Detour

"Detour" is a standout noir, made in 1945 for pennies, and starring Tom Neal, whose art was later imitated in his life when he was charged with murder.

Neal is effective as a man who seems on the surface to be a victim of bad luck and poor judgment. Real bad luck and real poor judgment.

Trying to get from New York to LA by hitchhiking so that he can be with his girlfriend, Al, a talented pianist, is picked up by a guy named Haskell, who, at some point during the ride, dies of we don't know what - probably heart failure. The guy kept taking pills of some sort - my guess is it's digitalis because if it were speed, he wouldn't have fallen asleep.

At any rate, his death leaves Al with a dead body and a car. Feeling no one will believe his story, he hides the body, changes clothes with the victim, takes Haskell's driver's license and money, and leaves. First mistake.

Surely an autopsy would have confirmed the man died of heart failure, number one; and number two, Al in his narration makes reference to the body falling out of the car when he opened the door, indicating that there would then be a bump on the head and he'd then be accused of hitting him.

Uh, Al, I doubt it - the ground was wet and the guy was DEAD. But instead of driving to the nearest police station and explaining what happened, Al takes off.

Later on, he picks up a hitchhiker named Vera. It turns out that she knows he isn't Haskell and uses her knowledge to get him to do what she wants to get more money. If it was downhill in the beginning, now the situation becomes a sheer drop.

There is speculation by viewers that Al is a big fat liar and that his narration, which makes him look like a victim of chance, is skewed, that the facts don't fit his story and that his girlfriend Sue didn't exist.

That is a very interesting way to look at this film, and that conjecture may be true. On the other hand, Al may just be a loser and the victim of bizarre circumstances.

The whole film, and I saw a very grainy print of it, has a bizarre atmosphere. In the New York section, as Sue and Al walk through the streets, there's a fog machine going nuts, giving rise to the conjecture that Sue and Al's romance with her are just in his imagination.

The character of Vera is frightening and pathological; one minute she wants to be treated like a woman by being complimented, and she comes on to Al, and the next, she's threatening him and acting like a shrew. More inconsistencies.

The hard-looking Ann Savage is savage indeed in the role, which is by necessity a quite exaggerated portrayal. Handsome Tom Neal does a good job as Al, and his role includes a substantial narration throughout.

Is this narration what really happened, or is it what he is planning to tell the police if caught? We don't know. The ending was tacked on at the last minute and frankly doesn't feel right.

I like the idea of the ambiguity of the original ending, which matches the ambiguity of the story. The viewer does see this ending, but then it is followed up by another minute of film apparently demanded by the censors.

With Neal's subsequent real-life violent actions and his ultimately being accused of murdering his wife, this film takes on some really macabre aspects.

"Detour" will always remain perhaps the most unusual noir ever produced: made for no money, the strange circumstances of the story, a character who may or may not be lying to the audience, and a leading man who perhaps took his role too seriously. A striking film.

When I got my first VCR in 1985, the two movies I immediately rented were "Baby Doll" and "Detour." I have revisited the former many times but it's been 20 years since I saw "Detour." I like it even better.

It moves in a seamless manner. The narrator is drawn as we watch into further and further degradation.

The movie has a beautiful look. I'm sure it's a cliché to note this but it resembles a Hopper painting. It also bears the trademarks of Edgar Ulmer's movies: Literate dialogue and classical movie, no matter how low the budget.

Tom Neal is a mournful, appealing protagonist. He's weak, not really bad. Ann Savage, of course, is terrifying as Vera, the hitchhiker from everyone's worst nightmare.

Al's descent from blonde soubrette Sue to consumptive, murderous Vera is terrifying. Yet, though it passes by us quickly, it is fully believable.

"Detour" is a true work of art.

Dear Me, PRC, the sub-Republic/Monogram indie studio that was considered the most cardboard of studios managed on this occasion to actually create a deliciously nasty noir. DETOUR, as many commentators here like to spoil for you by telling you THE WHOLE STORY is an excellent low budget film of one man's descent into accidental crime. So powerful are the screen images and the seedy tawdry drama that one almost forgets they are watching one of the cheapest (and profitable) films ever made. Monogram Pictures made several highly appreciated low end noirs (like the truly shocking DECOY of 1946) and must have been very envious of the now enduring $66,000 PRC masterpiece DETOUR. In fact I would not be surprised to find that Monogram were inspired enough to make DECOY as a result. Tom Neal sadly actually went to jail in real life in a genuine DETOUR like way and vicious Ann Savage lived up to her name in a few more noir shockers for various crummy B/W outfits who specialized until the mid 50s in similar films. NARROW MARGIN and KISS ME DEADLY are equals. DETOUR is one of the most rewarding grim descents into 40s desperation film making and the doomed loser played by Tom Neal certainly is the most tragic of them all. This is a great film. It is all it is meant to be and viewers who sit riveted to the unfolding emotional horror are genuinely rewarded. Originally TIFFANY STUDIOS in the 20s the lot became for hire after 1932 then was the home for GRAND NATIONAL from 1935 -39 and morphed into PRC in 1940. With a huge shed of snazzy 20s furniture and sets from the previous 15 years it allowed PRC's budget conscious front office to upgrade their art direction by virtue of all these classy fittings costumes bought and left there by the sophisticated view of those previous managements. I have seen a number of independent B grade30s pix made there with the same sets and outfittings inbetween management reincarnation. PRC in the late 40s were bought up by EAGLE-LION a US/Brit franchise headed by J Arthur Rank and rolled in 1950 into UNITED ARTISTS. As one journalist aptly wrote "No other poverty row outfit were able to cash in their chips so handsomely". Good on 'em! See DETOUR and gasp!!

