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IMDbPro

Detour

  • 1945
  • Passed
  • 1h 6m
IMDb RATING
7.3/10
18K
YOUR RATING
Claudia Drake, Edmund MacDonald, Tom Neal, and Ann Savage in Detour (1945)
Watch Trailer [OV]
Play trailer1:33
1 Video
78 Photos
CrimeDramaFilm-Noir

The life of Al Roberts, a pianist in a New York nightclub, turns into a nightmare when he decides to hitchhike to Los Angeles to visit his girlfriend.The life of Al Roberts, a pianist in a New York nightclub, turns into a nightmare when he decides to hitchhike to Los Angeles to visit his girlfriend.The life of Al Roberts, a pianist in a New York nightclub, turns into a nightmare when he decides to hitchhike to Los Angeles to visit his girlfriend.

  • Director
    • Edgar G. Ulmer
  • Writers
    • Martin Goldsmith
    • Martin Mooney
  • Stars
    • Tom Neal
    • Ann Savage
    • Claudia Drake
  • See production, box office & company info
  • IMDb RATING
    7.3/10
    18K
    YOUR RATING
    • Director
      • Edgar G. Ulmer
    • Writers
      • Martin Goldsmith
      • Martin Mooney
    • Stars
      • Tom Neal
      • Ann Savage
      • Claudia Drake
    • 225User reviews
    • 117Critic reviews
  • See more at IMDbPro
    • Awards
      • 1 win

    Videos1

    Trailer [OV]
    Trailer 1:33
    Watch Trailer [OV]

    Photos78

    Tom Neal and Ann Savage in Detour (1945)
    Tom Neal and Ann Savage in Detour (1945)
    Tom Neal in Detour (1945)
    Tom Neal in Detour (1945)
    Ann Savage in Detour (1945)
    Tom Neal and Ann Savage in Detour (1945)
    Ann Savage in Detour (1945)
    Ann Savage in Detour (1945)
    Tom Neal and Ann Savage in Detour (1945)
    Don Brodie in Detour (1945)
    Tom Neal and Ann Savage in Detour (1945)
    Ann Savage in Detour (1945)

    Top cast

    Edit
    Tom Neal
    Tom Neal
    • Al Roberts
    Ann Savage
    Ann Savage
    • Vera
    Claudia Drake
    Claudia Drake
    • Sue Harvey
    Edmund MacDonald
    Edmund MacDonald
    • Charles Haskell Jr
    Tim Ryan
    Tim Ryan
    • Nevada Diner Proprietor
    Esther Howard
    Esther Howard
    • Diner Waitress
    Pat Gleason
    • Joe
    Don Brodie
    Don Brodie
    • Used Car Salesman
    • (uncredited)
    Roger Clark
    Roger Clark
    • Cop
    • (uncredited)
    Eddie Hall
    Eddie Hall
    • Tony - Used-Car Lot Mechanic Inspecting Car
    • (uncredited)
    Harry Mayo
    • Nightclub Patron
    • (uncredited)
    Harry Strang
    Harry Strang
    • California Border Patrolman
    • (uncredited)
    • Director
      • Edgar G. Ulmer
    • Writers
      • Martin Goldsmith(screenplay) (original story)
      • Martin Mooney(uncredited)
    • All cast & crew
    • Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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    Storyline

    Edit

    Did you know

    Edit
    • Trivia
      According to Ann Savage, she and Tom Neal did not get along during filming. Savage stated that Neal embarrassed her on the set by putting his tongue in her ear. She retaliated by slapping his face as hard as she could. After that incident, they did not speak to each other except when filming scenes.
    • Goofs
      In the first shots of Al hitchhiking, the film is reversed. The cars are driving on the wrong side of the highway and the drivers sitting behind the wheel are sitting on the right side of their vehicles.
    • Quotes

      Al Roberts: Money. You know what that is, the stuff you never have enough of. Little green things with George Washington's picture that men slave for, commit crimes for, die for. It's the stuff that has caused more trouble in the world than anything else we ever invented, simply because there's too little of it.

    • Connections
      Edited into This Is It (2009)
    • Soundtracks
      I Can't Believe That You're in Love with Me
      (uncredited)

      Written by Jimmy McHugh and Clarence Gaskill

      Performed by Claudia Drake

      Played often in the score

    User reviews225

    Review
    Review
    Featured review
    9/10
    An unforgettable accident that paved the low road for film noir
    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.
    helpful•204
    22
    • bmacv
    • Jul 14, 2004

    FAQ1

    • Who is the young actress that plays the "car-hop" and brings the tray to the car?She looks a lot like the young Marilyn Monroe

    Details

    Edit
    • Release date
      • January 25, 1946 (Canada)
    • Country of origin
      • United States
    • Language
      • English
    • Also known as
      • Zaobilaznica
    • Filming locations
      • 9263 Sierra Hwy, Actis, California, USA(Vera hitchhiking at Richfield gas station called Actis Service Station)
    • Production company
      • Producers Releasing Corporation (PRC)
    • See more company credits at IMDbPro

    Box office

    Edit
    • Budget
      • $30,000 (estimated)
    • Gross US & Canada
      • $16,172
    • Opening weekend US & Canada
      • $5,127
      • Dec 2, 2018
    • Gross worldwide
      • $16,172
    See detailed box office info on IMDbPro

    Technical specs

    Edit
    • Runtime
      1 hour 6 minutes
    • Color
      • Black and White
    • Aspect ratio
      • 1.37 : 1

    Related news

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