DETOUR is a widely acknowledged 1945 Film Noir classic starring Ann Savage, Tom Neal and directed by Edgar G. Ulmer. Produced by Independent Distributor PRC (owned by international giant PATHE), DETOUR was shot in Hollywood and long considered a low budget "Poverty Row" quickie. It was decades ahead of its time. The raw naturalism of DETOUR influenced generations of actors, including Marlon Brando, and filmmakers from Francois Truffaut to Wim Wenders and Martin Scorsese who said it was "an inspiration over the years to low-budget filmmakers." Tom Neal had started at MGM in the 1930s. He directly offended Joan Crawford, queen bee at Metro, and was personally escorted off the lot by tough guy executive Eddie Mannix. Ann Savage made three b- movies at Columbia Pictures with Tom Neal before they shot Detour. She was creative and headstrong, qualities studios did not value in their contract actors during the 1940s. Her option was not renewed.
Director Edgar Ulmer was blacklisted by all the major studios when he ran off with the wife of the favorite nephew of Universal Studios owner, Carl Laemmle. All three found work and a thriving community in b movies at Hollywood studios like PRC, REPUBLIC and MONOGRAM. They were the original homes of the first "independent" filmmakers. This is the nearly forgotten underground world that we are documenting in DETOUR: '45.
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"Noah Isenberg has combined dogged detective work and an acute critical sense to create the first portrait of Edgar G. Ulmer that casts light into the dark corners of this gifted filmmaker’s labyrinthine career. Ulmer’s own life seems as spectacularly accursed as that of the protagonist of his most famous work, the 1945 film noir Detour, yet Isenberg uncovers something noble and ultimately quite moving in Ulmer’s unflagging pursuit of high art under the most unlikely circumstances."—Dave Kehr, author of When Movies Mattered.
From the moment that the opening credits appear on the screen, we find ourselves tearing along the open road -a road that 'lies behind us', as John Belton argues. The reverse tracking shot of a desert highway, captured from the back window of a moving car, combined with the dramatical orchestral score by Erdody, immediately sets the feverish pace and the tenor of the film. Unlike the novel's Alexander Roth, Al Roberts is not marked as specifically Jew. And yet he bears traits of a luftmensh or Wandering Jew. In Grissemann's apt summation: "Ulmer hands over his characters to a labyrinth of bars, motel rooms and highway rest stops -to anonymous spaces that could be anywhere or to a nowhere, a world for nothing and nobody. The locales of Detour are way stations, places of passage. Everything else Ulmer boldly eliminates. In contrast to Goldsmith's novel, his film noir gets by without any proper home, without living or private quarters." -"Edgar G. Ulmer: A Filmmaker at the Margins" (Weimar and Now: German Cultural Criticism) by Noah Isenberg (2014)
“Whichever way you turn,” mutters Al Roberts (Tom Neal) in the closing moments of Detour (1945), “fate sticks out its foot to trip you up.” The remark has come to sum up the cynical tone of the films grouped under what has become—inscholarly circles, at least—the contentious label of film noir. Shot in just six days and running at a taut sixty-eight minutes, Edgar G. Ulmer’s low-budget classic has become one of classical Hollywood’s most unlikely canonical works. As such, Noah Isenberg’s monograph is preoccupied with how Detour has managed to outrun its fate “as the bastard child of one of Hollywood’s lowliest Poverty Row studios”. As typies the BFI’s Film Classics series, Isenberg’s slim volume is carefully argued, impeccably researched, and arrives packing a critical punch which belies its lightweight appearance.
In contrast with the uncompromising fatalism of Ulmer’s film, Isenberg outlines how Detour was happily rescued on a number of fronts. On the one hand, 1960s auteurist critics like Andrew Sarris rehabilitated Ulmer as a cinéaste maudit, “a romantic, tragic figure, whose style and sensibility spurn the dominant norms”. Elsewhere, the enduring critical fascination with film noir among both hard-bitten cinephiles and the academic community ensured that the mad poetry of Ulmer’s bleak “asphalt film” remained on the critical radar. But, as Isenberg demonstrates, it was not until the early 1980s that Detour became more than “a private treasure among the interested few.”
