Detour
Detour (1945) has been declared a B-movie classic and a film noir classic, and I love film noir; therefore, I thought the movie was fantastic—not. The argument is that this movie is so bad that it’s good, but maybe it is so bad that it’s not very good at all. The movie was shot in 6 days on a severely limited budget (one figure is $117,000) by a B-movie director who has become idolized, Edgar G. Ulmer. The sets are terrible—which leads some folks to say they give the movie a surreal, dream-like quality. But maybe they just look like cheap sets. The back projection as Al Roberts (Tom Neal) hitches and drives from New York to LA is amateurish (nothing was shot on location)—which leads some people to say that the phoney roads behind the cars creates a claustrophobic air appropriate for a movie about a man hounded by fate. But maybe the rear projection is just amateurish and distracting. Sometimes the cars are reversed, with the driver on the right instead of the left, probably because Ulmer decided after shooting to run the stock through reversed in order to make the cars look like they were going from east to west, from NY to LA. Some say this is a wonderful example of Ulmer’s style-over-substance approach. Maybe it is so clumsy that you would not get away with it in high school film study class (well, ok, I let my class get away with it, but it was because they were making a comedy). The acting is so bad that some people class it not as B-movie acting but as C. It is not so much that the acting is that bad but rather that the characters are mono-dimensional, so what would any actor have to work with. Al is a type—a weak and submissive man; Vera (Ann Savage) is a type—a rotten and dominating woman. Some critics say these are delightful archetypes. But I found them irritating enough to fast forward for the first time ever in a film noir. The movie concludes with Al’s voice-over stating the movie’s theme: “Fate, or some mysterious force, can put the finger on you or me for no good reason at all.” Al says he was simply on the way to his marry his true love when a fellow he got a ride from died, fell out of the car and hit his head, and left Al looking so guilty he had to take the man’s clothes, money, and car. And so it goes. Al blames everything he does wrong on “fate.” What position does the film itself take on this topic? If you have fallen for the canonization of Detour, you will make the case that Al is an unreliable narrator, appearing to tell us a true story, but actually twisting the truth to make himself look the victim of fate rather than his weakness. But maybe the film simply doesn’t give any significant clues one way or the other.
Jim Bell