Flicker (100 page)

[As Jonathan learned from Zip Lipsky, Max Castle worked with the legendary poverty-row director Edgar Ulmer on two films:
Zombie Doctor
and
The Black Cat,
both produced at Universal Studios in 1934. Shortly before his death in 1972, Ulmer agreed to critique the page proofs of Jonathan's study of Castle. As this letter from Ulmer reveals, his friendship with Castle ended abruptly while
The Black Cat was
in production. In the years that followed, Castle's career continued to decline, but Ulmer went on the become “the king of B's,” as Peter Bogdanovich has called him. Among film scholars, the best of his low-budget productions, especially
Detour, Ruthless,
and
The Black Cat,
now hold a classic status. Jonathan may have felt he could not trust Ulmer's embittered and derogatory evaluation of Castle and so decided not to introduce the information in this letter into his interpretation of Castle's films.]

February 11, 1972

Dear Mr Gates:

I have received your manuscript and read it carefully. I hope you will understand my reluctance to take up many of the questions you raise about my relationship with Max Castle. This is a particularly painful subject for me which I prefer to avoid.

It is true that Max and I were friends for many years, dating back to our days at UFA studios. You might say we served our apprenticeship there. But you have greatly exaggerated how much Max, as a young man, contributed to the design of
Caligari
and other UFA productions. He can hardly be credited with being the genius behind the camera. In fact, if anybody can be credited with inventing expressionist design in
Caligari,
it would be myself—a technique I went on the develop throughout my career,
though without fair recognition. I won't go so far as to say that I taught Max everything he knew, but it came close to that.

Later, in Hollywood, after Max's projected extravaganza
The Martyr
came to a disastrous end, he might not have survived at all if it were not for friends like Lang, Freund, and me. Though I was struggling myself, I pushed work in Max's direction whenever possible. Bear in mind, the studios of that period had come to regard Max as a jinx and were unwilling to have his name associated with their films. I was taking a great risk when I decided to bring him in to assist on
Zombie Doctor,
it was also more than I could afford to do at the time, since I had to pay him out of my own pocket. But a few months after he joined me on that film, I was lucky enough to land a better contract. Universal decided to produce
The Black Cat.
That allowed me to be more generous with an old friend. In effect, I let Max have
Zombie Doctor
and the salary. I believe he directed the film under one of his assumed names; as “Max Castle,” he was still anathema in the industry. You are correct in giving him full credit for the result—a brilliant low-budget job. He was working on an even thinner shoestring than I was.

But you are outrageously wrong about
The Black Cat,
and I must ask you to revise your chapter dealing with that film. Don't believe a word you hear from Zip Lipsky, that vindictive dwarf. The man was Max's stooge, his toady. Contrary to what he has told you,
The Black Cat
was mine, all mine—one of my few big-budget productions. Max's role was strictly subordinate, little more than a gofer. I am willing to give him credit for only one aspect of the film. After I had designed it in a traditional horrorfilm mode—clammy stone walls, a shadowy crypt, winding staircases—Max came up with the intriguing notion of revamping all the sets as art deco. Imagine! Gothic art deco! A marvelous blending of the modern and the medieval, lending exactly the contemporary note I wanted. I saw the possibilities at once.

I knew better, however, than to leave the actual design up to Max. If I had, the film would have been a calamity. For one thing, Max actually proposed letting the design of the movie dominate everything else—script, acting, music. He imagined whole sequences in which the characters appeared simply as a huddled crowd or as hooded and faceless figures in the shadows with very nearly no dialogue. Only the design and lighting were to stand out. He insisted that the
mise-en-scène
in and of itself would be enough to tell the story—“the essential story,” as I recall him saying. Since I had no idea what this “essential story” was, I ignored the suggestion. Even so, I remember Boris Karloff complaining that he felt severely crowded by the scenic effects, as if they were doing more acting than he was.

I have tried never to speak ill of the dead, but now, for the sake of the historical record, I will be frank with you. My relationship with Max reached a nasty climax during the making of
The Black Cat.
This was destined to be the end of our friendship. Things happened between us, words were spoken that left me unwilling to associate with him again on any level. As I'm sure other sources will confirm, there were aspects of Max's personality that I was not alone in finding obnoxious in the extreme. Why did I not notice these disturbing traits before? I believe Max underwent a significant change
of character after coming to the United States. Hollywood warped him. He became another man, one for whom film seemed at times to be of secondary importance.

I do not refer to the crass commercialism or the general immorality of the culture. It was something more purely personal. How shall I put it? Max got religion. What kind of religion? I cannot say. Nothing I could recognize or put a name to. He was now in the constant company of people who seemed to have a hold over him. There was an arrogant young priest of some sort named Justin who claimed to be Max's business manager and was never far from his side, as if he were keeping Max under close observation. And, of course, there were the twins you write about at some length, the Reinking Brothers who worked with him as editors. There were others whose names I forget, strange, dark figures who were clearly controlling Max's career, though to what end I cannot say. They were certainly not making a financial success out of him. Quite the opposite. And there was an orphanage involved in this, a place in Zuma Beach. I cannot connect all these things for you. I can only say the entire arrangement had an unsavory odor.

