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Edgar G. Ulmer's  

The Man From Planet X

The claustophobic fog that pervades much of Edgar G. Ulmer’s work foregrounds budgetary limitations at the same time as it constructs an unsettling, evasive visual atmosphere. More than any other poverty row auteur, Ulmer integrates the ostensibly risible trappings of B-Picture coarseness (background paintings, scale models, stock footage) into the very fabric of his films. The effect is an oneiric quality in which the external world -- the environment typically realized through rear projection, fog machines or unconvincing models -- exudes a discomforting force when compared to the tight, nondescript confines which house the interpersonal drama of his films. The starkness of the motel room in Detour is contrasted with the surreal emptiness of the highway and the fog-obscured urban streets just as much the above image, taken from The Man from Planet X (1951), serves as a counterpoint that film’s unimaginative interiors. The gray mists of both films are simultaneously full and empty, vacant and engorged. They are thus more active and obscure than the dense black voids found in the work of Ulmer’s fringe contemporaries Anthony Mann and Jules Dassin. Mist is here presence and absence, not entirely real yet antagonistically joined to the prosaic.