A PROFESSOR ONCE insisted to me that most of Ingmar Bergman's iconic The Seventh Seal was lifted from one of Edgar G. Ulmer's most beloved horror pictures, a Universal film called The Black Cat (1934). I still haven't quite figured out the implications of this claim, but needless to say, it speaks volumes about Ulmer's strange spot in film history. Part of the same German émigré movement that swept figures like Murnau, Lorre, Lang, and Von Sternberg over to Hollywood, Ulmer was as idiosyncratic as they come; his oeuvre plays like one extended detour from the studio style most of us associate with '30s and '40s American filmmaking. He directed dozens of films in his years in the United States, covering everything from the monster movie to Yiddish comedy, all with the leftover scraps of A productions. Ulmer was hardly the only filmmaker to carve out a unique cinematic style during the studio era, but it's hard to fathom anyone doing it with less in the way of sets, acting talent, and general cash flow. True, there are plenty of low-budget film noirs and creature features floating around, but it's hard to find anything as defiantly different a picture as Ulmer's Detour (1945), a mangled collision of screwball comedy and on-the-road crime preceding Quentin Tarantino's work by some five decades. These are films of tremendous economy (The Black Cat clocks in at 66 minutes, Detour at 68) and startling strangeness; the PFA's retrospective screens several hard-to-see films by a hard-to-see director and ought to serve amply as a B-movie fix. See Rep Clock for show times. (Max Goldberg)