Detour (PRC, 1946)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After The Way We Were TCM showed a “Noir Alley” presentation of a film whose darkness and coldness was much more to my heart -- a fresh breath of foul air, as it were -- Detour, the 1946 film noir directed by Edgar G. Ulmer at the ultra-cheap PRC studio starring Tom Neal as Al Roberts, pianist at a dive bar in New York City whose girlfriend Sue (Claudia Drake) sings at the club. The old Jimmy McHugh song “I Can’t Believe That You’re in Love with Me” is their biggest joint success at the club -- it’s one of the few pieces that can get the bar patrons actually to look up from their tables and drinks and actually listen -- and it becomes associated with Al and his soon-to-be lost love. Sue decides to go to Hollywood to take a run at the movies and she leaves Al alone, determined not to marry him until they’re both successful (Al is the sort of bar pianist who practices classical pieces during his breaks -- the Op. 64, no. 2 waltz by Chopin and the Op. 39 waltz by Brahms, which in the fashion of the time he plays first come scritto and then as a boogie-woogie.) Al gets lonely without her and determines to cross the country, move to L.A. and reunite with her, but even after he’s sold all his meager possessions he has no way he can afford to get there other than hitchhiking.

He eventually works his way as far as Arizona, where he’s picked up by a man named Charles Haskell, Jr. (Edmund McDonald). The first thing Haskell asks Al to do for him is get him a small box of pills from his glove compartment -- I assumed they were nitroglycerine pills and he had a heart condition -- and then Haskell shows off three scars on his hand inflicted by a former girlfriend and a deeper scar on his arm which he got, he says, when he and a friend (they were teenagers at the time) took a pair of dueling sabers off his dad’s wall and played with them until he put his friend’s eye out, whereupon his rich dad disowned him and he’s been drifting ever since. He’s done well enough for himself that he owns a flashy, expensive car -- a 1941 Lincoln V-12 -- which practically becomes a character in the movie itself. Al is relieved that Haskell is going all the way to L.A., but the trip takes an unexpected turn when a rainstorm starts up at night in the middle of the Arizona desert. Al, who’s driving at Haskell’s request since Haskell was tired and wanted to nap, pulls the car over to put up its top and notices Haskell is unconscious. He opens the passenger-side door and Haskell falls out, striking his head on a boulder by the side of the road. Whatever killed him -- the blow to his head or a previous heart attack Haskell couldn’t short-circuit with his pills -- Haskell is dead and Al realizes that the police will suspect he killed Haskell to steal his car and over $700 in cash he had on him.

Al plans to drive Haskell’s car either to San Bernardino or L.A. and abandon it, then get together with Sue, but his plans are short-circuited when he picks up a woman hitchhiker and the film spirals totally into nightmare. The woman turns out to be Vera (Ann Savage), who seems normal at first but startles Al when she asks him what he did with Haskell’s body. She was the woman who got a ride from Haskell and gave him those three scratches on his hand when he made a pass at her and she fought him off. The two uneasy crimebirds form a partnership, intending to sell Haskell’s car to a dealer and get a $1,850 bankroll they can split, but then Vera realizes from a newspaper story that Haskell’s father, who hasn’t seen his son in 16 years, is about to die and Al could conceivably impersonate the son, show up at the Haskell home and claim the estate, especially since the article helpfully pointed out that the family’s attorneys were looking for Haskell, Jr. Vera blackmails Al into going along with the scheme by threatening to report him to the police if he doesn’t -- whereupon he points out that if she does that, he’ll say they were in on it together so they’ll both be executed for Haskell’s murder -- and so it goes until at one point Vera takes the phone in their sleazy little motel room, takes it into the bedroom and says she’s about to call the police. Al grabs the phone cord and pulls it tight, wanting to get the phone away from Vera -- only Vera had got the cord around her neck and by pulling on it Al inadvertently strangles and kills her.

All this is narrated by Al in a framing scene, set in a Nevada diner, where in the great tradition of impoverished movie characters he’s drinking a cup of coffee because he doesn’t have enough money actually to order any food. Things are already pretty mopey for him and they get worse when someone else in the place puts a nickel in the jukebox and plays “I Can’t Believe That You’re in Love with Me” -- and the song has the same effect on Al that that madeleine had on Proust, causing him to recount his life for us even though he isn’t talking to anyone in particular (it’s not like there’s anyone in the place that he’s actually talking to, and given that what he’s saying is he’s wanted for two murders and the police are continually after him it’s unlikely he’d be confiding this to a stranger even in a movie as nervy as this one, with its frayed attitude towards human relationships). Detour has become one of the oddest out-of-left-field films in all movie history to attain classic status, including a full restoration in 2018 by the Cinematheque Francaise in alliance with the Criterion Collection (the best print they could find was one originally released in Belgium with two sets of subtitles, in Flemish and French, and they used another print from the U.S. but in less good condition to erase the subtitles digitally) -- I hadn’t thought of Detour as a film that needed restoration but I’m glad it got it anyway, if only because some of the prints I’d seen seriously shredded the very ending of the film so it was unclear what was supposed to be going on.