As we worked on
The Black Cat,
I became more and more aware that Max was no longer his own man. He was laboring under an iron discipline. I have seen this kind of regimentation only once before. Friends of mine who belonged to the German communist party during the Weimar period. I do not know if you are old enough to remember the ethos of that time. Total, unquestioning subordination to the cause. That was the order of the day. Men—rational, well-educated men—became robots of their ideological masters. Absolute obedience, complete subservience. Only in Max's case, the cause was not political, but religious. Max was using movies for some purpose that went beyond art or entertainment. Whatever he and the Reinkings touched took on a quality that I can only call metaphysical. Exactly how they managed to infuse their productions with such an uncanny air, I cannot say. But I shudder to think of what
The Black Cat
would have become if it had been Max's film.

Perhaps you know something of my own political views. Notoriously, I was a radical lefty, very close to the New Deal. I was deeply committed to racial justice. I fought against anti-Semitism. I hope you appreciate that
The Black Cat
was one of the first movies to dramatize the dangers of fascism. If this was not appreciated at the time, that was only because the world did not yet know how crazy and how cruel fascism was. The cult in the movie is a Nazi cult. The protagonist, Hjalmar Poelzig—so brilliantly portrayed by Karloff—was the first totalitarian leader to appear on film. Some thought he was patterned on Svengali. But no. Hitler. That was the pattern. A charismatic sadist. That was the very core of Hitler's appeal. Long before anyone in Hollywood got round to taking Nazism seriously, I created this image of totalitarian madness, how sick, how superstitious it was.

Max and I had long discussions of these matters. He was a great one for all-night drinking sessions. To my amazement, he kept insisting that Poelzig must be the hero of the film. “The priest of the unknown god.” That was what he saw in Poelzig. He believed that Poelzig's death—he is flayed alive by Bela Lugosi—should be a sacrificial
act, a martyrdom. We spent night after night making such crazy talk. The more he rambled on, the more incoherent and hostile he became. Finally, things became very heated. I refused to consider making Poelzig a heroic figure. I asked him, “Can you imagine making Adolf Hitler the hero of a film?”

To my utter amazement, Max waved the question aside with a shrug. Hitler? What did Hitler matter? What did fascism matter? Not that Max doubted the harm that would come of Nazism. His view of the future was very dark. “So? There will be another war. Worse than the last. There will be terror, the slaughter of the innocents. The Jews will get the worst of it. They may not survive. But this will not be the first holocaust in the sad history of Europe, nor the most consequential.”

Can you imagine him saying this to me—a Jew? It was the first time I heard the word “holocaust” in connection with anti-Semitism.

“And this does not matter to you?” I asked.

“Edgar, there will be worse to come, a greater horror.”

You may know something of my work in Yiddish film, a little-known aspect of my career. For love, not money, I produced several movies based on Yiddish literature and Jewish history. This work was close to my heart. Then to hear Max dismissing the plight of the Jews in Nazi Germany—it was too much. Our collaboration and our friendship was at an end. I had to ask him to leave the set and not return.

But that was not the end of my connection with Max Castle. You may be interested to know that afterward I conceived of a film based on Max himself, a Gothic tale about movies. I imagined a power-mad film director, a Svengali of the silver screen who finds a way to hypnotize his audience and then bring his movies to life. Monsters, werewolves, vampires, the whole Universal Studios menagerie, he releases them into the world to do his bidding. An army of phantoms. They kill, they pillage, they rape. Whole societies fall under the directors spell. The title was to be
Hypnogogia.
Universal was interested. They signed Peter Lorre to play the lead. He had just arrived in Hollywood. He would have made the perfect Max Castle. In fact, he worked with Max on
Mad Love.
But then my luck turned. As you may know, I made an unwise marriage with the daughter of the studio head. People still say that was why I was blackballed. I never believed my marriage was the issue. I think it was the film.
Hypnogogia.
Somebody wanted to make sure it was never made. Maybe it was Max or his mysterious friends.

I once said I would go on making movies if I had to direct from a wheelchair. But that has not proven to be possible. I can only hope that scholars like yourself will find the artistic value in my work. Look at
Detour.
Then think what I could have done with a
Gone With the Wind
budget!

Sincerely Yours,
Edgar Ulmer

Theodore Roszak is professor emeritus of history at California State University-Hayward. He holds a B.A. from the University of California–Los Angeles and a Ph.D. in history from Princeton University. He has taught at Stanford University, the University of British Columbia, San Francisco State University, California State University–Hayward, and Schumacher College in the United Kingdom.

His books include
Longevity Revolution: As Boomers Become Elders,
a comprehensive study of the cultural and political implications of our society's lengthening life expectancy, and the widely acclaimed
The Making of a Counter Culture,
a much-discussed, bestselling interpretation of the turbulent 1960s. He has also written
The Cult of Information,
a study of the use and abuse of computers in all walks of life, and
The Gendered Atom: Reflections on the Sexual Psychology of Science,
a study of gender bias in scientific theory and practice, which includes a preface by Jane Goodall. His books
The Voice of the Earth
and
Ecopsychology: Healing the Mind, Restoring the Earth
are the founding texts of the ecopsychology movement. With his wife, Betty, he is coeditor of the anthology
Masculine/Feminine: Essays on Sexual Mythology and the Liberation of Women.

His fiction includes
Flicker
and the award-winning
Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein,
both of which are under option for major feature films. His most recent novel, published in 2003, is
The Devil and Daniel Silverman.

Theodore Roszak has been a Guggenheim Fellow and was twice nominated for the National Book Award. He lives in Berkeley, California.