Edgar G. Ulmer, the king of the B movies, was often relegated to shockingly threadbare productions that he usually transcended with fierce poetic inventiveness. Perhaps surprisingly, he was raised in Vienna in the bosom of high-cultural accomplishment. In his twenties, he worked for Max Reinhardt and F. W. Murnau; he co-directed the silent classic “People on Sunday,” from a script by Billy Wilder. (The story of his life is told with remarkable research and insight in a new biography by Noah Isenberg.) As an émigré in the thirties, he had a brief studio career but ended up as a journeyman of genius. In one of his few prestige projects, “Carnegie Hall,” from 1947, he found an appropriate outlet for his artistic enthusiasms. The subject is classical music, of which he was a connoisseur. His original plan, as Isenberg explains, was to make a film solely of performances; the producers required that he fit the performances into the framework of a fictional story, and he did so skillfully. But the core of the movie is the transmission of classical music by way of a movie—and the transformation of classical music into a distinctive cinematic style. Much of the music is truncated—some of it is kitsch—but, over all, it’s the greatest realization of classical music in images (at least, prior to Jean-Luc Godard’s “First Name: Carmen”).
P.S. The great conductor Fritz Reiner is seen in the movie, accompanying Jascha Heifetz in a performance of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto, and he also has a few lines. Isenberg explains that Reiner and Ulmer knew each other from Vienna in the twenties; the conductor was the godfather of Ulmer’s daughter, Arianné. He was a great conductor, whose interpretations of Bartók —his piano teacher—are justly famed. Here, he offers a thrillingly astringent performance of Mozart’s Thirty-ninth Symphony.