Strange Illusion

Repressed erotic desire fuels eerie nightmares in visionary director Edgar G. Ulmer's stunning interpretation of Shakespeare's "Hamlet." Young Paul Cartwright (James Lydon) is seeking his father's killer while his mother Virginia (Sally Eillers) finds herself caught between her husband-to-be, the suave but sinister Brett Curtis (Warren William), and the memory of her noble, dead husband, Judge Albert Cartwright.

Strange Illusion was produced by PRC Studios in 1945 between the production of Ulmer's Faustian stalker movie, Bluebeard, and Club Havana. With musical score composed by long time Ulmer collaborator Leo Erdody (with a little help from the Schumann Concerto) and photographed by cinematic pioneer, Eugene Schufftan (uncredited), Edgar G. Ulmer's Strange Illusion is poverty row poetry of the first order. It is the only movie ever made that begins and ends in a dream sequence!

• mystery