The Last Crooked Mile, a.k.a. Detour Dead End (Republic, 1946)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, August 27) Charles got home from work relatively early (shortly before 10 p.m.), and I ran him a movie off YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GejCipmwD_s). Whoever posed it gave it the title Dead End Detour, but it was actually The Last Crooked Mile, a crime “B” made at Republic Studios in 1946. I was attracted to it mainly because Ann Savage was the female lead the same year she made the real Detour, directed by Edgar G. Ulmer at PRC and one of the mini-masterpieces of the film noir era. The Last Crooked Mile was also one of Republic’s attempts to give their Western star Don “Red” Barry – so called because he’d become a major attraction in their 1940 serial The Adventures of Red Ryder. Here he’s billed as “Donald Barry” and is playing a characterization very much like Lee Tracy in his starring vehicles in the mid-1930’s. The film opens with the Harrison Bank being robbed (one seemed an awfully family-oriented name for a bank, and I couldn’t help but wonder if there were banks in the area called Lennon, McCartney, or Starkey) by four gunmen, one of whom is blond and another has clear-polished fingernails. One of the robbers is killed by a security guard who is wounded by one of the cops, and by pre-arranged plan the other three ditch the car in a garage, drive off in a new one, and the “blond,” Jarvis (John Dehner), takes off his wig, which he wore just to avoid later detection. Alas for the robbers, though Jarvis has ditched the blond wig, his confederate still has the well-polished fingernails. When they’re stopped at a police checkpoint, a sharp-eyed officer notices the fingernails and tells the bandits he’s going to arrest them. Instead they tear off and a chase ensues, in which the determined officer shoots out a rear tire on the getaway car and causes it to crash.

I’d assumed The Last Crooked Mile would keep the crooks, or at least some of them, alive longer and the main part of the movie would be the hunt to catch them. Instead they are dead in the first 20 minutes and the mystery becomes what did they do with the $300,000 they stole from the bank. It’s then that Donald Barry’s character, private detective Tom Dwyer, arrives on the scene. In a tense meeting with the bank’s manager, Floyd Sorelson (Tom Powers); the agent for the insurance company which will have to pay the bank’s losses if the money isn’t recovered; and Lt. Blake (Harry Shannon), the policeman who’s in charge of the investigation, Dwyer shows up and says they should hire him because he can do things the cops can’t. They agree, and the next scene takes place at a carnival where the so-called “Jarvis Death Car” is on exhibit in one of the sideshow booths – only the proprietor, Ferrara (Nestor Païva from the first two Creature from the Black Lagoon movies), has stupidly had the car restored instead of leaving it looking like it did when it crashed. (In 1934, the car in which Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow had been killed was publicly exhibited with all its bullet holes and other damage kept lovingly intact.) The surviving members of Jarvis’s gang, led by Ed “Wires” McGuire (Sheldon Leonard at his oiliest) – so called because of his penchant for strangling his enemies with thin wire – are determined to get back the car because apparently the loot is hidden within it. Just when the bandits had the time to work out such an elaborate hiding place (the money was concealed in the vestigial side fenders a lot of 1940’s cars still had, which reminded me of The French Connection and the way the drugs in that movie were hidden inside a car’s rocker panels, the ledges under the doors that you step over when you get in or out) and hide the money there is unclear, but then a lot about this movie is unclear.

Dwyer runs into an old girlfriend, Bonnie (Adele Mara), with whom he’s continually breaking dates, and he forces her onto a roller coaster even though she’s deathly afraid of them (which reminded me of my experience in the late 1980’s when John Gabrish and I went to Disneyland and he got me onto the Big Thunder Mountain ride; I endured it with clenched teeth, and after it blessedly ended he asked me, “Were you scared?” I said, “No, I just fail to see why anybody would find this entertaining”). They end up in the next-to-last seats and when the ride is over they discover a dead body, strangled with a thin wire, had been dumped along the ride onto the seat behind them. Later Dwyer visits a nightclub called the Blue Moon, where entertainer Sheila Kennedy (Ann Savage) is performing. She sings the 1920’s Isham Jones/Gus Kahn song “The One I Love Belongs to Somebody Else,” and while I’m not sure if the voice is her own or a double’s, at least she’s quite competent even though hardly at the level of Ella Fitzgerald, from whose 1940’s Decca record I first learned this song. Dwyer is investigating Sheila because she was supposedly the girlfriend of the late, unlamented Jarvis. Ultimately, after an unseen person takes a blowtorch to the side of the “Jarvis Death Car” (as it’s being exhibited) and extracts the money, Dwyer deduces that there’s only $150,000. [Spoiler alert!] The rest of the loot was actually embezzled by Sorelson, who hired the Jarvis gang to rob his own bank to cover up his embezzlements.

Dwyer has been alternating his affections between Bonnie and Sheila – Bonnie is a typical movie blonde bimbo and Sheila seems to be a better choice for him until the final scene [double spoiler alert!], when Dwyer realizes Sheila was a criminal and the mastermind of the whole thing. She holds a gun on him and forces him to get out of the car he’s driving while they’re speeding down a narrow mountain road, only instead he swerves, the car drives off the road, and two police officers show up to arrest Sheila while Bonnie turns up literally hiding in the car’s rumble seat. (A rumble seat – a seat hidden under what ordinarily would be the trunk lid – was common in the 1920’s but, like side fenders, was pretty anachronistic by 1946.) The Last Crooked Mile, directed by Philip Ford (John Ford’s nephew) from a pretty crazy but at least wisecrack-filled script by Jerry Sackheim, Jerome Gruskin, and Robert L. Richards, has more plot holes than a slice of Swiss cheese but at least hints at the potential of being a far better movie than it is. But somehow Ann Savage is less watchable as a good girl who turns bad than she was in Detour as a hard-bitten dame who’d long before realized that basic morality and common decency were luxuries she couldn’t afford.