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This crime thriller with 98% on Rotten Tomatoes is a noir without a happy ending

The big picture

  • Edgar G. Ulmer
    detour
    defies all odds with its compelling technical imperfections and enduring appeal.
  • The film noir follows a musician who becomes entangled in a story of deception, murder and survival.
  • Desolate and on a tight budget,
    detour
    With its dreamlike quality and suitably fatalistic protagonist, it nevertheless showcases Ulmer's directing talent.



By any reasonable standard, Edgar G. Ulmer'S detour should have disappeared the moment it left theaters in 1945. As a product of Hollywood's Poverty Row, studios that churned out cheap quickies that barely passed for feature length, its budgetary constraints are so obvious as to be almost laughable. Yet the film has stood the test of time despite – and in many ways because of – its technical shortcomings, and has even been lovingly restored for a Criterion release. For all its flaws, it has a black, beating heart at its core that makes it an ideal film noir.



What is “Detour” by Edgar G. Ulmer about?

Tom Neal plays Al Roberts, a nightclub pianist whose girlfriend, the singer Sue (Claudia Drake), decides to go to Hollywood to become an actress. Al hitchhikes west from New York to be with her and is picked up in Arizona by Charles Haskell Jr. (Edmund MacDonald), a bookie with a thick wad of cash and scars on his hand from a lady with claws. Haskell dies suddenly, and instead of contacting the police, Al steals the man's car, money and identity and buries his body in the desert. On the way to California, he takes Vera with him (Ann Savage), a sharp-tongued hitchhiker who immediately realizes that Al is lying about being the one who caused the scars on Haskell's hand. They move into a Los Angeles apartment, where Vera hatches a plan for Al to impersonate Haskell in order to claim an inheritance from his ailing father, who has not seen his son since he left home. Al refuses and accidentally strangles Vera with a telephone cord when she drunkenly threatens to call the police.


Jack Nicholson with a bandage on his nose, sunglasses and hat, driving a car and smoking

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“Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown.”

How many film noirs detour is told in flashbacks, with a despondent Al telling his tragic story while sitting in a Nevada diner, unable to return to New York or Los Angeles. The way he tells it, he is a victim of circumstance, a poor fool who always finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. This is generally the case with noir heroes, who are usually normal people who become overwhelmed after a series of bad decisions. What is fascinating about detour Al seems so wallowing in his own misery. Although he says he wants to break up with her, Vera stays with him, even though she makes him feel weak and helpless, showers him with insults and desperately tries to seduce him. This dynamic contains a certain pessimism that appeals not only to audiences in the 1940s, but also to those today.


“Detour” makes the most of its limited budget

Many films have to make do with a limited budget, but few show these limitations as clearly as Detour. According to most reports, the film was shot on a shoestring budget in just six days. However, the director’s daughter reported that Arianne Ulmerthe shooting time was more like 14 days. Whatever the length of the actual shooting, it's clear that this 69-minute feature was made for a pittance. Most of it takes place in rear-projected cars. There are even scenes early in the film where Al drives across the US on the wrong side of the car as if he were in the UK. Roads on studio lots are shrouded in fog to replicate New York City, and when Al calls Sue in California, archival footage of telephone operators and power lines fades in, as if Ulmer is reminding viewers that this is a long-distance call. Most of the final act takes place in Al and Vera's shabby apartment, where they play cards and await news of the death of Haskell's father.


But unlike most B-movies, which are produced as the second half of a double feature, Detour. Ulmer, who was born in Austria-Hungary in 1904, worked under the guidance of FW Murnau (Nosferatu, The last laugh, sunrise). Like many European directors of his generation, he fled to America during Hitler's rise to power and brought the German expressionist style of dark shadows, slanted camera angles and exaggerated sets to Hollywood films. This is evident in films such as The black cat, with Bela Lugosi And Boris KarloffAnd like other European emigrants Fritz Lang, Billy WilderAnd Robert SiodmakUlmer found the perfect medium for this very particular style in film noir, a genre characterized by dark imagery that reflects the moral ambiguity of its protagonists. It is no wonder that filmmakers who narrowly escaped the threat of Nazism made films with such cynical worldviews.


Through Detour, Ulmer gets around the budget constraints by exploiting them. As Al begins to tell the audience his story, Ulmer moves the camera to a close-up of his face and changes the lighting to cast him in shadow. As he dreams of Sue making it big in Hollywood, Al imagines her singing the song they used to play together, “I Can't Believe That You're In Love With Me,” while the exaggerated shadows of unseen band members accompany her from off-screen. Even the unconvincing New York recreation seems oddly eerie as Al and Sue wander through fog-shrouded streets. These elements give the film an almost dreamlike qualityas if the narrator wants to convince himself and the audience that the version of events that occurred in his memory corresponds to reality.


“Detour” is the darkest of all film noirs

Film noir became popular in the 1940s as Americans returned home after the devastation of World War II. It reflected a growing sense of gloom in the world. Although it lacked the technical precision of genre classics such as Double compensation (Wild), The Killers (Siodmak) and Hot topic (Long), detour captures the fatalism of those who watched helplessly as the world almost burned down. You couldn't ask for a more fitting protagonist for this story than Al Roberts, who passively laments how unfair life can be while making mistakes that cause the world to crumble around him. Underlying all of this is the feeling that he deserves his fate, and although he could make better choices, he still digs himself deeper into the hole. Neal's life would follow a similarly tragic path when he was convicted of manslaughter in 1965 when his wife, Storm Bennettwas found dead from a gunshot wound. He was sentenced to 1 to 15 years in prison and released on parole in 1971.


Despite his protestations to the contrary, Al is a willing prisoner of Vera, who treats him with little to no respect. As far as femme fatales go, Vera is truly deadly – a vicious schemer whose only discernible trait seems to be her ability to bring men down to earth through insults alone. She treats Al exactly how he wants to be treated – with contempt – and in return he gives her the one thing she's ever wanted in life: a man to trample on. Their coming together would be almost cosmic if the consequences weren't so tragic. But hey, that's noir.

detour is currently available to stream on Kanopy in the US

WATCH ON KANOPY

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