People on Sunday

Curt Siodmak (August 10, 1902 – 2 September, 2000) was a novelist and screenwriter. He made a name for himself in Hollywood with horror and science fiction films, most notably The Wolf Man and Donovan’s Brain (the latter adapted from his novel of the same name). He was the brother of noir director Robert Siodmak.

Born Kurt Siodmak in Dresden, Germany, to a Polish Jewish family, Curt Siodmak acquired a degree in mathematics before beginning to write novels. He invested early royalties earned by his first books in the movie Menschen am Sonntag (1929) a documentary-style chronicle of the lives of four Berliners on a Sunday based on their own lives. The movie was co-directed by Curt Siodmak’s older brother Robert Siodmak and Edgar G. Ulmer, with a script by Billy Wilder in collaboration with Fred Zinneman and cameraman Eugen Schüfftan. Siodmak was the nephew of noted film producer Seymour Nebenzal, who funded Menschen am Sonntag with funds borrowed from his father, Heinrich Nebenzahl..

In the following years Siodmak wrote many novels, screenplays, and short stories including the novel F.P.1 Antwortet Nicht (F.P.1 Doesn’t Answer) (1932) which became a popular movie starring Hans Albers and Peter Lorre.

Siodmak decided to emigrate after hearing an anti-Semitic tirade by the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, and departed for England where he made a living as a screenwriter before moving to the USA in 1937.

His big break came with the screenplay for The Wolf Man (1941), starring Lon Chaney, Jr., which established this fictional creature as the most popular movie monster after Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster. In the film, Siodmak created several werewolf “legends”: being marked by a pentagram; being practically immortal apart from being struck/shot by silver implements/bullets; and the famous verse:

“Even a man who is pure in heart,
And says his prayers by night
May become a Wolf when the Wolfbane blooms
And the autumn Moon is bright”

(the last line was changed in the sequels to “The Moon is full and bright”).

Siodmak’s science-fiction novel Donovan’s Brain (1942) was a bestseller that was translated into many languages and was adapted for the cinema several times, beginning in 1943 with The Lady and the Monster, then 1953’s Donovan’s Brain and 1962’s The Brain. Other notable films he wrote include Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, I Walked With a Zombie and The Beast With Five Fingers. An extensive interview with Siodmak about his career in both Germany and Hollywood is found in Eric Leif Davin’s Pioneers of Wonder. In the plots of his work, Siodmak utilised the latest scientific findings combining those with pseudo-scientific motifs like the Jekyll and Hyde complex, the Nazi trauma and the East-West dichotomy.

In 1998, he won the Berlinale Camera at the 48th Berlin International Film Festival.

Siodmak died in his sleep on September 2, 2000, at his home in Three Rivers, California. —Wikipedia

Robert Siodmak was a German born American film director. He is best remembered as a thriller specialist and for the series of Hollywood film noirs he made in the 1940s.

Siodmak was born to a Polish Jewish family in Dresden, Germany (the myth of his American birth in Memphis, Tennessee was necessary for him to obtain a visa in Paris). He worked as a stage director and a banker before becoming editor and scenarist for Curtis Bernhardt in 1925. At twenty-six he was hired by his cousin, producer Seymour Nebenzal, to assemble original silent movies from the stock footage of old ones. Siodmak worked at this for two years before he persuaded Nebenzal to finance his first feature, the silent chef d’oeuvre, People on Sunday (Menschen am Sonntag) (1929). The script was written by his younger brother Curt Siodmak, later the screenwriter of The Wolf Man (1941).

With the rise of Nazism he left Germany for Paris and then Hollywood. Siodmak arrived in Hollywood in 1939, where he made 23 movies, many of them widely popular thrillers and crime melodramas, which critics today regard as classics of film noir.

Beginning in 1941, he first turned out several B-films and programmers for various studios before he gained a seven-year contract with Universal Studios in 1943. As house director, his services were often used to salvage troublesome productions at the studio. On Mark Hellinger’s production Swell Guy (1946), for instance, Siodmak was brought in to replace Frank Tuttle only six days after completing work on The Killers.

At Universal, Siodmak made yet another B-film, Son of Dracula (1943), the third in a trilogy of Dracula movies (based on his brother Curt’s original story). His second feature, and first A-film, was the Maria Montez-Jon Hall vehicle, Cobra Woman (1944), made in garish Technicolor.

But his first all-out noir was Phantom Lady (1944), for staff producer Joan Harrison, Universal’s first female executive and Alfred Hitchcock’s former secretary and script assistant. Following the critical success of Phantom Lady, Siodmak directed Christmas Holiday (1944) with Deanna Durbin. And for the first time in Hollywood, his work attained the stylistic and thematic characteristics that are evident in his later noirs. His black and white stylisations and urban backdrop together with his light and shadow designs formed the basic structure of classic noir films. Christmas Holiday was Deanna Durbin’s most successful feature, and she considered it her only good film. During Siodmak’s tenure, Universal made the most of the noir style, but the capstone was The Killers in 1946. A critical and financial success, it earned Siodmak his only Oscar nomination for direction in Hollywood (his German production The Devil Came at Night (Nachts, wenn der Teufel kam) would be nominated for Best Foreign Language Film in 1956). Robert Siodmak was considered an actor’s director, discovering Burt Lancaster and skillfully directing actresses such as Ava Gardner, Olivia de Havilland, Dorothy McGuire, Yvonne de Carlo, Barbara Stanwyck and Ella Raines.

