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“Detour” is a movie so filled with imperfections that it would not earn the director a passing grade in film school. This movie from Hollywood’s poverty row, shot in six days, filled with technical errors and ham-handed narrative, starring a man who can only pout and a woman who can only sneer, should have faded from sight soon after it was released in 1945. And yet it lives on, haunting and creepy, an embodiment of the guilty soul of film noir. No one who has seen it has easily forgotten it.
“Detour” tells the story of Al Roberts, played by Tom Neal as a petulant loser with haunted eyes and a weak mouth, who plays piano in a nightclub and is in love, or says he is, with a singer named Sue. Their song, significantly, is “I Can’t Believe You Fell in Love With Me.” He wants to get married, she leaves for the West Coast, he continues to play piano, but then: “When this drunk gave me a ten spot, I couldn’t get very excited. What was it? A piece of paper crawling with germs.”
So he hitchhikes to California, getting a lift in Arizona from a man named Haskell, who tells him about a woman hitchhiker who left deep scratches on his hand: “There oughta be a law against dames with claws.” Haskell dies of a heart attack. Al buries the body, and takes Haskell’s car, clothes, money and identification; he claims to have no choice, because the police will in any event assume he murdered the man.
He picks up a hitchhiker named Vera (Ann Savage), who “looked like she’d just been thrown off the crummiest freight train in the world.” She seems to doze, then sits bolt upright and makes a sudden verbal attack: “Where’d you leave his body? Where did you leave the owner of this car? Your name’s not Haskell!” Al realizes he has picked up the dame with the claws.
Haskell had told them both the same unlikely story, about running away from home at 15 after putting a friend’s eye out in a duel (“My dad had a couple of Franco-Prussian sabers”).
In Los Angeles, Vera reads that Haskell’s rich father is dying, and dreams up a con for Al to impersonate the long-lost son and inherit the estate. Waiting for the old man to die, they sit in a rented room, drinking, playing cards and fighting, until Al finds himself with another corpse on his hands, once again in a situation that makes him look guilty of murder.
Roberts is played by Tom Neal as a sad sack who seems relieved to surrender to Vera (“My favorite sport is being kept prisoner”). Ann Savage plays Vera as a venomous castrator. Every line is acid and angry; in an era before four-letter words, she lashes Al with “sucker” and “sap.” Of course Al could simply escape from her. Sure, she has the key to the room, but any woman who kills a bottle of booze in a night can be dodged fairly easily. Al stays because he wants to stay. He wallows in mistreatment.
The movie was shot on the cheap with B-minus actors, but it was directed by a man of qualities: Edgar G. Ulmer (1900-1972), a refugee from Hitler, who was an assistant to the great Murnau on “The Last Laugh” and “Sunrise”, and provided one of the links between German Expressionism, with its exaggerated lighting, camera angles and dramaturgy, and the American film noir, which added jazz and guilt.
The difference between a crime film and a noir film is that the bad guys in crime movies know they’re bad and want to be, while a noir hero thinks he’s a good guy who has been ambushed by life. Al Roberts complains to us: “Whichever way you turn, fate sticks out a foot to trip you.” Most noir heroes are defeated through their weaknesses. Few have been weaker than Roberts. He narrates the movie by speaking directly to the audience, mostly in a self-pitying whine. He’s pleading his case, complaining that life hasn’t given him a fair break.
Most critics of “Detour” have taken Al’s story at face value: He was unlucky in love, he lost the good girl and was savaged by the bad girl, he was an innocent bystander who looked guilty even to himself. But the critic Andrew Britton argues a more intriguing theory in Ian Cameron’s Book of Film Noir. He emphasizes that the narration is addressed directly to us: We’re not hearing what happened, but what Al Roberts wants us to believe happened. It’s a “spurious but flattering account,” he writes, pointing out that Sue the singer hardly fits Al’s description of her, that Al is less in love than in need of her paycheck, and that his cover-up of Haskell’s death is a rationalization for an easy theft. For Britton, Al’s version illustrates Freud’s theory that traumatic experiences can be reworked into fantasies that are easier to live with.
Maybe that’s why “Detour” insinuates itself so well–why audiences respond so strongly. The jumps and inconsistencies of the narrative are nightmare psychology; Al’s not telling a story, but scurrying through the raw materials, assembling an alibi. Consider the sequence where Al buries Haskell’s body and takes his identity. Immediately after, Al checks into a motel, goes to sleep, and dreams of the very same events: It’s a flashback side-by-side with the events it flashes back to, as if his dream mind is doing a quick rewrite.