Going back to the first disc brings us to The Strange Woman. This film, shot two years after Bluebeard, was a rarity for Ulmer. His childhood friend Hedy Lamarr insisted that Ulmer direct her in her first outing away from MGM. This brought him decent actors, a strong script based on a bestseller, a fine cameraman (Lucien Andriot), and a reasonable budget and shooting schedule. The result is one of his most engaging works, a wonderfully rich, well-acted melodrama that recalls Leave Her to Heaven as one of the best examples of the popular 1940s genre devoted to female psychopathology.
The film opens in Bangor, Maine, in 1824. The city, like its protagonist Jenny (Lamarr), has a split personality: respectable (it’s a growing industrial town with a rather pretentious gentry class) and squalid (it’s full of "grog shops and low houses" – translation: bars and whores). Jenny’s an indecently beautiful, ambitious girl who tames (briefly) her apparently overwhelming lust for power and sex to marry a rich middle-aged merchant whose son is obsessed with her. She uses her almost hypnotic charms to dispatch both men – one in a brutal drowning scene, another in a shadowy suicide – and then go after the handsome guy (George Sanders) engaged to her best friend. In spite of this over-the-top portrait, the film carefully shows another side of Jenny as a caring woman whose identification with the "trash" of Bangor – including her "low house" pal Lena – makes her their champion. Ulmer successfully portrays her as more than a mindless sexual temptress. She’s an interloper among the rich, an irresistible vixen whose "psychopathology" masks her attempts to subvert Bangor’s rigid class system.
Lamarr must have been pleased with Ulmer’s treatment. It’s an ideal star showcase, with frequent close-ups of both Lamarr and her heaving bosom. In a dinner scene that’s surely historically inaccurate, she sits with both shoulders totally exposed before her aging hubby Isaiah Porter (Gene Lockhart) and his drooling son Efraim (the wonderful Louis Hayward). In another scene, she tempts poor Isaiah by showing him the marks her father has inflicted on her back (much to the housekeeper’s horror). She seems to be speaking for Ulmer when she says with both envy and disgust, "Men have the power in this world." Much of the film is taken up with her attempts to steal this power and use it for both personal and reformist purposes.
Visually, The Strange Woman is one of the director’s most accomplished. Lucien Andriot’s photography, no doubt closely supervised by Ulmer, superbly delineates the velvety blacks and pristine whites of the shadow world of "Devil’s Half Acre," the squalid waterfront that constantly thwarts Bangor’s attempts at bringing order from chaos in a developing land. Jenny’s duplicity is rendered powerfully through Ulmer’s subtle lighting schemes, often drenching her in shadows and isolating her in the frame. The film contains several masterful set-pieces, most notably the drowning of Isaiah by his son in a nightmarishly noirish sequence, and the pursuit and near-murder of Jenny’s "low" friend Lena by a mob of trashy timbermen.
Jenny is immediately recognizable as an Ulmer character. Like so many of them she appears and acts somehow possessed, carried away by impulses she can never quite comprehend. Critic John Belton said the world of Ulmer’s films "has no fixity and is incomprehensible" to the characters who inhabit it; this recalls the puppets of Bluebeard and the title character himself, Bela Lugosi’s tormented doctor in The Black Cat, poor Al Roberts (Tom Neal) in Detour, and certainly Jenny in The Strange Woman. Ulmer’s world here consists of violence and betrayal, self-doubt and self-destruction, all qualities that make up part, but not by any means the whole, of the amazing Jenny.
Extras on this disc include an archive of stills and artwork and an exclusive interview with Shirley Ulmer.
ABOUT THE DVDs
These DVDs aren’t perfect, and may disturb sticklers who only look for technical perfection in this format and don’t care about content, or who expect movies half a century old to look and sound like those of today. Finding usable prints for transfer must have been daunting; all three films had circulated mostly in lousy dupe 16mm and VHS versions for years, and 35mm elements were elusive. In the case of Moon over Harlem, there were no 35mm elements – it was, according to Mrs. Ulmer, the only film he shot in 16mm. The DVD transfer has occasional splices, and long stretches (during the first half) of background noise that obscure some of the dialogue. On the up side, this is unquestionably the clearest print I’ve seen, so much better that I was able to discern plot points that were unfathomable in previous blurry versions.
Bluebeard was "digitally remastered from a restored 35mm preservation positive supplied by the Cinematheque Francaise." This one gets high marks for the solid transfer and clear audio. The Strange Woman was also remastered from a restored 35mm print provided by the Cinematheque Francaise. This one too has a sharper look than previously seen, with mostly solid tonal values and occasional splices but one notable flaw in a brief (perhaps 15 seconds) section of missing audio (due to stretching) in chapter 17. These problems notwithstanding, these first two discs in what looks to be a fascinating series merit a high recommendation as superior examples of Ulmer’s ability to make art in the most unlikely circumstances.