Detour
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Movie Reviews of Detour
Movie Review: Film Noir Lean and Sharp as a Razor
Summary: 5 Stars
I saw a double bill of "Criss Cross" and "Detour" at a film noir festival, and although "Criss Cross" is definitely the A picture of the two with extraordinary performances and great visuals to boot, "Detour" doesn't take a back seat on any account. At the centerpiece of "Detour" is Ann Savage as Vera (favorite bad girl name of noir). When Savage comes on the scene, look out! She's so tough, she seems to spit nails when she talks. In spite of the low budget and the lousy prints in existence (such as the one I saw which crackled periodically), this film is extraordinarily stylish and effective and unsurprisingly, has a cult following -- probably many filmmakers and directors among its fans. Part of this effectiveness is due to director Edgar G. Ulmer, who began as a set and production designer at the heart of German expressionism. Both story and visuals are almost poetically dark, the hardboiled fatalism aided by striking lighting, smoky fog and seedy hotel rooms.
The plot involves a talented pianist and "everyman" Al Roberts (played by Tom Neal) who is getting nowhere fast at The Break O'Dawn nightclub in New York where the saving grace is his chanteuse girlfriend Sue (Claudia Drake). When Sue decides to try her fortunes in Los Angeles, the lovesick Roberts eventually decides to join her. Low on cash, he makes the cross-country journey by thumbing a ride. When he is picked up by Charles Haskell (Edmund McDonnell), his life is fatally and irrevocably changed. About an hour into the trip, he notices the deep scratches on Haskell's hand and inquires if Haskell had had an encounter with an animal. Haskell says he did -- with the most dangerous kind, "a woman"; after picking her up, he'd wound up booting her out of his car. Later Haskell unaccountably dies while Roberts is taking his turn at the wheel and in a panic that he'll be accused of murder, Roberts hides the body and assumes Haskell's identity. Further on Roberts picks up Vera (Ann Savage) on the road and as cruel fate has it, she is the dangerous hitchhiker who left her scars on Haskell. Recognizing Haskell's car and putting two and two together, she now has Roberts under her thumb.
Yes, this is a great portrait of an average joe caught in the unforgiving wheels of fate. It's also immensely entertaining. Ann Savage is largely to credit for its delicious fun with her "wrong side of the track" savagery and occasional pitches for love. The black and white visuals are terrific as is the dialogue with its classic noir philosophical cynicism. The close-ups of Neal's soul-weary face are fabulous. I'd say this ranks with the very best of noir.
Movie Review: infinite sum of disgraces finish in big success
Summary: 5 Stars
____Well, in life, values and purposes are all at last relative and debatable. In this film, the protagonist, Al Roberts, apparently at first should be classified as a jinx man. He's truly a winner, this is, a master and a top artist in the art of losing, as I think for attain so constant bad luck, one has to be predestined, born so, and more, to train and cultivate.
Effectively, Roberts is a truly pessimistic man and from the beginning he has that dash. Later we understand why. He's full of reasons for this. Not only this movie shows the big problem of the man who takes him while doing auto stop and dies during the travel by natural but suspicious motives, but there are the small details: if Roberts drives a convertible car and the hood is down, it begins to rain furiously while the owner dies and the hood, of course, is blocked; if also he's very tired, he has to drive hundreds of kilometres with bad night vision, if he was in a lonely highway in a compromising situation, a policeman has to appear just then, if there's too much heat at the hotel, the windows are closed, if Robert wants to open these windows, someone impedes him to do, all that, impossible to remedy.
Prevision, reflection and taking of decisions isn't neither the strong point of Roberts, as I think he commits a basic error by no declaring the death of Hassel, the owner of the car, and taking his money and documentation, starting so a series of confusions and disgraces fortunately he seems to be accustomed to coping with. Moreover, the car documentation results insufficient and incomplete to sell the car, as Hassel the dead owner, also seems not to have been an example of virtue during his life. To close all this, he finds a woman which truly is a specie of insufferable feminine devil.
And at the end, another succession of improbable accidental facts (but for Robert, we have to believe by then that abnormal and accidental things are normal). The case is all these happenings avoids him to be arrested and stay perhaps more sure and perhaps even happy in jail, but this is not, and he continues free to follow with his terrible fate and life, as he's still young enough to suffer many other misadventures.
But in the same way accumulation of all these errors make Roberts to remain free, in this movie, facts and adventures are done and disguised with so great talent and mastery, that this movie, full of artifice, is a masterpiece, perhaps because we all have passed sometimes a luck so black as that of Al Roberts.
Movie Review: Want a ride?
Summary: 5 Stars
An unshaven and weather-beaten young man sits brooding over a cup of coffee in an anonymous roadside café. A man of means by no means, as Roger Miller would put it. But Al Roberts (Tom Neal) is king of no road, and by the end of DETOUR we wonder whether he is even sovereign over his own soul.A potential ride in the form of a friendly trucker strikes up a conversation. Where you coming from? West. Where you going to? East.
