Detour (1945)

I remember hearing once that some famous European art director considered Detour to be the finest American motion picture of all time. Made at the short lived poverty row studio PRC, you can tell this film was done cheaply, but it was done creatively and well. Through taught pacing, intriguing characters, solid acting, and some interesting editing, Detour rises far beyond the middling production it could have been. It is a contemplative and fatalistic noir, while its story seems fairly standard, its effect feels heightened, this is no doubt do to the excellent direction of Edgar G. Ulmer who makes you feel trapped like his protagonist.

The plot concerns Al Roberts (Tom Neal), a down on his luck piano player hitchhiking from New York to Los Angeles to reunite with his fiance (Claira Drake) who traveled there in hopes of becoming an actress. Working his way west Roberts is picked up in Arizona by a man named Charles Haskell Jr. (Edmund MacDonald), who literally drops dead on Roberts in what would appear to be incriminating circumstances. Roberts stashes Haskell's body in the desert and assumes his identity, hoping to ditch the car and Haskell's belongings once he makes it to California. Before he get to his destination however he picks up a hitchhiker who goes by the name of Vera (Ann Savage), and boy is she a sour character. Having been picked up hitchhiking before by the real Haskell, Vera takes Roberts as a sort of hostage through blackmail, and uses him in her attempts at several schemes, before finally settling on an unrealistic plan to get money from Haskell's dying millionaire father.

The film has a claustrophobia, a real tension, Roberts is a poor everyman that its easy to sympathize with, while Vera, a strangley complicated, detestable character, and surprisingly sexually aggressive for that era. While it might not seem much on the surface of it, Detour captures something emblematic, perhaps its the grimness, small budget, and largely unknown cast which make it seem seamyer, more depressing, a noir's noir. It doesn't have that classic polish, but it has a strange kind of truth to it, one which simply makes it better and more engrossing then it ought to be. Grade: B+