Detour (1945)
Director: Edgar G. Ulmer
Starring: Tom Neal, Ann Savage
Honors:
Hollywood’s major studios were known for lavish productions
with superior quality and budgets. Most of what we know as Hollywood’s greatest
pictures during the 1940s were products of the usual major studios, but here resides
an example of a classic of a different kind. Produced by one of Hollywood’s
“poverty row” companies on a slim budget and swift production schedule come a
noir that would unexpectedly become one of the industry’s greatest independent
films, Detour. A motion picture that
would never compete on the level of an MGM, Paramount, or other large studio’s
production level, this film found quality in storytelling and would leave a
mark on cinema with the aid of the small screen, becoming a cherished classic
for many.
Detour is a film
noir of a man’s hitchhiking journey across the country finds him to be the
subject of a case of blackmail from another vagrant traveler who traps him in
his lie. Al Roberts (Tom Neal) sets to hitchhike from New York to Hollywood to
reunite and marry his girlfriend Sue (Claudia Drake). Depending on the kindness
of strangers for his travels leads Al to riding along with Charles (Edmund
MacDonald) a bookie who unexpectedly dies during their travels. Al panics,
ditching the body and assuming Charles’s car, documents, and even clothes to
temporarily take on his person just until he makes it to his destination. In kindness
along the way Al picks up another hitchhiker, Vera (Ann Savage), who pinpoints
Al’s forged identity as Charles, because she was picked up by Charles days
before.
Vera threatens Al with turning him in as Charles’ murder for
her own gain, essentially making him into her dejected, subservient slave. News
arises that Charles is due for a large inheritance, and Vera see the
opportunity to use Al posing as Charles to get the money all for herself. The
two quarrel in their motel room about the idea, when a drunk Vera threatens to
call the police with leads to the accentual death of Vera when Al unknowingly gets
Vera’s neck tangled in the phone line while attempted to pry the phone from her.
Now at the center of two deaths Al gives up on ever seeing his beloved Sue
again, ditching all that he has done thus far, and attempts to hitch back east,
imagining of the dreaded moment the authorities arrest him.
The film is a short (68 minutes), enthralling story of an
innocent man getting himself caught with the mess that ultimately ruins his
life. Obviously made with on a paltry budget with its lack of locations, set
decoration, with only a few no name actors, Detour
has all the suspense of a well written short story and proves that good
storytelling trumps the entertainment of lavish, empty movies. Detour was an amazing independent film
for its day that would play well up against any of the larger studio dramas of
the 1940s.
A product of Producers Releasing Corporation, PRC for short,
a meager company that made its business with low-budget features or foreign
imports they distributed usually played alongside of major studio second-run
pictures at neighborhood theaters. At the helm of Detour was director Edgar Ulmar, a Hungarian born filmmaker whose
supposed work began back in Europe under Fritz Lang before moving stateside and
becoming a B-movie director, with his best and most inspiring work coming at
Universal. His eye for visuals and keen sense of storytelling made him an
unsung director languishing in the background of Hollywood when he began work
at PRC.
With PRC being a studio of very low means, the common
formula was to make movies fast and cheap. This usually produced terrible
melodramas, campy horror films, westerns, and anything that would allow the
crews to make a film in just a couple weeks’ time with little to no need for
set construction of significant costuming. Detour
falls just in line with that. With minimal cast and settings that were either
in a small room, a car, or out in the desert Detour was a picture PRC was easily able to produce while letting
Ulmer’s storytelling to mold into a rather well made picture.
Starring former amateur boxer turned actor Tom Neal and
Columbia Pictures cast off Ann Savage, the two had worked together on a couple
of features before, but here in this low budget independent film, were given
starring roles. The two did not see eye to eye on set, having quarreled over
their ideas on acting and Neal’s inappropriate behavior towards Savage while on
set, leading to the two never talking to each other off screen. Ulmer was able
to capture this raw emotion in Savage’s performance along with Neal’s nervous
portrayal of Al to create a friction filled relationship between the two
characters. At times their performances are over the top, but in this picture
it feeds off the idea of hatred between the two.
The story of a man that in the middle of two accidental
deaths would be a tricky plot to work into any Hollywood motion picture with
the current day’s Production Code’s ethics. At that time they did not allow
murders to get away with their deeds, needing to show they paying for their
sins. To work around this was the tacked-on ending that saw Al imagining his
arrest, manifesting the debt he will pay for killing Vera, even though she was
the villain and the death was by accident. In any case the film’s conclusion
still works, leaving us with a broken man whose journey towards the one he
loves destroys his life.
Detour was a
critical success, but it was only a poverty row feature, never to see the wide
spread release to the measure of even any major studio B-picture would get. For
a film produced in less than a month it would gain critical notoriety, but
little else for filmmaker and studio. PCR would be gone by the end of 1946,
with what little assets left to blow in the wind. With the advent television
the picture found new audiences who would digest the film with the new brand of
home entertainment. Detour would
become an inexpensive feature to fill air time with high quality entertainment
for many stations, further distributing the picture for new audiences to
discover for decades. The film would become, in a way, a cult classic, playing
in revivals movie houses through the later decades of te 20th
century, keeping filmmaker and actors relevant in their later years.
With the introduction of the National Film Registry to the
Library of Congress in 1992, Detour
would receive the high honor of being one of the inaugural 100 entrants onto
the list of preserved American pictures in the nation’s greatest library. This
manifests just how highly revered the picture had been in the American
cinematic mind. Despite the fact the picture is not well known within common
audiences, Detour has left a distinct
impact on the American cinema as an independent feature film that proved to
leave a lasting impression in an industry of giants.
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