Roberts is wrong, though. He's coming from Hell and he's going to Nowhere, and the last thing he needs is a chatty trucker along for company.
DETOUR is told in a flashback from that lonely stool. Roberts and his girlfriend work as pianist/singer in a fleabag club out east. Comes a foggy night and she splits up with him to pursue fame out west. Weeks later he calls and they agree to get back together. He'll come out west and they can be married.
Being down at his heels Roberts is forced to hitchhike to California. All goes well until he reaches Arizona, where Fate deals Roberts one nasty hand after another. In short order the innocent Roberts finds and feels himself a hunted man.
DETOUR is a wonderful film. Neal is perfect as the moody young musician who finds himself trapped first by and accident and later by femme fatale Ann Savage, who know his terrible secret and has no scruples against using it against him for her own nefarious purposes. Veteran B-movie director Edgar Ulmer has enough tricks up his sleeves to surmount the Poverty Row studio conditions he was working under. If you're a fan of film noir, or enjoy hard-bitten stories, you'll enjoy DETOUR.
By the way, my thirty year old first edition copy of The Film Encyclopedia had an interesting entry on DETOUR'S star Tom Neal. He received a law degree from Harvard University in 1938. Throughout the forties he appeared in a number of B-movies, usually cast as a tough guy. In 1951 he found himself in the middle of a love triangle involving Franchot Tone and Barbara Payton. Neal "smashed" Tone's nose and a scandal ensued. Neal became poison and no studio would employ him, so he became a gardener and later established a landscaping business. In 1965 he was accused of murdering his wife. Able to prove that the gun went off accidentally, Neal had the charges reduced to manslaughter and served a six-year sentence. He died in 1971.
Movie Review: Highway to Hell. DVD Comments.
Summary: 5 Stars
It's a short movie see but not short on thrills. It's gotta be short cause like you out there watching our poor guy Al Roberts doesn't have time either. Time; That's just what he'll be doing if the fuzz get wise to what's happened.
Al is a talented and going no where fast piano player. He's a good guy the kind you only see in old movies, but this isn't just an old movie it's a film noir. Why name it noir? To make it arty. I guess it's better then film black which is what the future is looking here for good ole Al.
So why such negativity bub? If Al's on the up and up. Well his girl is sick of the night club scene see, so instead of marrying Al she's doing the opposite literally and heading to L.A.
Al needs his girl bad so he's heading to L.A but the only bad he's got is luck and plenty of it. A ride he hitches ends up hitching a ride to the pearly gates during a rain storm leaving Al looking responsible, he comes up with a plan but like all plans things happen. One of those things is Vera a tough as nails girl who sees through Al like a window; kind of like a rear window, which fits like a glove seeing Al is like a wrong man framed out of an old Hitchcock flick. He's not the wrong man though or do we have it all wrong? Talk about when it rains it pours, better put on your overcoat it's going to be a bumpy ride.
That was fun and so is this film noir. It's all about the dialogue in these films and this one has it. It doesn't take a wrong turn in this fast paced hour and 7 mins full of thrills.
Very highly recommended. One of the most enjoyable noirs I've ever seen.
DVD
As for the dvd. It doesn't have any special features. I didn't expect much from the picture but it wasn't all that bad, however at certain parts it does mess up a bit. All and all for the price and the quality of the movie it's worth it.
Movie Review: The highway of broken dreams. Destination Hell.
Summary: 5 Stars
Have you ever wondered how little things--a hitchhiker you pick up, a newspaper you buy--can change your life forever? Edgar G. Ulmer certainly did, and in his zero-budget 1945 film noir, "Detour," he demonstrates how they can ruin even the remotest chance of happiness. The film looks cheap--the photography is muddy, the continuity choppy, the sets out of Edward D. Wood--but Ulmer, a former assistant to F.W. Murnau, knew how to create memorable visual effects on no budget, so that most of the movie seems to be drifting in a hellish limbo. In "Detour," fate is totally a matter of chance, and any decision you make is bound to be the wrong one. What is particularly fascinating about "Detour" is that neither goodness nor street smarts are of any use: scheming, hard-bitten Vera (Ann Savage) gets no closer to achieving her dreams than does naive, well-meaning Al (Tom Neal). They are the couple from Hell, trapped in a B-movie "No Exit" in which they can never feel anything for each other except bitter hatred. (No wonder the French were the first to hail "Detour" as a masterpiece: this is existentialism distilled to its essence.) By now most fans of "Detour" know the film noir turns that Tom Neal's life took in reality; what is less well known is that Edgar Ulmer and Ann Savage had some noirish twists in their own lives. Ulmer, who emigrated to Hollywood from Germany in the early 1930s, started out as an A-list director; but when he ran off with the wife of studio head Carl Laemmle's nephew, he was henceforth and forever blackballed to Poverty Row. As for Savage, she retired from the screen in the early 1950s, only to find herself suddenly penniless in 1969 when her supposedly wealthy husband died, leaving nothing but debts. She was forced to work in a law office well into her old age, returning to the screen only briefly, playing an elderly nun in the 1986 B-movie "Fire With Fire."