Detour: The Cheapest, Bleakest Noir Ever Made

A man sits in a roadside diner somewhere in Nevada, nursing a coffee, hating a song on the jukebox, and telling you — furiously, defensively, at length — how none of it was his fault. That is Detour, made in 1945 at Producers Releasing Corporation by Edgar G. Ulmer, running sixty-eight minutes, and shot for a sum so small that the film has spent eighty years being introduced by its budget rather than its qualities. The budget is the least interesting thing about it. What matters is that it is the most airless, most self-loathing, most completely doomed film the American crime cycle ever produced, and that it achieved this on a soundstage with almost no money, almost no time, and a cast of actors nobody was ever going to nominate for anything.

PRC was Poverty Row’s Poverty Row — a bottom-rung outfit grinding out programme fillers for the lower half of double bills. Ulmer had been a designer and assistant in the German industry, worked adjacent to the people who made the Weimar cinema look the way it looks, directed The Black Cat for Universal in 1934, and then found himself exiled to the industry’s basement after a personal scandal that made the major studios uninterested in him. The story of his career is usually told as tragedy. It is more accurate to call it a transplant: a man who had learned to build worlds out of light and shadow was handed a studio where light and shadow were all anyone could afford, and he made the constraint into a philosophy.

The road only runs one way

Al Roberts (Tom Neal) is a piano player in a New York club, unhappy in a shabby way, in love with the singer Sue (Claudia Drake). Sue leaves for Hollywood to try her luck. Al decides to follow, and because he has no money, he hitchhikes. That is the entire premise, and the film’s argument is contained in it: a man of no consequence makes one ordinary decision — to cross a continent by asking strangers for lifts — and the decision eats him.

Somewhere in Arizona he is picked up by a man called Charles Haskell Jr. (Edmund MacDonald), a talkative bookmaker in a convertible with expensive shoes and a scar on his hand. Later, near the California line, Al picks up a hitchhiker of his own. Her name is Vera (Ann Savage), and she is one of the most frightening presences in American film. Everything after that is a tightening.

Martin Goldsmith adapted his own 1939 novel, and the source’s structure — the long confessional flashback, the narrator explaining himself to the dark — survives intact. What Ulmer added is the sense that the explaining is itself the disease.

Why it works: poverty as an aesthetic

Detour looks the way it looks because Ulmer had nothing, and it is essential to understand that he did not merely cope with that. He weaponised it.

Benjamin H. Kline photographed the film, and the method is subtraction. Where a studio picture would establish a location, Ulmer gives you a pool of light with blackness around it and lets you assume the rest. The diner is a counter and a hat. The desert is a car interior and a lot of rear projection. When Al thinks back to the New York club, the camera pushes in on his face until it is nothing but two eyes in a spotlight and everything else drops away — a shot that costs nothing and does more than a set would. The absence of a world is the film’s real special effect. There is nowhere to go because Ulmer never shows you anywhere to go, and by the second reel that starts to feel less like a budget limitation and more like a diagnosis of Al’s mind.

The rear projection is the great example. In a well-funded film, the process shots behind a car are a technical embarrassment to be minimised. In Detour the road behind Al is obviously, absurdly fake, a flat rolling image while the car sits still, and the effect on a modern viewer is precisely correct: he is not travelling. He is being carried. The picture behind him changes and his situation does not. Whether Ulmer intended this or simply could not afford better, the film has absorbed the accident into its meaning, which is what happens when a director’s instincts are pointed the right way.

The runtime does the same work. At sixty-eight minutes there is no room for a subplot, a comic relief, a decent night’s sleep, a scene where somebody is kind. The film cannot breathe because there is no budget for breathing, and so the audience does not breathe either.

Ann Savage, and a performance with no floor

Vera arrives about halfway through and detonates the film. Ann Savage plays her with a rasp, a permanent sneer, a cough she never explains, and an absolute refusal to be liked for a single frame. She is not a femme fatale in the seductive sense the genre usually means — there is no glamour on offer here, no soft-focus entrance, no negotiation. Savage plays her as a cornered animal who has decided that the way to survive is to bite first and continuously.

It is a performance without vanity and without technique in any conservatory sense, and it is one of the great pieces of screen acting in the cycle. She barks her dialogue over Neal’s, cuts him off, hectors him while lying on a bed with a drink, and gives the impression of somebody who is dying and intends to take a passenger. Savage never had a career remotely equal to it. She and Neal reportedly shot their scenes at ferocious speed, and the exhaustion is visible and useful.

