Al Roberts, an unemployed piano player, hitches a ride, arriving at a roadside diner in Reno, Nevada. Another customer in the diner plays a song on the jukebox, that disturbs Al, for it reminds him of his former life in New York City.
Al recalls a time there when he was bitter about squandering his musical talent playing in a cheap nightclub. After his girlfriend Sue Harvey, the nightclub's lead singer, quits her job and leaves New York to seek fame in Hollywood, Al becomes depressed. After anguishing a while, Al decides to travel to California to marry Sue. With little money to his name, Al is forced to hitchhike across the country.
Detour full film; runtime 01:07:59
In Arizona, bookie Charles Haskell Jr. gives Al a ride in his convertible and tells him that he is in luck; for he is driving to Los Angeles to place a bet on a horse. During the drive, he has Al pass him his pills on several occasions, which he swallows as he drives. That night, Al drives while Haskell sleeps. When a rainstorm forces Al to pull over to put up the convertible's top, he is unable to rouse Haskell. Al opens the passenger-side door and Haskell tumbles out, falling to the ground and striking his head on a rock.
Al realizes the bookie is dead. It is likely that Haskell died earlier from a heart attack, but Al is certain that if he calls the police, they will arrest him for killing Haskell, so Al hides the body in the brush. He takes the dead man's money, clothes, and identification, and drives away, intent on abandoning the car near Los Angeles.
Al crosses into California and spends a night in a motel. The next day, as he leaves a gas station near Desert Center Airport, he picks up a hitchhiker, who gives her name as Vera. At first, she travels silently with Al, who has identified himself as Haskell, but suddenly challenges his identity and ownership of the car, revealing that she had been picked up by Haskell earlier in Louisiana, but got out in Arizona after he tried to force himself on her. Al tells her how Haskell died, but she blackmails him by threatening to turn him over to the police. She takes the cash that Al retrieved from Haskell's wallet and demands whatever money they get by selling the car.
In Hollywood, they rent an apartment, posing as Mr. and Mrs. Haskell, to provide an address when they sell the car. When they are about to make the sale, Vera learns from a local newspaper that Haskell's wealthy father is near death and a search is under way for his long-estranged son. Vera demands that Al impersonate Haskell and position himself to inherit the estate. Al refuses, arguing that the impersonation would require detailed knowledge he lacks.
Back at the apartment, Vera gets drunk and they begin arguing intensely. In a drunken rage, she threatens to call the police and runs into the bedroom with the telephone. She locks the door then falls on the bed and begins to fall asleep, the telephone cord tangled around her neck. From the other side of the door, Al pulls on the cord to try to disconnect the phone. When he breaks down the door, he discovers he has inadvertently strangled Vera.
Al gives up the idea of contacting Sue again and returns to hitchhiking. He later finds out that Haskell is wanted in connection with the murder of "his wife." Back in the diner in Reno where the film opened, he imagines his inevitable arrest.
Eddie Hall as the Used Car Mechanic (uncredited)[9]
Harry Strang as the California Border Patrolman (uncredited)[9]
Production
In 1972, Ulmer said in an interview that the film was shot in six days. However, in a 2004 documentary, Ulmer's daughter Arianne presented a shooting script title page which noted, "June 14, 1945-June 29. Camera days 14."[10] Moreover, Ann Savage was contracted to Producers Releasing Corporation (PRC) for the production of Detour for three six-day weeks, and she later said the film was shot in four six-day weeks, with an additional four days of location work in the desert at Lancaster, California.[11]
While popular belief long held that Detour was shot for about $20,000,[12] Noah Isenberg, in conducting research for his book on the film, discovered that the production's final cost was closer to $100,000.[13] Even so, it still had one of the highest profit margins, if not the highest, of any film noir listed in the National Film Registry.
