NFR Project: 'Detour' (1945)

 

NFR Project: “Detour”

Dir: Edgar G. Ulmer

Scr: Martin Goldsmith

Pho: Benjamin H. Kline

Ed: George McGuire

Premiere: Nov. 15, 1945

68 min.

Edgar Ulmer was a great director who made the most out of pitiful resources. Nowhere is this more evident than in Detour.

Ulmer got his early training in Germany, working at the state production house, the mighty UFA. He came to America and started plying his trade at the major studios. It was then he made his beautiful and transgressive horror masterwork, The Black Cat (1934). It was a big success; it looked like Ulmer had nowhere to go but up.

However, he fell in love with the wrong woman. He began an affair with the wife of a producer who happened to be the nephew of Carl Laemmle, Universal studio head. She divorced her husband and married Ulmer. Ulmer got blackballed from the major studios.

He didn’t give up. He cranked out cheap potboilers for Poverty Row studios, giving his efforts a finish and a depth that they probably didn’t deserve. Detour was just another one of those assignments. Shot in only six days, it’s a marvel of inventiveness. Using studio fog, lighting tricks, props heavy with symbolism, and haunting voiceovers, Ulmer crafted a claustrophobic nightmare of a story, a noir that works despite its spareness.

 It all takes place in the mind of Al, a hapless piano player played by Tom Neal. Neal couldn’t really act; however, he was good at looking glum and confused. That’s the mode he’s in for much of the movie. He starts out in New York, where his girlfriend decides to try her luck in Hollywood. After a while, Al decides to follow her there. With no money to speak of, he sets off hitchhiking across the country.

(Note: in the New York scenes, Al appears to be a genius pianist -- we are treated to some shots of his hands, supposedly, working the keyboard in a flashy, expert manner. But is Al really a prodigy, or does he THINK he's a prodigy? It's impossible to tell.)

Al happens to be the unluckiest person in the world, and one of the dumbest. He gets a ride from a bookie, Haskell, who inconveniently dies en route. Does Al call the cops? No. He dumps the body in the desert, steals his clothes, money, and car, thinking this is the best path forward. THEN he picks up the world’s worst hitchhiker, who turns out to be a psychotic bitch from hell named Vera (Ann Savage). It turns out she knows that he’s not Haskell, and she blackmails him into doing her bidding, which becomes more and more delusional.

It is fascinating to watch the almost somnolent acting style of Neal contrasted with the bold overacting of Savage. In an improbable turn, he ACCIDENTALLY strangles her with a phone cord. Now completely without hope, he gives up on the idea of getting together with his girlfriend and starts hitchhiking again, drifting across the dark landscape. In the end, he’s picked up by a prowl car, and it looks like he’s going to pay for his . . . crimes? His bad luck? His sheer stupidity? It’s all of the above, frankly.

This sad-sack tale is classic noir. The hero is doomed by the actions of a femme fatale. He makes bad choices that box in him further and further, until the only safe place for him is the hoosegow. The bitter despair of the story is something that never would have flown in mainstream Hollywood. Here, Ulmer sneaks a gloomy, nutty story into the cinemas, and does a bang-up job of it.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: ‘The House I Live In.’