Before leaving Hollywood for Europe in 1952, following the problematic production The Crimson Pirate for Warner Bros., his third and last film with Burt Lancaster, Siodmak had directed some of the era’s best film noirs, more than any other director who worked in that genre, twelve in all. But his identification with film noir, generally unpopular with American audiences, may have been more of a curse than a blessing.

He often expressed his desire to make pictures “of a different type and background” than the ones he had been making for ten years. Nevertheless, he ended his Universal contract with one last noir, the disappointing Deported (1951) which he filmed partly abroad (Siodmak was among the first refugee directors to return to Europe after making American films).

Those “different types” of films he had made – The Great Sinner (1949) for MGM, Time Out of Mind (1947) for Universal (which Siodmak also produced), The Whistle at Eaton Falls (1951) for Columbia Pictures – all proved ill suited to his noir sensibilities (although The Crimson Pirate, despite the difficult production, was a surprising and pleasant departure).

The five months he collaborated with Budd Schulberg on a screenplay tentatively titled A Stone in the River Hudson, an early version of On the Waterfront was also a major disappointment for Siodmak. In 1954 he sued producer Sam Spiegel for copyright infringement. Siodmak was awarded $100,000, but no screen credit. His contribution to the original screenplay has never been acknowledged.

After returning to the Federal Republic of Germany, he made The Rats (Die Ratten) which went on to win the Golden Berlin Bear at the 1955 Berlin Film Festival and The Devil Came at Night (Nachts, wenn der Teufel kam, 1957) which was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and is based on the true story of Bruno Lüdke.

His return to Hollywood film-making in 1967 to make the wide-screen western Custer of the West was another disappointment. Siodmak fared better in Europe, especially with the British film The Rough and the Smooth (1959), another noir, but much meaner and gloomier than anything he had made in America.

He ended his career with a six-hour, two-part toga and chariot epic, Der Kampf um Rom (1968), oddly more campy (perhaps intentionally, one hopes) than Cobra Woman had been. There was a brief and profitable foray into television in Great Britain with the series O.S.S. (1957–58). Siodmak was last seen publicly in an interview for Swiss television at his home in Ascona in 1971. He died alone in 1973, seven weeks after his wife’s death. —wikipedia

