Detour (1945)There's a saying that no good deed goes unpunished--it's the kind of saying that would make a suitable epitaph for the hapless Al Roberts (Tom Neal). Detour (1945) is a film noir thriller about a piano player in a nightclub (Al), who hitchhikes from New York to Los Angeles to be reunited with his singer girlfriend, Sue (Claudia Drake), who is trying her hand at Hollywood. A man named Charles Haskell, Jr. (Edmund MacDonald) gives him a lift, only to accidentally drop dead on the way. Al panics and tries to cover up the death by posing as Haskell; but he makes the mistake of picking up a former hitchhiker of Haskell's--a salty, hard drinking dame who calls herself "Vera" (Ann Savage)--who subsequently blackmails him.
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Most of Detour is a flashback, narrated by Al as he sulks in a diner outside of Reno, recalling the grim turn of events that led him to life on the run. Al is always sour, griping with Sue about working in a dive bar while his girlfriend is pawed by drunks between her performances of "I Can't Believe That You're in Love with Me"--a song which now sends Al into a rage. He longs to be a professional pianist at Carnegie Hall, and isn't that bad of a tickler of the ivories, evidenced by his after hours session as Sue looks on, his cigarette precariously dangling from his lower lip. Sue sees bigger things for her future, and Al stays behind in New York when she leaves for the West Coast. It isn't until he realizes how lucky he is to have her that he pawns all his goods, which forces him to hitch across the country to join with her. Detour comes from Al's perspective and is colored by his recollection of the past. He doesn't explain why he stayed behind when she left, but it's clear that it was out of spite--and Al withholds this even from the audience. Al's memory of events always seem to favor his ego. After Haskell picks up Al and treats him to a meal, his benefactor's subsequent death is ambiguous. Al appears to try to wake him to no avail; when he opens the passenger door and Haskell hits his head on a rock, Al blames "Fate" for being out to get him. Al's paranoid fantasy that he would be blamed for Haskell's murder becomes his justification for dumping the body in the rain-soaked brush of the Arizona desert. He takes the man's money, car, and even his clothes for the rest of his trip to California; he considers how suspicious it all looks, and he'd be right. Al learns that Haskell was a "chiseler", planning on grifting his own father when he got to the west coast--this helps to take the sting out of his guilt. Al's flashback deliberately intimates that he picked up Vera at the side of the road near a dusty gas station because he sympathizes with her plight, recently being a hitcher himself. But something Haskell said earlier about his "expectations" about women who hitchhike--women like Vera--makes it clear what the reason Al eyes Vera really is...the kind of reason that earned Haskell the nasty scratches on his hand. Al offers a charming smile to his passenger and thinks how she possesses a "kind of beauty"--his sole purpose in going to Hollywood being a reunion with Sue notwithstanding. Al is drawn to Vera's own sour, nihilistic world view, which mirrors his--even after she realizes that she's been picked up in the same car by a man who she knows is not Haskell, in a moment that is the apex of inconvenient coincidences.
Detour reminds me of a comment made by Robert Mitchum about film noir: "we used to call them B-pictures". This film was made over the course of six days on a slim budget, and it shows; it seems to relish its deliberately low stature with a kind of tawdry pride. Sue informs Al that she is going to Hollywood as they walk through the pre-dawn streets of the Big Apple, which are smothered with an incomprehensibly thick layer of fog that doesn't even pretend that this wasn't shot on a movie set. There are moments that seem designed to pad the running time, despite being just over an hour long--like the extended sequences of Al performing at the nightclub. When Al decides to join Sue, his long distance phone call to her lacks the right timing for her to reply with plausible responses. These "rough edges" add to the ambience of Detour--it feels like a neglected midnight movie, and a cheapie pulp thriller with a few eye-rolling chuckles. Vera always has a caustic glare in her eyes; she is unquestionably the meanest of femme fatales, unrelentingly dragooning Al into her schemes and capitalizing on Al's misfortune with a quickness suggesting that she has done this before. It is possible that she also resents Al because he reminds her of Haskell; the reasons she gave him those vicious scratches on his hand are best left to the imagination. Al has no hope of evading her talons once she declares in no uncertain terms that he must do everything she says or find himself on death row; she alternates her threats between hanging or the gas chamber to drive her point home. She gets a room for them to share--signing them in as husband and wife--and she immediately gets drunk; her alcoholism a symptom of her all-consuming hatred for the world, and not the other way around. She suggests that Al sleeps with her at one point--not out of love, but merely boredom. Al is benumbed to her sardonic attitude, as though he finds some twisted comfort in being subservient to her. Vera arouses the dark side within him that he pretends doesn't exist, as though she were the devil and Sue was his angel. Perhaps the real reason Al didn't leave with Sue in the first place was because he believed that he deserved the kind of punishment that comes from being trampled under the heels of a woman like Vera.
Recommended for: Fans of a quick and cheap film noir classic that is more memorable for its imperfections, yet remains a testament to a style of filmmaking that helped mold the genre. The paranoid protagonist, the venomous and morally vacuous woman who antagonizes him, and the gritty setting gives Detour all the style of a lurid, vintage paperback one might find hidden away in a musty bargain bin.
Detour reminds me of a comment made by Robert Mitchum about film noir: "we used to call them B-pictures". This film was made over the course of six days on a slim budget, and it shows; it seems to relish its deliberately low stature with a kind of tawdry pride. Sue informs Al that she is going to Hollywood as they walk through the pre-dawn streets of the Big Apple, which are smothered with an incomprehensibly thick layer of fog that doesn't even pretend that this wasn't shot on a movie set. There are moments that seem designed to pad the running time, despite being just over an hour long--like the extended sequences of Al performing at the nightclub. When Al decides to join Sue, his long distance phone call to her lacks the right timing for her to reply with plausible responses. These "rough edges" add to the ambience of Detour--it feels like a neglected midnight movie, and a cheapie pulp thriller with a few eye-rolling chuckles. Vera always has a caustic glare in her eyes; she is unquestionably the meanest of femme fatales, unrelentingly dragooning Al into her schemes and capitalizing on Al's misfortune with a quickness suggesting that she has done this before. It is possible that she also resents Al because he reminds her of Haskell; the reasons she gave him those vicious scratches on his hand are best left to the imagination. Al has no hope of evading her talons once she declares in no uncertain terms that he must do everything she says or find himself on death row; she alternates her threats between hanging or the gas chamber to drive her point home. She gets a room for them to share--signing them in as husband and wife--and she immediately gets drunk; her alcoholism a symptom of her all-consuming hatred for the world, and not the other way around. She suggests that Al sleeps with her at one point--not out of love, but merely boredom. Al is benumbed to her sardonic attitude, as though he finds some twisted comfort in being subservient to her. Vera arouses the dark side within him that he pretends doesn't exist, as though she were the devil and Sue was his angel. Perhaps the real reason Al didn't leave with Sue in the first place was because he believed that he deserved the kind of punishment that comes from being trampled under the heels of a woman like Vera.
Recommended for: Fans of a quick and cheap film noir classic that is more memorable for its imperfections, yet remains a testament to a style of filmmaking that helped mold the genre. The paranoid protagonist, the venomous and morally vacuous woman who antagonizes him, and the gritty setting gives Detour all the style of a lurid, vintage paperback one might find hidden away in a musty bargain bin.