This is one of the all-time great examples of film noir. It can practically be used to define the genre: shadowy black and white cinematography; a star-crossed protagonist ("...fate sticks out a leg to trip you."); a femme fatale (the unforgettable Ann Savage as Vera); cynical voice-over narration; ambiguous morality. All these elements are brought together magnificently by director Edgar G. Ulmer, who incredibly made this movie in several days on a shoestring budget. His direction is so masterful that the low budget sets only add to the film. This is a great masterpiece and one of the marvels in film history.

Is Detour just a bad dream? Or a masochistic reverie dredged up out of the sumps of self-loathing? Long before setting out on the road trip that took such a disastrous turn, Tom Neal was a picky eater at life's banquet. Pounding the ivories in a Manhattan nitery, he sulks that his talent goes unappreciated (when a drunk tips him a ten-spot, it's 'a piece of paper crawling with germs'). He sabotages his rapturous renditions of Chopin and Brahms waltzes with a left-handed boogie-woogie beat. When his girl, the club's shantoozie, tells him that he'll make it to Carnegie Hall 'someday,' he snaps back, 'Sure, as a janitor. Maybe I'll make my debut in the basement,' and 'Yeah, someday – if I don't get arthritis first.' Neal's lousy with what we now call issues.

When his fiancée heads to Los Angeles to try for the lush life, he lets her go, then, suddenly lonesome, decides to hitch out to the coast. In Arizona, he thumbs a ride from a pill-popping driver (Edmund McDonald) with scratches on his wrist from tussling with a 'wild animal' – a woman he had picked up in Louisiana. When Neal takes over the wheel during a rainstorm, McDonald up and dies – and conks his head on a rock as he slumps out the passenger door. Looks bad. Since he casts himself as eternal victim, Neal, though blameless, guiltily drags the body into the desert and assumes its identity (along with car and wallet). Later, at a gas station, he offers a lift to another thumb-jockey (Ann Savage), even though she looks like she 'just got thrown off the crummiest freight train in the world.' (Does the phrase 'self-destructive' strike a familiar note?) In fact, she's none other than the beast who sank her claws into the deceased – and plans to make an even bigger feast out of Neal....

The stubble on Neal's unshaved chin can't disguise his pouty, pretty-boy looks, and he proves just right as this callow, ill-starred loser (a better actor would have added superfluous dimensions). If he and his self-absorbed predicament start to wear a little thin, it ceases to matter when Savage arrives halfway through to give a performance that beggars all description. Owing either to Ulmer's or her own genius (or to exigent production values), her hard face stays stripped of glamor – when she does slap on the war paint, the effect is primitive, alarming, with eyebrows that looked slashed on with a stiletto under an unkempt riot of hair. She starts off slowly, until, supposedly dozing in the shotgun seat, her eyes fly open to size up and devour Neal. It's the most terrifying instant in Detour. From then on in, she's all shrew all the time, drunk or sober, intimidating or seductively manipulative. Thus Savage's Vera entered film history as the hardest-boiled of its femmes fatales. And Neal never knew what hit him.

Insolently original – a classic in a class by itself – Detour is by no stretch of the imagination a conventional masterpiece (if masterpieces can be counted as conventional). It shows evidence of starting out to be something – a longer, more fully developed movie – quite different from what it ended up . Groundwork gets laid for developments that never come to pass. What seems to be intended as the plot's centerpiece – a scheme to pass Neal off as McDonald, the lost scion of a wealthy family – comes to nothing. As does Savage's ominous cough, a clue to her subsequent indifference ('I'm on my way anyhow') to that 'perfume Arizona hands out free to murderers.'

Somewhere along the way, Detour ran out of time, or money, or film stock, and was cobbled together out of footage already in the can, with the aid of peculiar voice-overs (in the last-ditch manner of The Magnificent Ambersons or My Son John). Against all odds, it still worked, and remains one of the best known and most unforgettable titles in the film noir canon, a stunningly effective piece of work that manages to encapsulate, in 67 minutes, all the inchoate angst that informs the cycle. It may have been an accident, but it's the kind of accident you can't peel your eyes off of.

When the noir cycle began to coalesce in the early 1940s, it looked like it was going to take the high road of starry, big-budget prestige productions (The Maltese Falcon, I Wake Up Screaming, The Glass Key, Laura, Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce). Edgar G. Ulmer's Detour took the low road. A Poverty-Row production empty of box-office names, it was shot on a few cheap sets in a matter of days. But it sweated off a raw power that other alert film-makers working on the fringes of the industry were quick to emulate; the next few years would see Fall Guy, The Guilty, Suspense, Violence, I Wouldn't Be In Your Shoes, Decoy (the pick, along with Detour, of this particular litter) – all done with wannabes or has-beens in cast and crew, visually often ugly (the murky lighting more a matter of necessity than moody esthetic choice). It was often inspired movie-making on the most frayed of shoestring budgets.

And yet, with a few exceptions, this second-feature slot was the niche into which film noir would settle until it ran its course in the late 1950s. Which raises a question: Without Detour paving the way for quick-and-dirty, sensational fodder to fill up double bills – B-movies that the suits in the front offices didn't much care about and so paid little attention to – would the noir cycle have been but a brief flash in the pan? Would it have stayed the passion only of a handful of French cineastes? Would it have amounted to a cycle at all? The debt owed to Detour may be greater than acknowledged.