Friday, July 24, 2009  Architecture of the Black Cat  The Black
Cat (1934) was a film directed by then-unknown émigré filmmaker
Edgar G. Ulmer in Universal Studios.  The titles say the source
of the picture is the Edgar Allan Poe story, but "it is not a
story you can dramatize," said Ulmer frankly. So he moves freely
with the new ideas about the plot, characters and their
relations.  An important source of inspiration for Ulmer was a
true story he had heard while working on The Golem (1920).
"Doumond was a French fortress the Germans had shelled to pieces
during World War I; there were some survivors who didn't come
out for years," explained Ulmer in a 1970 interview with Peter
Bogdanovich. "And the commander was a strange Euripides figure
who went crazy three years later, when he was brought back to
Paris, because he had walked on that mountain of bodies."  The
shooting was done in two weeks and the budget was at a third of
what the studio had spent on the other hits like Dracula (1931)
or Frankenstein (1931