Billy Halop was tested for the role of Al Roberts, was selected for the part, but was replaced by Tom Neal just three days before filming began.[14]
As detailed in Savage Detours: The Life and Work of Ann Savage, great care was taken during the postproduction of Detour.[11] The final picture was tightly cut down from a much longer-shooting script, which had been shot with more extended dialogue sequences than appear in the released print. The soundtrack is also fully realized, with ambient backgrounds, motivated sound effects, and a carefully scored original musical soundtrack by Leo Erdody, who had previously worked with Ulmer on Strange Illusion (1945). Erdody took extra pains to underscore Vera's introduction with a sympathetic theme, giving the character a light musical shading in contrast to her razor-sharp dialogue and its ferocious delivery by Savage.
The film was completed, negative cut, and printed throughout the late summer and fall of 1945, and was released in November of that year. The total period of preproduction through postproduction at PRC ran from March through November 1945.
In contrast, during the period Detour was in post-production, PRC shot, posted, and released Apology for Murder (1945), also starring Savage. Apology was given a shorter production period and a quick sound job, and used library music for the soundtrack. Clearly, Detour was a higher priority to PRC, and the release was well promoted in theaters with a full array of color print support, including six-sheet posters, standees, hand drawn portraits of the actors, and a jukebox tie-in record with Bing Crosby singing "I Can't Believe That You're in Love with Me" (1926).[11]
With reshoots out of the question for such a low-budget movie, director Ulmer put storytelling above continuity. For example, he flipped the negative for some of the hitchhiking scenes. This showed the westbound New York City to Los Angeles travel of the character with a right-to-left flow across the screen, though it also made cars seem to be driving on the "wrong" side of the road, with the hitchhiker getting into the car on the driver's side.
The car owned by the character Charlie Haskell and later driven by Al Roberts is a customized 1941 Lincoln Continental V-12 convertible, a base model of a "Cabriolet" but one that features bolted-on rear wheel-well covers and some exterior components added later from Lincoln's limited 1942 version of the same model.[15] Reportedly, the production budget for Detour was so tight that director Ulmer decided to use this car, his "personal car", for the cross-country crime drama.[15]
Censorship
The Motion Picture Production Code did not allow murderers to get away with their crimes, so Ulmer satisfied the censors by having Al picked up by a police car at the very end of the film after foreseeing his arrest in the earlier narration.[citation needed]
Reception and legacy
Trailer of Detour; runtime: 1:32 mins
Detour was generally well received on its initial release, with positive reviews in the Los Angeles Times, The Hollywood Reporter, Variety in other major newspapers and trade publications. Contemporary screenings of Detour were also not confined to grindhouse theaters; they were presented at top "movie houses". For example, in downtown Los Angeles in May 1946, it played at the 2,200-seat Orpheum in combination with a live stage show featuring the hit Slim Gaillard Trio and the Buddy Rich Orchestra. Business was reported to be excellent despite a transit strike.[16]
Shortly after the film's release in November 1945, Mandel Herbstman, the reviewer for the trade journal Motion Picture Herald, rated the production as only "fair". Herbstman was impressed, however, with the film's overall structure. "Venturing far from the familiar melodramatic pattern", he wrote, "director Edgar G. Ulmer has turned out an adroit, albeit unpretentious production about a man who stumbles into a series of circumstances which seals his doom."[17] He especially liked its conclusion and noted, "Making no compromise with the 'happy ending' formula, the film has a number of ironic and suspenseful moments."[17]
The film was released to television in the early 1950s, and it was broadcast in syndicated TV markets until the advent of mass cable systems. TV reviewers casually recommended it in the 1960s and 1970s as a worthwhile "B" movie. Then, by the 1980s, critics began citing Detour increasingly as a prime example of film noir, and revival houses, universities and film festivals began presenting the crime drama in tributes to Edgar G. Ulmer and his work. The director died in 1972, unfortunately before the full revival of Detour and the critical re-evaluation of his career occurred. Tom Neal died the same year as Ulmer, but Ann Savage lived long enough to experience the newfound acclaim. From 1985 until just two years before her death in 2008, she made a series of live appearances at public screenings of the film.[citation needed]