Edgar George Ulmer was one of the very few genuinely creative filmmakers who, for a time, chose the world of low-budget B-films over the more opulent milieu of mainstream, high-profile A-pictures. Born in Vienna, Austria, he worked as a stage actor and set designer while studying architecture and philosophy, and later joined the company of the legendary German theatrical producer Max Reinhardt. He first visited America in connection with a Reinhardt production, and became briefly involved with Universal Pictures in the mid-‘20s. On his return to Germany he served as an assistant to filmmaker F.W. Murnau, and worked as art director on the latter’s film Sunrise, which was shot in Hollywood in 1927. Ulmer went back to Germany to co-direct Menschen am Sonntag (1929) in collaboration with Robert Siodmak. He emigrated to Hollywood in the early ‘30s, working as a writer on movies such as Tabu and as an art director. By 1933, Ulmer had been signed to Universal as a director, making his debut with The Black Cat (1933), a bizarre and harrowing horror film starring Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, that seemed designed to startle the viewer at every turn, intermingling elements of grisly sadism and knowing black comedy. The Black Cat remains one of the more distinctive of Universal’s horror films of the 1930s, and it seemed to herald the arrival of a major new talent in the genre. Ironically, it was also to be Ulmer’s last movie for a major studio for 14 years. Sometime after his arrival on the Universal lot, he’d made the acquaintance of Shirley Kassler Alexander, an employee of the script department and the wife of Max Alexander, a producer at Universal and also a nephew of studio owner Carl Laemmle. The two fell in love, which immediately put her job and Ulmer’s American career in jeopardy — he directed one low-budget Western, Thunder Over Texas, under the pseudonym “John Warner” for tiny Beacon Pictures, based on one of her scripts. Soon after, she divorced Alexander and the two were barred from the Universal lot. She married Ulmer, a union that lasted until his death nearly 40 years later. In the meantime, however, the director discovered that he was effectively blackballed from the Hollywood film industry. Ulmer was forced to return to the East Coast to get any film work over the next few years. There was still a movie industry of sorts in New York. Very few talented hands from Hollywood ever made the trip east, and Ulmer, with his experience both in Hollywood and in Germany (and a hit Hollywood movie under his belt), was something of a find for anyone producing movies in New York. He, in turn, found a place where he could continue his career, making films in Yiddish for producers aiming at that audience (which was considerable, right up to the advent of World War II), and also documentaries such as the venereal disease educational/exploitation movie Damaged Lives, and, later still, movies with all black casts for the theater circuits catering to black communities. It was during this period that Ulmer began making his reputation — with a lot of help from Shirley Ulmer as a screenwriter and script editor — as something of a cinematic magician, who could make good ideas work on screen for very little money. Having experienced the worst side of big studio politics in a particularly personal way, Ulmer was said to have preferred working for smaller studios, where he could earn a decent living (if only a fraction of what directors were earning in Hollywood) and embrace the challenge of making incredibly inexpensive movies come out well.
Once established, Ulmer chose his films on the basis of their worth as ideas, scripts, and the degree of independence that they allowed him. He infused all of them with passion, vibrancy, and inventiveness, all of which belied their miniscule budgets and breakneck shooting schedules. Contrary to the conventional wisdom about Ulmer, that he spent his career avoiding high-profile projects and the major studios, he did have ambitions beyond the scope of 62-minute thrillers and dramas. He hoped to be hired by one of the major studios, and in 1941-1942 Paramount seemed interested — there was apparently even discussion about his remaking The Blue Angel with Veronica Lake. In 1943, at the prompting of expatriate German producer Seymour Nebenzal, with whom Ulmer had a longstanding friendship, he approached Producers Releasing Corporation (PRC), a B-studio that stood at the very bottom of the barrel of Hollywood’s “Poverty Row.” PRC had enjoyed two good years and was beginning to upgrade its releases under the guidance of production executive Leon Fromkess. Ulmer and Fromkess got along well, and he was able to persuade Fromkess of his ability not just as a director able to bring in good movies for very little money, but also as a production executive. As a result Ulmer was one of the major forces at PRC as well as being its top director, helping in no small way to transform the studio’s output and image. He was the head of production in all but name (outside of its Western films, which were virtually a separate division), not only developing projects for himself but devising and assigning films to other directors of his choice. His own output, beginning with Bluebeard (1944), a beautifully made, lyrical, poignant, and suspenseful period drama starring John Carradine as the notorious strangler, represented not only some of the finest films of his career, but several of the most complex and entertaining B-movies of the 1940s: Strange Illusion (1945), a harrowing and piercing modern dress adaptation of Hamlet; Detour (1945), a cross-country film noir/thriller, shot in under a week for less than 20,000 dollars, that is still shown widely on television, revived regularly in theaters, and studied in film courses around the world; and The Wife of Monte Cristo, a brilliant costume swashbuckler, with as much heart and excitement as anything coming from Warner Bros. or MGM, and displaying lots of unusual touches that those studios would never allow. All of these movies, whatever their respective sources, featured screenplays written or edited by Shirley Ulmer — all looked and played better and more memorably than movies made for ten or 20 times the money at the major studios. Ulmer remained with PRC after Fromkess’ departure in 1946, but his relationship with the tiny studio ended in 1947, after he was loaned out to direct The Strange Woman at United Artists. This was Ulmer’s first chance to return to working under the umbrella and auspices of a major studio in 13 years, and he welcomed it as well as the opportunities it afforded him in terms of budget, casting, and shooting; but he objected to the fact that PRC, for which he had done so much, made a huge profit from the fee it collected for the loan-out of his services, while he was paid his usual, relatively modest PRC salary. He was back on the map, however, and in 1947 he made three major films that were widely advertised, seen, and reviewed: The Strange Woman, Carnegie Hall, and Ruthless (which was released the following year). He did the unusual swashbuckler The Pirates of Capri in Italy during 1949, and then was back at United Artists in 1951 to do The Man From Planet X, one of the earliest and strangest (and most enduringly popular) of science fiction stories dealing with alien visitors. In 1951, he even returned to New York City to shoot the offbeat comedy/drama St. Benny the Dip, but most of Ulmer’s movies over the next few years were more conventional in both content and production. In 1960, however, Ulmer inaugurated a series of strange, compelling low-budget science fiction films: Beyond the Time Barrier (1960), The Amazing Transparent Man (1960), and L’Atlantide (Journey Beneath the Desert) (1961), the latter a remake of a film first done in Germany in 1932 by the director’s friend Seymour Nebenzal. Ulmer closed out his career in 1965 with The Cavern, one of the more unusual World War II dramas of the 1960s or any other era. Shirley Ulmer continued to write screenplays well into the 1970s. Edgar Ulmer passed away in 1972, little remembered at the time by the public. In the decades since, however, a new generation of filmmakers, including Martin Scorsese and John Landis, has come to champion his work. Detour, in particular, has achieved considerable acclaim as a seminal example of film noir, and was picked by the Library of Congress as one of the first group of 100 films worthy of special preservation efforts, right alongside Citizen Kane and 98 other vastly more expensive, higher profile movies. —allmovie guide