Tom Neal, for his part, is exactly as good as the film needs and no better, which is its own kind of correctness. Al Roberts is a self-pitying mediocrity and Neal plays him as one: soft, whining, always three seconds behind the situation, entirely convinced of his own decency. The casting of an adequate actor as an inadequate man is a piece of luck the film wears well.

The narrator in the booth

Here is the reading that turned Detour from a cult curio into a film people write essays about. Al’s voice is the only account we have. Every fact in the film reaches us through a man in a diner explaining why he is blameless, and the images we see are illustrations of his claims rather than evidence for them. Once you notice that, the film reorganises itself. The critic Andrew Britton set out the case at length in the 1990s, and the argument has been in the film’s bloodstream ever since: Al is a liar, the flashback is his defence brief, and the improbable run of accidents he describes is what a guilty man sounds like when he is workshopping his story.

The film does not confirm this. It also does nothing to close the door, and Ulmer’s images keep quietly declining to corroborate the narration. That gap is where the picture lives. Al insists that fate singled him out. Fate, in Detour, is the word a weak man uses for his own choices, and the film’s fatalism is therefore doubled: doom as a cosmic weather system, and doom as an alibi.

Where it sits on the shelf

For the collector, Detour is the proof that the noir sensibility was never dependent on studio money. Its nearest relative in spirit is Out of the Past, which arrives two years later with RKO’s resources and Nicholas Musuraca’s photography and reaches almost the same conclusion — a man whose past drives up and asks for the bill — with beauty where Ulmer has only bile. Watch them adjacent and you learn what money buys in this genre, and what it cannot.

Its true siblings are the other films made in the industry’s cheap seats by people who knew what a shadow was for: Raw Deal, where Anthony Mann and John Alton turned an Eagle-Lion budget into a black-and-white symphony, and Gun Crazy, another independent production that got further on nerve than the majors managed with departments. And Al Roberts himself — the ordinary sap who volunteers for his own ruin and then complains about it — has a distinguished cousin in Scarlet Street, released the same year, where Fritz Lang gave the same character a bank job and an easel.

The verdict, with the mechanism below the line: Detour is the purest film in the American noir cycle, and its purity is a function of its poverty. It has no room for hope, no room for a subplot that might dilute the acid, no money for a world outside the frame that a man might escape into. Al Roberts tells you at the end that fate can put its finger on you for no reason at all. He is wrong, and the film knows he is wrong, and it lets him say it anyway. That is the cruellest thing a crime film has ever done to its own hero.

Copies circulate in every condition imaginable — the film fell out of copyright and spent decades in murky public-domain prints, which is how a generation found it. The Academy Film Archive’s restoration is the one to seek out; seeing Kline’s blacks actually read as blacks changes the picture from a curiosity into a piece of craft.

Spoilers below

Haskell dies in the car. Al’s account is that Haskell, asleep in the passenger seat during a rainstorm, fell out when Al opened the door and struck his head on a rock. It is a preposterous story, and Al knows it is preposterous, which is why he explains at length that no policeman would ever believe it. His solution is to hide the body, take Haskell’s clothes, money, car and identity, and drive on to California as a dead man.

Then he picks up Vera, and Vera has been in Haskell’s car before. She knows the scar on his hand, and she knows Al is not him. From that moment she owns him. Her scheme is small at first — sell the car, split the money — and then she reads in a newspaper that Haskell’s estranged and dying millionaire father is searching for the son he has not seen since childhood, and she decides Al is going to walk into a deathbed and inherit a fortune. Al refuses. They drink. They fight. In a rented Los Angeles apartment she takes the telephone into the bedroom, drunk and screaming that she will call the police, and locks the door. Al, on the other side, pulls at the cord. When he breaks the door down she is dead on the bed with the phone cord around her neck.

So the second death, like the first, is a freak accident that only Al witnessed, and which only Al can vouch for. Two people who inconvenienced him have died in ways that require us to accept his word, and the second killing is so exactly a repetition of the first that the film seems to be inviting you to stop believing him. This is the moment the Britton reading becomes irresistible: a man who tells the same impossible story twice is not unlucky.

The ending has a history worth knowing. The Production Code required that crime be punished, and so the released film closes with Al walking a dark highway, still explaining himself, while a police car pulls alongside and takes him. Goldsmith’s novel and the film’s own internal logic both point at a man who was never caught in any legal sense and is instead serving a life sentence inside his own narration, which is the more terrible outcome and the one the diner framing implies. Watch the last shot with that in mind and the police car looks like something Al is imagining — the arrest he deserves and half wants, arriving out of nothing, because fate, as he keeps telling you, can put the finger on you for no good reason at all.