Al Roberts’s disequilibrium is presented in the film by two different representations of the femme fatale. Sue is a blond woman who, after a short episode at the beginning of the film, appears only in short sequences when Al tries to reach her by phone. Sue functions for Al as a part of the patriarchally institutionalized relationship: marriage. To the viewer, the scenes offer a chilling chimera that is miles away from the Sue that Roberts projects.
Vera is Sue’s other Self. She is dark-haired, passionate, energetic, and tangible. Al is more and more infatuated by her charm and manipulation. If Roberts speaks about some mysterious force, then Vera is the physical representation of this unpresentable concept. Although Ann Savage, who stars as Vera, appears only in the second half of the film, her appearance is unforgettable. The camera accentuates her physical beauty, and, with her mesmerizing looks and harsh, sharp words, she dominates each scene. Her accidental death corresponds with the feminist interpretation of the masculine desire to conquer fate. While Vera is existentially present, Sue is only an illusion. The frame shot in which Sue reappears in Al’s imagination Ulmer and the Noir Femme Fatale in the reflection of the rear mirror shortly before he encounters “fate” is among the most fascinating in the film. The camera shows Al’s face in the rear mirror of Haskell’s car, which in the center of the frame is conspicuous in the darkness. Sue, singing in a close-fitting, glittering dress, appears in a fade-in/fade-out, with the shadows of musicians in the background. The shot’s diagonal outlines and the low Dutch angle of the camera disrupt the compositional unity. The visual means of expression are the iconographic representation of Roberts’s disturbed mind, and they foreshadow Al’s submissiveness toward “fate.”
Faultlessly described as having “the handsome looks of an ex-boxer and a preternatural capacity for sulking”, Neal’s maudlin schmuck is at the luckless epicenter of Detour, a man with a face as rough-hewn as the production values of the movie itself. Ulmer uses only two sets, which he rearranges and alters depending on the setting. The shots filmed in the car are accomplished with a static camera and a movable background. In spite of this, the forced perspective, the expressionist motifs, and the nightmarish world grounded in fatalism produce the atmosphere of one of the blackest film noirs ever made in the classic period between 1935 and 1955.
The early 1940s found Ann Savage working just unbilled walk-on parts. Her primary line of business at that time was as a pinup girl, quite popular with the troops—a gig that rewarded her most rudimentary physical assets but said nothing about her talent. Detour represented a major break for the struggling actress. “I had never had a good part like that,” she would later say. In stark contrast to what had gone before, Ulmer sought to conceal her glamour, hiding her beauty behind dirty makeup and greasy hair. He encouraged her to scream and sneer, to disregard what was ladylike. “I often tell young actresses—if you can play Vera, you can play anything.” The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences agreed, and in 2005 praised her as an “icon and legend.” Following Detour, her career took off, with Savage often cast in femme-fatale roles, costarring five times with Tom Neal.
Like Savage, Neal was given a role that connected to his own personality and life. He was educated as a lawyer and a boxer—two professions in opposite spheres, perhaps, but also just different ways in which to fight. There was a simmering, seething anger in Neal. In Detour he played a man driven to self-destruction, and afterward he followed that maleficent detour to his own doom. Forged in the fire of a writer’s frustration, it started off as a way for Martin Goldsmith to vent. Goldsmith’s most personal novel would come to be seen as Edgar Ulmer’s most personal film, starring actors whose lives flitted through a similar orbit. The magic of Detour is in the curious circumstance by which Goldsmith’s angry screed turned out to be fully transferable —what was “personal” was also universal. Wade Williams III’s mistake was in thinking that this unique alignment of artists and opportunities could be reduced to a simple formula, to be repeated decades later, to anything resembling the same result. “I really am looking for absolution for all the things I had to do for money’s sake,” Ulmer told Peter Bogdanovich. It is a statement that could just as easily have been uttered by anyone else involved in this classic film. In Detour, they found it. -"The Films of Edgar G. Ulmer" (2009) by Bernd Herzogenrath
Edgar G. Ulmer considerably shortened Goldsmith's script. Detour runs only 65 minutes, and Goldsmith's script would have called for a movie more than two hours long. Ulmer was also adept at shooting quickly and interestingly, hence the ragged feel of the movie. Ulmer also invented the idea during the climax of moving the camera in and out of focus over the objects in the hotel room after the murder. It's one of the darkest movies ever made, which perhaps comes from Ulmer's association with Lang. It's a desperate movie, as grim as it is charming. It easily belongs on a list of the 100 greatest movies ever made.
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