Edgar G. Ulmer (September 17, 1904 - September 30, 1972) was an Austrian-American film director. He is best remembered for the movies The Black Cat (1934) and Detour (1945). These stylish and eccentric works have achieved cult status, but Ulmer's other films remain relatively unknown.

Father of Arianne Ulmer.

Historian/critic/director Peter Bogdanovich praises Ulmer's directorial work on low-budget movies like Naked Dawn, The (1955) and Sette contro la morte (1964), which he considers "classics", adding that "the astonishing thing is that so many of Ulmer's movies have a clearly identifiable signature [despite being] accomplished with so little encouragement and so few means...". Ulmer worked in set design beginning as a teenager for Austrian director Max Reinhardt. He came with Reinhardt to the US in 1923 with the play "The Miracle", which opened on Broadway. He was blackballed from Hollywood work after he had an affair with Shirley Castle (he eventually married her and she became known as Shirley Ulmer), who at the time was the wife of B-picture producer Max Alexander (I), a nephew of powerful Universal Pictures president Carl Laemmle. Ulmer spent the bulk of his remaining career languishing at PRC, the lowest rung on the ladder of Hollywood's poverty row studios. He signed a long term contract there in October, 1943 after directing the "big budget" (by PRC standards anyway) Jive Junction (1943), becoming the outfit's #1 director. Today, Ulmer remains the principal reason PRC is mentioned in Hollywood history at all.

Biography in: John Wakeman, editor. "World Film Directors, Volume One, 1890-1945." Pages 1107-1112. New York: The H.W. Wilson Company, 1987.

Many of his films involved pure geometric patterns.

Interviewed in Peter Bogdanovich's "Who the Devil Made It: Conversations With Robert Aldrich, George Cukor, Allan Dwan, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock (I), Chuck Jones (I), Fritz Lang (I), Joseph H. Lewis, Sidney Lumet, Leo McCarey, Otto Preminger, Don Siegel (I), Josef von Sternberg, Frank Tashlin, Edgar G. Ulmer, Raoul Walsh." NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997.

Despite being the resident "artist" at PRC, after signing his long term contract, the studio immediately assigned Ulmer to direct a series of short subjects produced by the R. Wolff Advertising Agency for Coca-Cola. The project took some 5 months and kept him busy while the studio was involved in a substantial upgrade resulting from it's purchase of various bankrupt properties along poverty row.