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Edgar Georg Ulmer was an Austrian-American film director. He is best remembered for the movies The Black Cat and Detour . These stylish and eccentric works have achieved cult status, whereas Ulmer's other films remain relatively unknown. Ulmer was born in Olomouc, in what is now the Czech... Republic. As a young man he lived in Vienna, where he worked as a stage actor and set designer while studying architecture and philosophy. He did set design for Max Reinhardt's theater, served his apprenticeship with F. W. Murnau, and worked with directors including Robert Siodmak, Billy Wilder, Fred Zinnemann and cinematographer Eugen Schüfftan, inventor of the Schüfftan process. He also claimed to have worked on Der Golem , Metropolis , and M , but there is no evidence to support this. Ulmer came to Hollywood with Murnau in 1926 to assist with the art direction on Sunrise . In an interview with Peter Bogdanovich, he also recalled making two-reel westerns in Hollywood around this time.
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Robert Siodmak was a German born American film director. He is best remembered as a thriller specialist and for the series of Hollywood film noirs he made in the 1940s. Siodmak was born in Dresden, Germany, the son of Rosa Philippine and Ignatz Siodmak. His parents were both from Jewish families... in Leipzig . He worked as a stage director and a banker before becoming editor and scenarist for Curtis Bernhardt in 1925. At twenty-six he was hired by his cousin, producer Seymour Nebenzal, to assemble original silent movies from the stock footage of old ones. Siodmak worked at this for two years before he persuaded Nebenzal to finance his first feature, the silent chef d'oeuvre, People on Sunday . The script was written by his younger brother Curt Siodmak, later the screenwriter of The Wolf Man . With the rise of Nazism he left Germany for Paris and then Hollywood.
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Fred Zinnemann was an Austrian-American film director. He won two Academy Awards for directing films in many genres, including thrillers, westerns, film noir, and play adaptations. Nineteen actors appearing in Zinnemann's films received Academy Award nominations for their performances: among that... number are Frank Sinatra, Audrey Hepburn, Glynis Johns, Paul Scofield, Robert Shaw, Wendy Hiller, Jason Robards, Vanessa Redgrave, Jane Fonda, Gary Cooper and Maximilian Schell. Zinnemann was born to a Jewish family in Vienna, Austria. While growing up in Austria, he wanted to become a musician, but went on to study law. While studying at the University of Vienna, he became drawn to films and eventually became a cameraman. He worked in Germany with several other beginners before going to America to study film.
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Rochus Gliese was a German actor, director, production designer, and Academy Award-nominated art director of early films from the 1910s and 1920s. He was born in Berlin, Germany. He is most remembered in the United States for his work as an art director on the film Sunrise. Most of his other films... did not receive wide release in the United States. His final film as a director was 1930's Die Jagd nach dem Glück , though he did some behind-the-scenes roles through the 1930s and in the 1950s. His final work was 1955's Fidelo, where he worked as a set decorator. He died in 1978 in Berlin.
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