Detour (1945) - Video On Demand

Detour - Movie Review

Detour is a film noir cult classic that stars Tom Neal, Ann Savage, Claudia Drake, and Edmund MacDonald. Although made on a small budget and containing only rudimentary sets and camera work, the film has garnered substantial praise through the years and is held in high regard.

A piano player, Al (Tom Neal), sets off hitchhiking his way to California to be with his girl. Along the way, a stranger in a convertible gives him a ride. While driving, Al stops to put the top up during a rainstorm. He discovers that the owner of the car has died in his sleep. Al panics and dumps the body in a gully and drives off in his car. Later, he picks up another hitchhiker. Vera (Ann Savage), a femme fatale, threatens to turn him in for the supposed murder unless he assumes the identity of the dead man to collect an inheritance

Conceived as a B-movie, Detour was shot in six days with a budget of $89,000, ending up costing $117,000. With re-shoots out of the question for such a low budget movie, director Edgar G. Ulmer made the decision to place storytelling conventions above continuity. Detour's famous example of this is the reversal of the hitchhiking scenes. In order to parallel the westbound New York to Los Angeles travel of the character with right-to-left movement across the screen, many scenes had to be flipped. This caused the cars to appear to be driving on the wrong side of the road, and the hitchhiker to enter the car on the driver's side. Because the 1945 Production code mandated that "murderers... must be brought to justice", director Ulmer satisfied censors by ending the movie with Al being picked up after predicting his arrest earlier.

The film's darkness in both style and content owes much to its fabled director, Edgar G. Ulmer. Ulmer got his start as a set and production designer at the heart of German expressionism. He worked on all the most important contributions to the silent expressionist cannon: Paul Wegener's The Golem, F.W. Murnau's The Last Laugh, Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Fritz Lang's M to name a few.

Detour - Cast & Crew

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