Detour (1945)

Film: Detour (1945)
Stars: Tom Neal, Ann Savage, Claudia Drake, Edmund MacDonald
Director: Edgar G. Ulmer
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

With me going more and more to revival/retro screenings, I've learned that I have a new pet peeve: rude audience members who don't respect the time-and-place of a film being made, perhaps best illustrated by a recent viewing of Detour on a big-screen.  Made on Poverty Row, the film is the stuff of cinematic legend, a movie with no major stars that yet somehow remained in the public consciousness, to the point where Criterion will be releasing a movie from PRC of all movie studios later this year.  The film's dialogue, film quality (thanks to a thin budget and broad speaking styles from the stars) would be easy-to-ridicule, but I don't like hate-viewing & think people who want to laugh at an actor's performance or the dialogue should do so at home, and respect the vision onscreen for what it is.  And it's not like Edgar Ulmer's film is some Room-style atrocity.  Beneath the cheaply patched-together cinematography and the bad-gangster-movie dialogue is a really interesting, engrossing movie that sits with you as you leave the theater, wondering how something so dark came out of Hollywood's Golden Age.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is relatively simple.  Al Roberts (Neal) is a man-on-the-run, with us seeing his life through flashbacks of how he once had a great relationship with Sue (Drake), but she pursued her dreams in Hollywood, and spite for the universe that gave him a great, Carnegie Hall-style gift for the piano (but no ways to use it), has led him to hitchhiking across the country to reunite with her.  Al comes across a man named Charles Haskell Jr. (MacDonald), who treats him well but complains about how a woman earlier in his journey had fought back when he'd tried to assault her (it says this in so many words), and he's still bitter about it.  Haskell suddenly dies while Al is driving (more on that in a second), and disposes of the body because he assumes that no one will believe he didn't murder Haskell for his money/car.  He picks up an ornery woman named Vera (Savage), who turns out to be the woman that Haskell picked up and assaulted, and she then blackmails Al into giving her the profits of the car or she'll go to the police.  The two start to sell the car, with Vera clumsily coming on to Al, but her rejecting him, and her eventually finding out that Haskell is poised to inherit millions, and says if Al pretends to be Haskell, they can be on "easy street."  Al refuses, begging her to let him go, but then accidentally kills her (more on that in a second too) by strangling her accidentally with a phone cord.  The final sequence seems to be a dream of sorts, a projection of the future, when Al inevitably is caught for this murder.

Okay, that's a lot to unpack; Detour, at only 68 minutes, is a story that doesn't have time for frivolity.  The film, at least what the rude woman in my theater found so amusing, is not impressive on a technical level.  Neal is hardly Gregory Peck, and seems to spend most of the movie either pleading or pouting.  Ann Savage is better, though it's not always clear whether she's giving a great performance or just being totally original & memorable as a steely, angry, oversexed femme fatale.  They are forced to sputter deeply-dated phrases as they fight and flirt and quarrel, and a modern audience would be forgiven to (in the comfort of her own home) chuckle at some of the acting onstage.

But it's just so damn entertaining, and so rich with nastiness that you can't help but want to continue, and I get why people called it a classic & kept coming back to it year's later.  By casting non-stars, Walsh is able to go into this without any sort of pretense about what these characters will be to the audience, which serves him well as he continues to make them cruel & dismissive.  While the Hays Code of the era stops, say, Al from fleeing from the police (though it's obvious to a modern audience he's arrested in a dream sequence rather than reality), or Al & Vera from sleeping together on the road, it's all there below the surface.  What makes Detour so mesmerizing is that, unlike even the most famous film noir, there's no relief here-there's no light or sense of humanity.  Even Sue feels like a distant dream, someone too pure to be associated with such a story.

Which makes you assume that she's not.  The most creative aspects of Detour are surely the fact that Al is lying about this entire story, which is why such a crumby guy comes across as so noble.  We're expected to believe that someone as chaste and lovely as Sue would associate with such a fellow?  Or that he, months deprived of companionship, decided to just not have sex with Vera who is throwing herself at him?  And the two people just die, randomly, solving all of his problems?  No, Detour is that rare unreliable narrator story where the narrator never acknowledges he's lying, but it's there for anyone paying attention.  Dubious Al, combined with the blackhearted nature of the film that recalls a Cormac McCarthy story in its downward trajectory, with one man buying a ticket to Hell, makes Detour a classic worth revisiting-just try not to laugh if it's a public screening.