Movie Review – Detour

Detour (1945)
Written by Martin Goldsmith
Directed by Edgar G. Ulmer

Noir is not exclusively the realm of detective stories. Detective pictures are under its broad umbrella, but some of my favorite noir films focus on people who get into trouble and can’t escape it. There might be a crime they can commit that would fix their financial situation, or they may be convinced to join in a conspiracy to murder with promises of sex & money. These are the genre at its best, exploring the deep flaws in humanity and how we so often sabotage ourselves. Detour is one of these, possibly one of the bleakest noir films from this period. It was released by the Producers Releasing Corporation, which at the time was the smallest and least prestigious studio in Hollywood. Gower Street in Hollywood made up “Poverty Row,” a low-rent stretch where the lowest-budget studios operated. They made money, but it was often by chasing trends or simply making movies quick & cheap. Detour never feels like that; it’s a masterpiece from a filmmaking system that rarely produced such work.

Al (Tom Neal) is an unemployed piano player who pursues his girlfriend out to California, where she’s gone to have a singing career. Al hitches his way from New York City to the West Coast with little money. Most of his trip is uneventful until he gets to Arizona. Al is picked up by a bookie named Charlie Haskell, Jr. Eventually, Haskell asks Al to take the wheel while he gets some much-needed sleep. Hours later, during a stop on the side of the road, Al discovers the man is unresponsive, having died from a heart attack. He opens the door, and the man’s body falls out, cracking his skull on a rock. Al realizes the authorities will assume he attacked and killed Haskell, so he hides the body in the brush and takes on the dead man’s identity.

A couple days into California, Al picks up a hitchhiker named Vera (Ann Savage). She’s very cagey around Al and asks a lot of questions. Vera reveals that she rode with Haskell back in Louisiana and that this man did not give her a ride. She’s convinced Al murdered the real Haskell and threatens to go to the police. Later, they both learn that Mr. Haskell is entitled to a considerable sum of money, and she wants a piece of it, coercing Al into going forward and continuing his assumed identity. But of course, crime can’t pay in these movies, and things eventually take a remarkably dark turn. 

Detour’s ending scene is a clear case of finding a loophole in the Hays Code, the film censorship board in the States during this time. The images show a man being pulled over and arrested by the police (adhering to the “crime doesn’t pay” rule), while the voice-over narration speaks about this event as a thing that may happen in the future. This way, the film appeases the censors but can still be read so that there is no actual resolution. Al is a character whose final fate in this story is pitch black. His prospects with his girlfriend have become impossible, and Vera has worsened the situation. Al is a man without a place to go. His initial identity is destroyed, so returning to NYC is out of the question. However, he has no prospects in California. A person in Al’s position will simply become a drifter, unmoored from any community.

The performances in Detour are stock hardboiled noir. Our hero has a persistent hangdog look, while Vera sports a permanent snarl, a wild dog ready to snap at anyone who fucks with her. There’s an amount of horrible coincidence that takes a suspension of disbelief, but noir and horror are cousins, so they both push credulity. By allowing dramatically devastating things to happen, we feel the world become quicksand; the harder Al struggles, the quicker he gets pulled under.

There comes a very interesting point where Al could leave Vera behind and try to continue his journey; a moment happens when freedom is within his grasp. Yet, he chooses to stay, to be harangued and threatened by this woman without any end. That character decision speaks volumes about who Al really is more than any of his more grandiose actions. A darker psychological aspect emerges from this decision: Al holds tremendous guilt and believes he should be punished for it, with Vera to mete out the pain. 

The noir genre has this interesting wrinkle where the protagonist loves to blame Fate for his circumstances; their voice-over narration often pines away that if the universe hadn’t gotten in the way, everything would have worked out. Yet, their actions on screen often contradict that self-aggrandizing inner monologue. The universe is unaware of the existence of these ants, and they end up where they do because they are desperate and do desperate things. Al’s narration is all about making excuses as the audience clearly sees him make bad choice after bad choice, his voice pleading & whining that it wasn’t really his fault. 

These are things that, through a particular modern lens, get erroneously read as “plot holes.” No, it’s an unreliable narrator, one of the juiciest & most compelling narrative elements in all of literature & film. In Al, I hear lame excuses for certain things in my life. We’ve all been guilty of trying to rewrite history in our memories, refusing to acknowledge what other choices we could have made. Detour is about two people who live in a rancorous, cutthroat society, doing whatever it takes to survive the next day. The problem is that what it takes are actions that lead to death.