Happy Anniversary, Ann Savage!

Happy Anniversary, Ann Savage!


Ann Savage and Tom Neal in "Detour" (1945)
directed by Edgar G. Ulmer

The lead actors selected for the film were all relatively unknown players from the American B-movie circuit. Ulmer had already worked together with Tom Neal, ‘a poor man’s Clark Gable’, on Club Havana (1945), one of his fly-by-night melodramas for PRC. With the handsome looks of an ex-boxer and a preternatural capacity for sulking, Neal was cast in the role of sad sack Al Roberts, a talented New York pianist who, in his desperate attempt to reach his fiancée in Los Angeles, gets dealt a bad hand a couple of times over.


In the more critical role of Vera, Al’s acid-tongued nemesis, a thoroughly downand-out dame who fiendishly drops into the picture midway and keeps things in a headlock until her unceremonious exit, a feisty actress with a curiously apt nom de guerre, Ann Savage (née Bernice Maxine Lyon), was cast. Savage and Neal had previously played opposite each other in a few Bs for Columbia – William Castle’s Klondike Kate (1943), Lew Landers’s Two-Man Submarine (1944) and Herman Rotsten’s The Unwritten Code (1944) – and the two had an established screen chemistry and a bit of history, both on and off screen. (While shooting their first film together in 1943, Neal purportedly wasted no time overstepping the boundaries of professionalism, making an untoward pass at Savage by burying his tongue deep in her ear; she is said to have rewarded him with a prompt grazing of her knuckles across his face.


Ann Savage was brought in to see Ulmer on the set of Club Havana, with just over a week left before the shooting of Detour began; after a quick once-over, she immediately fell into favour with the director.


In a considerable departure from Goldsmith’s novel, the tale is told exclusively from Al Roberts’s perspective. Roberts serves as the film’s narrator – delivering half his lines in a pained, edgy voice-over whose primary task, beyond recounting his life as a cursed nightclub pianist and a cursed hitchhiker, is explaining the inexplicable, proving to himself, as well as to the audience, that he is essentially powerless in his losing battle against fate. The story of Al Roberts begins where it ends: on the open highway. Seated at the counter of a Nevada diner, in a tableau that evokes the canvas of Edward Hopper’s iconic 1942 painting Nighthawks, Roberts cries into his coffee mug. The tale he tells, whittled down from Goldsmith’s oversized script, is one of loss, with a tragic core that intensifies as the human wreckage piles up all around him until he is no longer able to find a way out. Source: www.palgrave.com