Detour (1945, Dir. Edgar G. Ulmer):
Money. You know what that is, the stuff you never have enough of. Little green things with George Washington’s picture that men slave for, commit crimes for, die for. It’s the stuff that has caused more trouble in the world than anything else we ever invented, simply because there’s too little of it.
Al Roberts, “Detour”
The open highway: is there anything quite so American, so Manifest Destiny, or fraught with such romance and treachery? Many a classic movie has mined our freeways as a prominent backdrop for either Happily Ever After or crack-ups of the worst kind, but when it comes to cynical, tawdry and twisted highway noir, few can match one of the earliest entries in the genre, Detour.
Produced on a shoestring budget for PRC Pictures (aka Hollywood’s “Poverty Row”), starring a bunch of no-names, and filmed in under a month, Detour was never intended to be a classic, yet its deficiencies contribute to its power. Who needs A-listers bathed in soft-glow light when you have the lowest of low-lifes rocketing down a road to nowhere? The lowest of them all is Al Roberts (Tom Neal), a sad-sack musician who we come across in a Reno diner at the beginning of the film in less than salubrious shape. He’s all too willing to narrate his tale of woe to us from inside his head: “Did you ever want to forget anything?” he asks rhetorically, but the curse of noir is that the past never forgets, even if it’s something in our rear-view mirror, like the scenery that recedes from us in the opening credits.
Al has never had it all, but the way he tells it, he at least had something: a steady gig at a New York nightclub and an “ordinary, healthy romance” with a doll of a singer named Sue (Claudia Drake). Like any self-respecting hustling artist, Sue is keen on moving to Hollywood and making it big; her favorite song is “I Can’t Believe You’re in Love with Me,” a tune that doesn’t sit well with Al, given his advanced case of self-loathing. When he finally decides to get off his duff and hitchhike his way to L.A., it’s ostensibly to join his gal, but we all know what he’s really thinking, as he regards a $10 tip with the unsatisfied hunger of a ravenous wolf. “A piece of paper crawling with germs,” he scoffs bitterly. “Couldn’t buy anything I wanted.”
Al’s freeway odyssey begins well enough when he’s picked up by a chummy, generous guy named Haskell (Edmund MacDonald), who represents a vision of Al made good: flush with success as a bookie, owner of a sweet Lincoln Continental, at ease with himself and the world. Then again, his anecdotes about himself contain hints of menace. There’s a bit about the time he “accidentally” blinded a kid with a rapier and ran away from home, never to return, or a story about a recent hitchhiker who clawed some very noticeable scratches onto the back of his hand. “I was tussling with the most dangerous animal in the world—a woman,” he jokes, but it’s unclear as to how culpable he was in her assault. “Give a lift to a tomato, you expect it to be nice, don’t you?” he reasons. “After all, what kind of dames thumb rides? Sunday school teachers?”
Sure enough, things go to pot quickly, as a random accident kills Haskell. Stuck with a corpse on the side of the highway in the dead of night, Al talks himself into appropriating the man’s identity, money and car, reasoning that no sane person would believe that Haskell’s death was an accident. “They’d laugh at the truth and I’d have my head in the noose,” he argues to himself (and us), spelling out the essential fatalistic truth of noir: no matter how innocent we pretend to be, it’s only a matter of time before we lead ourselves into trouble we can’t get out of.
From there the film descends into a purgatory where motivations, actions and plans become as aimless as the sun-baked roads Al motors along. Forget happy ever afters and lovers reunited: Detour lives up to its title by matching its plot movement to Al’s roundabout motion, as he carves a circle to LA and back towards New York, caught in an eternal loop. There’s only the next scuzzy diner, the next fleabag apartment or hotel, the next desperate grab for money. Most of all, there’s a harpie hanging over Al’s shoulder: Vera (Ann Savage), who rolls onto the scene halfway through the movie like the baddest of pennies. Her face frozen in a gargoyle glare, mussed up and messed up, she’s a low-rent woman who cares not a whit what you think of her. “How far are you goin’?” Al asks her. “How far are you goin’?” she retorts. The answer to both questions is: too far. Within minutes of hitching a ride with Al, she snaps at him like a cobra sinking its teeth into its prey, “Where’d you bury him?” It turns out she’s the hitchhiker who scratched up Haskell, and having put two and two together, she’s ready to blackmail Al to do her bidding.
Vera: I’m gonna see that you sell this car so you don’t get caught.
Al: Thanks. Of course, your interest wouldn’t be financial, would it? You wouldn’t want a small percentage of the profits?
Vera: Well, now that you insist, how can I refuse? 100% will do.
Al: Fine. I’m relieved. I thought for a moment you were gonna take it all.
Vera: I don’t wanna be a hog.
From there, one might expect a contest of wills, with Al seeking to outwit his oppressor, but the weak-chinned, whiny Neal doesn’t have a chance. Dragged around San Bernardino like a bedraggled pup, he’s putty in Savage’s hands. “From now on, you and I are like the Siamese twins,” she proclaims as she relieves him of his money and dignity, reminding him that all that separates him from “sniffin’ that perfume Arizona hands out free to murderers” is a single phone call. Their repartee soon shades into sadomasochistic territory, with Al a little too happy to trade wisecracks with his tormentor. Vera may be a harridan and a low-life, but it becomes clear that these two losers are actually made for each other.
Detour avoids the expected at nearly every turn, as the couple’s attempts to stay clear of the law and break free from poverty only end up turning them against each other in true dog-eat-dog fashion. For all the whispered warnings about cops, their mutual desperation and misery is far more deadly. Martin Goldsmith’s spare screenplay (the film’s run time was reportedly pruned quite a bit for the final edit, with lengthier dialogue bits chopped down) is peppered with existential quandaries and unanswered questions. Is Vera’s prominent cough a sign of TB or another fatal illness? Was Haskell really the straight-up guy he painted himself to be? Is it worth haggling over $200 when selling a stolen car? No one has any answers, even as director Edgar G. Ulmer shrinks the locations to used car offices and faceless, ramshackle bedrooms, to the point where even the allure of a lonely highway is taken away. Many post-World War II movies depict a return to rosy communities or a move to bustling new suburban outposts, the American Dream renewed; Detour depicts the flip side, for what’s desolation and rootlessness but the other side of freedom? While Vera presents herself as a go-getter (“Life’s like a ballgame. You gotta swing at whatever comes along before you wake up and find it’s the ninth inning”), her fate and Al’s are fixed the moment they lay eyes on each other—Siamese twins, indeed.
Ulmer’s no-budget effects—roads rendered in rear-projection, singers filmed against silhouettes of horn players—only heighten Detour‘s claustrophobia, with Savage dominating the frame as she takes the film over the top. Her Vera is the snarliest of all femme fatales, her aggressiveness an affront and a come-on that somehow wins us over even as she subjects Al to one humiliation after another. It’s a performance that didn’t receive much notice at the time but has come to be recognized as one of the key achievements in noir. Detour concludes with another shocking accident/murder and a striking cinematic flourish: a slow pan across an apartment, the victim’s belongings bobbing in and out of focus like detritus floating in the wake of a capsized ship, underscoring how little this all meant in the end. Disregard the final shot in which the police catch the culprit (an ending forced on the film by the Motion Picture Production Code, which decreed that no major crime could go unpunished); it’s best to think of Detour as an endless road of abandoned pasts and bleak futures, with Al and Vera forever falling short of elusive salvation, stuck in a world where no one believes themselves to be guilty and everyone receives a comeuppance. ■