Critical response to the film decades after its release is almost universally positive.[18] More current reviewers contrast the technical shoddiness of the film with its successful atmospherics as film critic Roger Ebert wrote in his essay for The Great Movies, "This movie from Hollywood's poverty row, shot in six days, filled with technical errors and ham-handed narrative, starring a man who can only pout and a woman who can only sneer, should have faded from sight soon after it was released in 1945. And yet it lives on, haunting and creepy, an embodiment of the guilty soul of film noir. No one who has seen it has easily forgotten it."[19]Sight and Sound reviewer Philip Kemp later wrote, "Using unknown actors and filming with no more than three minimal sets, a sole exterior (a used-car lot) to represent Los Angeles, a few stock shots and some shaky back-projection, Ulmer conjures up a black, paranoid vision, totally untainted by glamour, of shabby characters trapped in a spiral of irrational guilt."[20] Novelists Edward Gorman and Dow Mossman wrote, "Detour remains a masterpiece of its kind. There have been hundreds of better movies, but none with the feel for doom portrayed by ... Ulmer. The random universe Stephen Crane warned us about—the berserk cosmic impulse that causes earthquakes and famine and AIDS—is nowhere better depicted than in the scene where Tom Neal stands by the roadside, soaking in the midnight rain, feeling for the first time the noose drawing tighter and tighter around his neck."[21]
In 2007, Richard Corliss, the former editor-in-chief of Film Comment and a notable film critic for Time magazine, ranked Savage's portrayal of Vera number 6 on his list of the "Top 25 Greatest Villains" in cinema history, placing her just behind Barbara Stanwyck's character Phyllis Dietrichson in Double Indemnity (1944).[22] As part of his assessment of Vera, Corliss describes her effects on not only her traveling companion Al Roberts but on viewers of the film as well:
...Hell truly is other people—if the person is Vera. Picked up on a trip out west by a man (Tom Neal) fleeing from a death scene, she instantly and spectacularly gets on his and the audience's nerves. When she's not playing the domestic harridan ("Stop makin’ noises like a husband"), she's threatening to send him to the gas chamber ("sniffin' that perfume Arizona hands out free to murderers"). With a final fatal phone call, Vera leads her poor prey to his motel-room doom. Even in death, she makes the survivor the sucker.[22]
Remake
A remake of Detour was produced in 1992, starring Neal's son, Tom Neal Jr., and Lea Lavish, along with Susanna Foster making her first acting appearance in 43 years and her final appearance on film. Produced, written, and directed by Wade Williams and released by his distribution company, Englewood Entertainment, it was released on VHS and in 1998 on DVD.[23]
Bound for Glory is a 1976 American biographical film directed by Hal Ashby and loosely adapted by Robert Getchell from Woody Guthrie's 1943 partly fictionalized autobiography Bound for Glory. The film stars David Carradine as folk singer Woody Guthrie, with Ronny Cox, Melinda Dillon, Gail Strickland, John Lehne, Ji-Tu Cumbuka and Randy Quaid. Much of the film is based on Guthrie's attempt to humanize the desperate Okie Dust Bowl refugees in California during the Great Depression.
Swingers is a 1996 American buddy comedy film about the lives of single, unemployed actors living on the 'eastside' of Hollywood, California, during the 1990s swing revival. Written by Jon Favreau and directed by Doug Liman, the film starred Favreau alongside Vince Vaughn, featuring performances by Ron Livingston and Heather Graham.
Ann Lee Doran was an American character actress, possibly best known as Carol Stark, the mother of James "Jim" Stark in Rebel Without a Cause (1955). She was an early member of the Screen Actors Guild and served on the board of the Motion Picture & Television Fund for 30 years.
Ann Savage was an American film and television actress. She is best remembered as the greedy cigarette-puffing femme fatale in the critically acclaimed film noir Detour (1945). She featured in more than 20 B movies between 1943 and 1946.
Thomas Carroll Neal Jr. was an American actor and successful amateur boxer best known for his co-starring role in the critically lauded film Detour, for having a widely publicized affair with actress Barbara Payton, and for later being convicted and imprisoned for involuntary manslaughter.
