An old American proverb reads “Excuses are merely nails used to build a house of failure.” It’s also a succinct paraphrase for the trajectory of the woeful protagonist of Edgar G. Ulmer’s seminal B-noir, Detour (1945), the Poverty-Row production which continues to flex its hopelessness and dread as it portends to depict a fitful dance with fate. Only the hapless character played by Tom Neal, whose trenchant passivity dictates his demise, isn’t so much building a house but his own coffin. Made vulnerable by his misguided understanding of what love and desire are supposed to look like, a myriad of poor decisions lead him into the maw of victimhood from which he can never seem to escape, despite all the agency in the world right at the tips of his white, heteronormative universe.…...
- 3/26/2019
- by Nicholas Bell
- IONCINEMA.com
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