Apparently Joseph Breen, Will Hays’ successor as head of the Production Code Administration, objected to Al apparently getting away with murder (he’d had the same objection the same year to Fritz Lang’s noir classic Scarlet Street, in which the character played by Edward G. Robinson murdered the woman he thought was in love with him and her boyfriend got convicted and executed for the crime) and demanded that the film end with a scene in which a police car would pull up to Al and arrest him. But the voice-over narration makes it clear that this isn’t supposed to be something that happens in the actual story; it represents Al’s fear that he will be arrested and ultimately convicted of crimes for which he’s morally innocent but legally guilty. Detour has been hailed for a lot of things, including Ulmer’s artful direction on a pinched budget (the film’s cost has been estimated at $30,000, low even by 1946 standards) and the feral force-of-nature performance by Ann Savage as Vera as well as the superb work of Tom Neal (who in later years was almost as much a low-life off-screen as he was on), but this time around the real unsung hero of Detour seemed to me to be its writer, Martin Goldsmith. He came up with a simple story rich with allusions, and though the film has been criticized for the many loose ends in the plot -- some writers have suspected the film was originally planned as longer and more elaborate than it is, including an on-screen attempt by Al to pass himself off as the heir to the Haskell fortune, but PRC didn’t have the money or time to shoot it -- I think the movie is just fine as it stands.

There are fascinating parallels between the lives of Al’s two victims, both of whom (at least if I’m right about my reading of the plot) are suffering from life-threatening illnesses -- Haskell has a heart condition and Vera has tuberculosis (Al compares her to the heroine of Camille) and says that if she’s caught and executed “the state will be doing me a favor, because I don’t have that much longer anyway” -- and Haskell was a cheap gambler and bookie who’d been on his way to L.A. in the first place to place a bet on a fixed race at Santa Monica. The film gains its power largely from the closed-in world of its two leads (though Vera doesn’t enter the action until about halfway through the running time), and unlike in most femme fatale stories the tension between the leads has nothing to do with sex. The classic femmes fatales, like Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity and Claire Trevor in Murder, My Sweet, used their bodies as sexual lures to pull basically decent but stupid and ultimately greedy men into their plots. Ann Savage -- I can’t think of another movie in which one of the leading actors had such a name perfectly suited to their character! -- comes off as a sheer force of nature without a hint of a redeeming quality, turned hard-bitten by the sheer ordeal of surviving in a noir underworld and with an odd aspect of honesty and forthrightness in her evil: she knows who and what she is and she doesn’t care what either the other characters or the audience think of her. I also liked the irony that Goldsmith gave his false-hearted villainess a name that means “true”!

At times Goldsmith’s dialogue gets silly -- notably the part in which after he recounts his killing of Vera that the music played by the saxophonist practicing in the room next door (who’s both part of the movie’s reality and its background score, since he’s orchestrally accompanied by the orchestra of musical director Leo Erdody) “wasn’t a love song anymore -- it was a DIRGE!” -- but for the most part it’s quite tight and sounds like what people like this would actually say. Some writers have suggested that Al is lying to us in his flashback and he really did kill Haskell and/or Vera intentionally -- which would make Detour the first film to show a visual flashback that was supposed to be a lie (four years before Alfred Hitchcock did it in Stage Fright -- until then the convention had been that a movie character could speak a lie in dialogue, but if the camera showed it, that meant it was a true part of the story reality) -- but I’m more inclined to believe that he, like Fred MacMurray’s character in Double Indemnity, is a basically decent but weak person who gets sucked into the noir world and loses his moral bearings along the way.

Detour is also a marvelous movie technically, reflecting director Ulmer’s work in the 1920’s as a technical assistant to Friedrich Murnau, Fritz Lang and the other giants of Weimar-era German cinema. Though much of it takes place in cars with the characters “driving” in process shots in front of backdrops representing highways, the process work is absolutely convincing despite the film’s ultra-low budget. Indeed, in later interviews Ulmer made the film seem even cheaper than it was -- he claimed it was shot in just one week but the extant PRC files list a 28-day shoot and that’s how long Ann Savage said it was in later years (she actually had the most sane life of the Detour principals and managed to publish an autobiography and live to 87! -- and the Lincoln V-12 convertible that figures so prominently in the action was Ulmer’s own car (nice to know that even in the Poverty Row assignments he was getting he was still able to afford such a nice car) and the sweater Ann Savage is wearing when she’s introduced was a “loaner” from Ulmer’s wife Shirley.

I read Detour as the ultimate expression, outside Frltz Lang’s own films, of Lang’s idea that we are all in the grip of an unalterable fate or destiny that controls our lives and leads them into directions we don’t consciously want to go; it’s known that Ulmer didn’t like Lang personally (they’d worked together in Germany and Ulmer thought Lang unscrupulous and sadistic, and reportedly based Boris Karloff’s architect and Satanist character in the 1934 film The Black Cat on him), but it’s obvious Ulmer had learned his lessons from Lang as a filmmaker and Detour is yet another example showing that film noir came from the fusion of the German cinematic style of the Weimar era, particularly the heavy use of dark shadows, high contrast and chiaroscuro lighting, with the hard-boiled crime fiction published by U.S. pulp magazines in the 1920’s and 1930’s. Indeed, the three films I would regard as the archetypal noirs -- The Maltese Falcon (1941 version), Double Indemnity and Murder, My Sweet -- each stem from works by the three archetypal writers of pulp crime fiction: Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler, respectively.