Edgar Ulmer's Murder is My Beat

Parallel to this narrative confusion is a chaotic visual style that repeatedly changes the characters' positions in space by viewing them first from one angle, then from another totally different one.
John Belton, Howard Hawks, Frank Borzage, Edgar G. Ulmer (The Tantivy Press, 1974).

I wonder what those who had never heard of Ulmer thought of his low-budget Murder is My Beat (1955), shown recently on Turner Classic Movies: something of a film noir, something of a murder mystery, something of a series of shaggy dog stories.  It starts with a man driving to a motel and getting into a fistfight, only then do we realize that it is one cop looking for another.  Ray was taking Eden Lane to prison when he took a bite of the apple, jumping out of the train with her when he believes her story of seeing her murder victim on a train platform.  He had found her in a mountain cabin, walking many miles through the snow because he wanted to bring a murderer to justice, "I hate the wanton destruction of human life; I had seen too much of it in the Pacific."  But when he is on her own with her he realizes how much he had depended on the support system of the police department.  He becomes rather like Ulmer himself, who never had the support of the craftsmen of a major studio, making his films all over the world, often with miniscule budgets.  Ray is running out of time when he realizes that the older neighbor lady (who introduces herself as "spinster") had seen the man who supposedly had been murdered by Eden and he brings her to town just in time to identify him.

I think of Ulmer as a very modern director; his style and his plots reflect the discontinuity and darkness of the universe, as well as a class consciousness.  Ulmer plays fair with the audience in the way many directors of murder mysteries do not:  we find out things only as the detectives do, their irrationality and desperation mirroring that of modern society.  Like many of Ulmer's films Murder is My Beat has a narrative discontinuity common to many of his films, a discontinuity due to Ulmer's low-budget view of the universe.  The "happy" ending is not to be taking literally, but rather as symbolic of waking from a bad dream.