Producers Releasing Corporation was one of the smallest and least prestigious Hollywood film studios of the 1940s. It was considered a prime example of what was called "Poverty Row": a low-rent stretch of Gower Street in Hollywood where shoestring film producers based their operations. However, PRC was more substantial than the usual independent companies that made only a few low-budget movies and then disappeared. PRC was an actual Hollywood studio – albeit the smallest – with its own production facilities and distribution network, and it even accepted imports from the UK. PRC lasted from 1939 to 1947, churning out low-budget B movies for the lower half of a double bill or the upper half of a neighborhood theater showing second-run films. The studio was originally located at 1440 N. Gower St. from 1936 to 1943. PRC then occupied the former Grand National Pictures physical plant at 7324 Santa Monica Blvd., from 1943 to 1946. This address is now an apartment complex.
Edgar Georg Ulmer was a Jewish-Moravian, Austrian-American film director who mainly worked on Hollywood B movies and other low-budget productions, eventually earning the epithet 'The King of PRC', due to his extremely prolific output for the Poverty Row studio. His stylish and eccentric works came to be appreciated by auteur theory-espousing film critics in the years following his retirement. Ulmer's most famous productions include the horror film The Black Cat (1934) and the film noir Detour (1945).
The Blue Gardenia is a 1953 American film noir starring Anne Baxter, Richard Conte, and Ann Sothern. Directed by Fritz Lang from a screenplay by Charles Hoffman, it is based on the novella The Gardenia by Vera Caspary.
Two-Lane Blacktop is a 1971 American road movie directed by Monte Hellman, written by Rudy Wurlitzer and starring songwriter James Taylor, the Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson, Warren Oates, and Laurie Bird.
Esther Howard was an American stage and film character actress who played a wide range of supporting roles, from man-hungry spinsters to amoral criminals, appearing in 108 films in her 23-year screen career.
I Accuse My Parents is a 1944 American exploitation film dealing with juvenile delinquency. Produced by PRC, the film was used to teach morals, specifically that parents should take an interest in their children's lives, as well as the consequences of child neglect. It premiered on November 4, 1944 and was released generally on October 27, 1945.
Donald Ellis Brodie was an American film and television actor.
The Brute Man is a 1946 American horror thriller film starring Rondo Hatton as the Creeper, a murderer seeking revenge against the people he holds responsible for the disfigurement of his face. Directed by Jean Yarbrough, the film features Tom Neal and Jan Wiley as a married pair of friends the Creeper blames for his deformities. Jane Adams also stars as a blind pianist for whom the Creeper tries to raise money for an operation to restore her vision.
Scared Stiff is a 1945 American comedic murder mystery directed by Frank McDonald for Pine-Thomas Productions and released by Paramount Pictures. The film stars Jack Haley, Ann Savage and Barton MacLane.
Blonde Ice is a 1948 American crime film noir starring Leslie Brooks, Robert Paige, and Michael Whalen. Based on the 1938 novel Once Too Often by Elwyn Whitman Chambers, the B picture was directed by Jack Bernhard, with music by Irving Gertz.
Jack Irving Schwarz was an American independent producer of low-budget feature films in the 1940s and 1950s.
Isle of Forgotten Sins is an American South Seas adventure film released on August 15, 1943 by PRC, with Leon Fromkess in charge of production, directed by Edgar G. Ulmer and featuring top-billed John Carradine and Gale Sondergaard, whose performance in one of 1936's Academy Award for Best Picture nominees, Anthony Adverse, earned her the first Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.
Edmund Francis MacDonald was an American actor.
Apology for Murder is a 1945 American film noir directed by Sam Newfield and starring Ann Savage, Hugh Beaumont, Russell Hicks and Charles D. Brown.
Club Havana is a 1945 American film drama directed by Edgar G. Ulmer. It was produced and released by independent film company Producers Releasing Corporation. It has been compared to the 1933 film Grand Hotel.
Detour' essay by Daniel Eagan in America's Film Legacy: The Authoritative Guide to the Landmark Movies in the National Film Registry, A&C Black, 2010 ISBN0826429777, pages 386-388
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