Roger's
reviews have appeared in McClatchy-Tribune News
Service, Orlando Sentinel, Spin Magazine, The World,
Orlando Magazine Autoweek Magazine among others.
He is the founder and editor of Movie
Nation.
H
ardboiled,
archetype-upending and gorgeous in its bare-bones minimalism,
“Detour” is quintessential film noir.
“The
Maltese Falcon” preceded it and “The Big
Sleep” followed it — big studio productions
with Bogie and Lorre and Bacall and John Huston conjuring
up a genre that the French would later label “film
noir.” But cheap, briskly-shot and briskly-cut
“Detour” is the great primer on the genre.
Nobody
in it got famous. And the director never shook his “B-movie”
bonafides.
Even
in this now-acknowledged classic, we see the sloppiness
of low budget haste — images flipped to show cars
going east instead of west, with the driver and steering
wheel on the wrong side — and the crutch of “narration”
was never more superfluous in a film that was voice-over
narrated to death.
But
this lean, blunt and talky thriller grew in stature
over the decades. The lore attached to it was added
to again and again, and was often wrong — “shot
in a week” — and troubling when it wasn’t.
Read boxer-turned-star Tom Neal‘s later life biography
if you want to know what I mean.
In
1992 “Detour” was added to the National
Film Registry by the Library of Congress, denoting it
as essential cinema and one of the finest films to come
out of that cynical, world-weary/underworld-friendly
genre that took Hollywood by storm after World War II
made the movies and America grow up.
I
hadn’t seen it since its 2018 restoration. That’s
as good an excuse as any to dive back into an all-time
favorite.
Neal
plays a rumpled, grimy hitchhiker when we meet him in
a Reno diner late one night. Al Roberts has the haunted
look of a man who’s seen things, done things and
heard things.
He’s
been west. He’s headed east. And that’s
about all you’ll get out of him.
So
whatever you do, don’t play the wrong song (“I
Can’t Believe You’re in Love With Me”)
on the jukebox.
“Wait
a MINUTE, pal! That’s my nickel, see?”
As
the lights in diner dim around his stubbly face, Al’s
interior monologue — the flashback of the life
that brought him here — begins.
There
was New York, a nightspot called the Break’O Dawn.
And there was a dame — Sue (Claudia Drake) —
the singer where Al played the piano.
“Let’s
split this town,” says she.
“Next
week we’re gonna make with the ring and the license,”
he counters.
But
“split” she did. And when the longing grows
too much, Al takes a $10 tip, a “piece of paper
covered with germs — it couldn’t buy me
nothin’ I want” and sets out by thumb across
country as “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows”
wafts into the score for the first of many times.
“If
only I’d known what I was getting into that day
in Arizona,” when he thumbed that last ride to
the left coast in the Lincoln V-12 convertible of a
big-talking bookie (Edmund MacDonald).
A
death will follow, one “nobody’ll believe”
was an accident. And a brassy, bullying hitchhiker —
Vera (Ann Savage) — runs into our guy in that
high-end Lincoln and proceeds to guess what’s
happened and work the angles, threatening her way into
blackmail.
We
don’t have time to wonder why this piano player
would give the femma fatale his real name. We’re
dumped into this jam with him, wondering if she’ll
rat him out, help him out or somehow manage to do both.
Savage
gives one of those performances so far ahead of the
gender curve that it was almost certain to make her
a screen immortal. Her Vera is a tough broad and a vile
schemer, and not as smart as she figures she is.
“If
you act wise, well, mister, you’ll pop into jail
so fast it’ll give you the bends!”
Neal
never lets us forget that whatever this guy’s
temper, he’s still just a piano player and nobody’s
idea of a tough guy.
Director
Ulmer and his just-as-efficient director of photography
Benjamin H. Kline (he’d go on to decades of TV
drama cinematography) manage several artistic flourishes
in the framing and screen compositions.
But
Ulmer’s focus on telling a story quickly had him
turn the movie into a radio drama with pretty, shadowy/foggy
black and white pictures, thanks to a remedial over-reliance
on voice-over narration
“As
I drove off, it was still raining and the drops streaked
down the windshield like tears,” Al narrates what
we already see. “Then she turned around to face
me.” Let’s restate the obvious, over and
over.
But
if we accept it from flinty private eyes in film noir,
we’re obligated to let this grating flaw slide.
“Detour” is that good.
There’s
no Bogart, and no Howard Hawks or John Huston, Fritz
Lang or Ida Lupino behind the camera. But “Detour”
remains the exemplar of the genre, the formulas and
dominant themes — an “innocent” man
jaded by the illusion of justice, trapped in a corrupt,
unforgiving “system.”
You
simply cannot call yourself a film buff until you’ve
seen this, restored to its crackling, waste-no-screen-time
brilliance.
