#684) Detour (1945)

The Plot: At a small diner outside Reno, Nevada, Al Roberts (Tom Neal) sits despondently and narrates to us how he got there. We flashback to his life as a piano player in a New York nightclub with his girlfriend, the club’s lead singer Sue Harvey (Claudia Drake). When Sue breaks up with Al and moves to Hollywood, Al becomes depressed, but ultimately decides to head out West to reconcile. While hitchhiking across the country, Al is picked up by Charles Haskell Jr. (Edmund MacDonald), a bookie en route to LA with a briefcase full of cash. While serving as Haskell’s relief driver, Al discovers that Haskell has died of an apparent heart attack. Realizing that the police will assume he killed Haskell for his money, and determined to get to Sue in Hollywood, Al hides the body and keeps driving, but a mysterious hitchhiker named Vera (Ann Savage) complicates matters. “Detour” is prime film noir and a gem from one of Hollywood’s lesser-known Poverty Row studios.

Why It Matters: The NFR calls it “one of the most stylish B pictures ever produced”, praising the “bleak nightmare existence” Ulmer was able to create under budget constraints. An essay by film critic J. Hoberman is mostly a biography of Ulmer, though he amusingly compares the film’s art through adversity style to “a Rembrandt drawing wrapped around a wad of bubble gum”.

But Does It Really?: I figured out pretty early on why “Detour” got selected for the NFR. At a time when the NFR only had 100 movies on it, “Detour” is an excellent representation of the ’40s B movie. “Detour” feels like someone put every ’40s film noir in a blender, and the results are occasionally uneven, but always watchable. With great lead performances by Neal and Savage, and the artistic eye of Edgar Ulmer behind the camera, “Detour” stands out as one of the best of the Bs. I’m glad “Detour” made the NFR so early, and continues to get discovered by new generations of film lovers.

Everybody Gets One: Born in what was then Austria-Hungary, Edgar G. Ulmer started his film career as an art director, heading to Hollywood to help his mentor F.W. Murnau with “Sunrise“. His directing career got off to a promising start with the horror film “The Black Cat”, Universal’s biggest hit of 1934. Unfortunately, Ulmer’s affair with his script supervisor Shirley Beatrice Kassler (who was married at the time to the nephew of Universal head Carl Laemmle) got him blacklisted from working with the major studios. Ulmer eventually found work with Producers Releasing Corporation (PRC), one of the “Poverty Row” movie studios that cranked out cheap B pictures. Ulmer’s penchant for economically made yet artistically stimulating films earned him the moniker “The King of PRC”. Fun Fact: The G stands for Georg.

Wow, That’s Dated: This is one of many movies that would play very differently if smart phones and the internet existed. If nothing else, Al could contact Sue directly and find out how she’s doing, or just stalk her on social media. And almost everything in the film’s second half would fall apart if everyone was under modern surveillance. That all being said, there is something almost romantic about living life “off the grid”. There’s an anonymity we’ve lost in recent years that this movie reminds us of. But enough of my Andy Rooney rant, back to the movie…

Seriously, Oscars?: Unsurprising for a B movie, “Detour” received no Oscar love. In fact, as best I can tell the only film made by Producers Releasing Corporation in their seven year existence that got any Oscar nominations was 1944’s “Minstrel Man”, a sleeper hit with an unfortunate title.

• You can sense the film’s budget constraints pretty clearly. The nightclub Al and Sue perform at has maybe five people in the audience, and the street they walk on afterwards is the foggiest street in movie history.
• Tom Neal has one hell of a face. Sometimes he looks like Charlton Heston, other times Brian Williams. I gotta say though, he looks great staring off into nothing and sulking in his bleak existence.
• Also dated: The lost profession of switchboard operator. No early Hollywood movie is complete without a row of women moving phone plugs around and connecting people to their parties.
• I think the working title for “Detour” was “Rear Projection: The Motion Picture”. I get the sense that most of this movie’s production was the cast in a stationary car pretending to drive and/or sitting in silence as Al narrates.
• Speaking of driving, I noticed a few shots during the hitchhiking montage where the steering wheel is on the wrong side, and it looks like Al is hitchhiking across Europe. Turns out that in order to save money, some of the shots of Al hitchhiking back East from the film’s opening were flipped and used for his trip out West, hence why some of these shots look slightly off.
• In another alleged bit of B movie cost cutting, Haskell’s car – a 1941 Lincoln Continental convertible – was Edgar Ulmer’s actual car. Could he bill the mileage to PRC?
• Because movies like “Detour” tend to fly under the radar, I was completely unaware of the film’s twists and turns. Once Haskell becomes unresponsive I immediately started saying “Oh no oh shit oh no” over and over. It’s a delightful twist, the moment that starts the domino effect for the rest of the movie, and Haskell hitting his head on a rock as he falls out of the car is the cherry on top. From this point on, Al is royally screwed.

• What can I say about Ann Savage? She doesn’t show up until about halfway through the movie, but once she does she owns every frame of it. In a Hollywood filled with glamorized, uninteresting ingenues, Ann Savage lives up to her last name with a brassy, cutting performance. She’s somewhere between a young Bette Davis and a young Elaine Stritch, with a bit of Barbara Stanwyck thrown in for fun. Side note: As much as I wish Ann Savage was her real name, it’s actually Berniece Lyon.

• Also, it doesn’t help that Al makes several bad decisions after he discovers Haskell’s body, including PICKING UP ANOTHER HITCHHIKER. Did you learn nothing?
• I will once again advocate for black-and-white film as an aesthetic choice for certain movies, including this one. The film’s third act in Hollywood would have been too bright and flashy in color, especially compared to its New York beginning. Every spot in this movie is bleak, because Al and Vera make it bleak.
• “Detour” contains what I assume is the second most famous movie scene where someone on the run tries to quickly sell their car at a lot. Three if you count “The Muppet Movie“.
• I don’t want to spoil the ending, suffice it to say that there was a point where I had no idea where the movie was going, and it was great. It all culminates with Al’s final narration, in which he concludes that at any time “Fate or some mysterious force can put the finger on you or me for no good reason at all.” It’s this unrelenting pessimism towards life that makes “Detour” an irresistible antidote to its more upbeat big studio contemporaries.

• After PRC folded in 1946, most of their film library was sold off and started making the late night TV rounds in the 1950s. At some point in the early ’70s, “Detour” slipped into the public domain. Mixed with Ulmer fitting in neatly with the then-popular “auteur theory” of film, “Detour” found a second life with a new generation of film critics and became a prime example of a classic Hollywood B movie. 
• While Ann Savage lived long enough to see the film and her performance be re-evaluated and celebrated, Tom Neal…did not. In a bizarre bit of life imitating art, Neal was convicted of involuntary manslaughter when he accidentally shot and killed his wife Gale Bennett. He served six years before being released on parole, and died less than a year later.
• And finally, “Detour” got the remake treatment in 1992, using the original script with several deleted sequences intact. Al was played by Tom Neal’s son Tom Neal Jr. in his first and only on-screen performance.