Detour (dir. Edgar G. Ulmer, 1945)
Is there anything more hopeless than a doomed piano player?
Nightclub musician Al Roberts (Tom Neal) is hitchhiking across the country. His girlfriend Sue Harvey (Claudia Drake) left him and New York for Los Angeles. Roberts, having nothing left in the city, decides to follow her. Drifting down the desolate roads of America, he is picked up by gambler Charles Haskell, Jr. (Edmund McDonald), who dies en route to California while Roberts is in the driver’s seat. Believing he has no other choice available, Roberts dumps the body and assumes Haskell’s identity, planning to dump the car as soon as he reaches Los Angeles. By chance or contrivance, Roberts stops for a fellow hitchhiker Vera (Ann Savage), who had herself ridden with Haskell previously. Realizing Roberts’s ruse, she blackmails him into giving what money he has. Upon arriving in Los Angeles, the two rent an apartment in a grotesque parody of domesticity. Vera intends to bilk Haskell’s dying father for his inheritance. A drunken argument, a phone cord, and a shut door all come together to result in Vera’s death in a manner somewhere between accident and murder–so aggravated manslaughter if Roberts is lucky, which, of course, he isn’t. Roberts knows that there’s only one way this can end for him.
Then the film is over.
Reduced to this sketch of a plot, it seems a little threadbare. That’s because it is. These are the most basic elements of a noir story: a luckless protagonist, a dangerous woman, an ending that feels inevitable. Roberts’s narration is nothing revelatory and always has a secondhand familiarity to it. His musings on fate are either justifications for his own actions or ascribing blind chance to some higher power, but that’s nothing unexpected in this genre. The whole film feels like a half-remembered episode coming back to you–yes, yes, I do think I’ve seen this one. Maybe…
It shouldn’t work much at all, and yet it is a minor masterpiece.
Detour’s production history is a bit fabled–and exaggerated, as is the case with many aspects of director Edgar G. Ulmer’s life. The story that it was shot on six days for 20,000 dollars is untrue, but it was undoubtedly a low budget with few sets and no name stars attached. You can, however, make up for limited resources by being more creative than a B-picture necessarily requires. The right amount of fog can turn a backlot into an impressionistic New York. A stretch of road can be imbued with existential heaviness if framed correctly and with the right words in voice-over. And sometimes, those unknown actors are exactly what you need. Tom Neal was as destined for misfortune as Al Roberts, and Ann Savage’s performance as Vera is every bit the equal of Barbara Stanwyck and Lana Turner.
More than anything else, though? Detour is imbued with atmosphere: as bleak as Beckett and preordained as the Greek tragedy. As describing something as ‘dreamlike’ is overdone at this point, I will do even worse and describe it as hypnagogic. The film feels like it’s the process of waking itself up. The tension between the ordinary and the bizarre, the everyday and the exceptional is present throughout the film. In a way, Roberts’s invocation of fate is that, preferable to the mundane bad luck that has come to define a loser’s life, or worse, the deliberate crimes of an unreliable narrator who cannot face what he has done. Perhaps in the world of Detour, there’s just not a lot of difference between any of those realities.
oliveresque 