Siodmak would use some Hitchcockian effect or device in one of his own films, and Hitchcock would reciprocate by borrowing an idea or image from a Siodmak film. About Ulmer (1904-72), born in Austria, James Naremore notes that, '[w]hile in Germany, he was a designer for Max Reinhardt; an assistant for F.W. Murnau, Lang, and Ernst Lubitsch; a codirector with Robert Siodmak on Menschen am Sonntag; and a self-described "art-obsessed" intellectual who felt an affinity with Bertholt Brecht and the Bauhaus.' (p. 144) (That last trait reminds me of Hitchcock's membership at the same period of the élitist London Film Society and his later remark that his favourite painter was [the Bauhaus-trained] Paul Klee.) Ulmer's daughter, Arianne, like Hitchock's daughter, Patricia, was a graduate of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London. Naremore notes in Ulmer's Detour the use of a huge prop coffee cup - whose function to suggest hallucination or reverie both recalls Hitchcock's use of similar props (the outsize glasses containing supposedly-drugged brandy) in The Lady Vanishes (1938) and anticipates the poisoned coffee cup in Notorious (1946). But we were discussing yesterday how aspects of Detour anticipate Psycho. By no means are these just technical matters. For instance, Naremore notes that '[e]veryone in [Detour] is a low-rent pretender or impostor' (p. 149). That reminds me of how everyone in Psycho has something to hide: e.g., Lowery has a bottle hidden in his desk, and even the Sheriff's wife sees fit to whisper to Lila about how Norman's mother had been found dead with her lover, 'in bed'. I've been reading several articles lately on Psycho, including Steven Schneider's in 'CineAction' #50 and Bill Schaffer's that's on the 'Senses of Cinema' website (issue 6, as I recall). I'll discuss these briefly tomorrow.
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