Down and Dirty in Gower Gulch: Poverty Row Films Preserved by UCLA
- Strange Illusion
- USA1945
- Edgar G. Ulmer
- 87 DCP
- NR
- Poverty Row Films
Screening Dates
- April 25, 2019 8:30
- April 29, 2019 6:30
“Ulmer made several films for PRC, a film studio at the bottom of the Poverty Row heap. Nevertheless, Ulmer always got stellar performances from his cast, while utilizing the camera to aesthetic effect … [He creates] a sense of delirium throughout the story.”
UCLA Film & Television Archive
Detour director Edgar G. Ulmer’s Freudian film noir is an hallucinatory version of Hamlet set partly in an L.A. asylum. Its Oedipal tale has a wealthy college student (James Lydon) haunted by disturbing dreams about his prominent father’s recent death and the slimy suitor (Warren William) now wooing his widowed mother (Sally Eilers). Ulmer’s characteristically stylish movie, unfolding in shadowy black-and-white images, was made, quickly, for the ultra-low-rent Producers Releasing Corporation. His VD drama Damaged Lives also screens in this series.
Restored by UCLA Film & Television Archive with funding provided by the AFI/NEA Preservation Grants Program
preceded by
News of the Day, Vol. 17, No. 288 • USA 1945 • 8 min. Short newsreel
Grampy’s Indoor Outing • USA 1936 • Dave Fleischer • 7 min. Betty Boop cartoon