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About fifteen minutes into the picture, a television set presents us with a sublime moment from Edgar G. Ulmer's The Black Cat, starring Karloff and Lugosi. Lugosi plays Dr. Vitus Werdegast, a tortured psychoanalyst imprisoned during WW I by the villainous General Poelzig (Karloff) who, in turn, married and murdered Werdegast's wife Karen. Werdegast, after fifteen years in the prison from which few men return ("I have returned," he says gravely at one point), journeys to Poelzig's house to investigate Karen's death and eventually kill the murderer. Through a nasty turn in the weather...
...films constitute a relatively unknown group of excellent low-budget pictures made during a period of more than 30 years. His art is in many respects highly pictorial, yet in the most developed films his complicated intellect adds dimension to the straightforward impact of the images. In The Black Cat and The Naked Dawn, initially simple confrontations are made ambiguous by Ulmer's elusive concept of morality. The camera often works against the script in directing audience sympathies, and should we feel secure in our assessment of character relationships, Ulmer will invariably undermine the status quo and shift the dramatic...
...CAT'S PAJAMAS & WITCH'S MILK, by Peter De Vries. In these two grotesquely humorous novellas, a gifted, discontented man works hard at being a failure, and a gentle, down-at-heart woman struggles with domestic disaster...
...CAT'S PAJAMAS & WITCH'S MILK by Peter De Vries. 303 pages. Little, Brown...
According to taste, Tillie's matrimonial ordeal in Witch's Milk will seem touching, crazily unconvincing, or hopelessly sentimental. But read back to back with The Cat's Pajamas, it removes all doubt about De Vries' allegiance to domestic commitment, however grotesque. In Hank Tattersall's swinging world, everything is possible, therefore nothing is binding. Like Pete Seltzer, Hank, too, talks about outrageous products. But he does so only in ironic mockery of himself and the commercial world. By contrast, Seltzer's crazy products are mainly dreamed up as a kind of cheerful game...