Detour (1945)

Cool cover art. Reminds me of Sin City.

I just watched Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg (2007), and in it is 86-year-old Ann Savage, an actor who had been retired from the movies for over 50 years. That made really curious to see what the 24-year-old Savage was like. In My Winnipeg, I couldn't tell if she could act, or if the weirdness of the film just called for Savage to be weird. To be honest, after watching Detour, I still don't know for sure if she can act, because her performance is weird in a film noir sort of way. The basic premise is that Al (Tom Neal) needs to hitch across country. His girlfriend is in L.A. She wanted to see if she could make it there, but she quickly discovers she can't. Al wants to get out there and marry her quick. Unfortunately, "fate" isn't kind to Al. He ends up getting a ride from a guy who either died while Al was driving or who died falling out of the passenger's side door, hitting his head on a rock. Al's bad luck continues when he picks up another hitcher, Vera (Savage), who just happens to be the mean girl attached to the dead guy Al had been riding with. That's a pretty big coincidence. Also, if I was in Al's spot, I'm not sure I would have picked up a hitcher while I was driving away in a dead man's car. Al's description of Vera is interesting. He calls her beautiful in a homely, non-movie star sort of way. One thing about her, for sure, she has penetrating eyes. She stares so hard that it feels like her eyes could cut diamonds. Edgar G. Ulmer is the director of this low-budget B-film. I'm not familiar with his work, but there's a documentary of him on the Criterion edition -- it's actually longer than the film itself, which clocks in at a short 68 minutes. As I write the review, I haven't watched the documentary yet, but I did look over his body of work. This is his film with the highest IMDb rating. None of his other films rang a bell. *** Ulmer documentary "Within the man was a great film." -- Peter Marshall, in conversation with John Saxon (actors in The Cavern - 1961), reminiscing about the life and career of film director Edgar Ulmer. The documentary of Edgar Ulmer (included on the Detour Criterion DVD) paints him as a man who wanted recognition for being a great director. He never got it, and once he was pigeonholed as a B-film director, he was never able to escape that label. As he approached his death, he worried about his legacy, convinced that all of his films would be, not just forgotten, but also destroyed. That is, film preservation was expensive, and no one Studio was in charge of his body of work. After he died, his daughter spent the next seven years tracking down copies of his films from various places. She was able to consolidate his work and make sure it survived so that eventually people like me would be able to watch it and then write posts like this about it. Now, that's not to say that he's well-remembered. It took me 50+ years to discover and watch his work, but I like the story of who he was and who he wanted to be. It's sad that not everyone gets to be who they want to be, no matter how hard they try. He tried, and perhaps that was enough. Perhaps some of his work will live on, and as time goes on, if he's only remembered for Detour (1945), that might be enough of an accomplishment to let him rest in peace. *** I did like some of the camera and lighting techniques used in the film. It might be a low-budget B-film, but Ulmer did nice work with what he had to work with. Maybe with a stronger ending, I'd add a little more to the rating, but the ending was flat for me. I do like Noir, but to me the gold standard will always be Double Indemnity, and this one, which is interesting for some of its style, had a rather preposterous plot and a weak ending.

Rating: 2.5/5 stars