Detour: Still Fascinating 65 Years Later
Detour was the first film I saw in a theater since last February. I saw it in a small cinema hidden in a corner of the Judería in Córdoba, Spain (the oldest and most picturesque neighborhood in the city). There isn’t a huge audience for old, low-budget, black and white movies in English here in Southern Spain, so I essentially had the theater to myself. I tried to go into the film knowing as little as possible, but I admit I was intrigued to read that the one American film the Filmoteca de Córdoba decided to screen in January was a noir picture filmed on poverty row with a minuscule budget. If anything, this heightened my excitement walking into the theater. Clearly, this film has something special—a mere B film, yet it has been meticulously restored, and Richard Linklater and Martin Scorsese cite it as an influence. The day after watching it in the theater, I watched it again on Youtube. I then realized how lucky I was to be able to watch the restored version on the big screen.
The budgetary constraints offered the film some comedic moments. For example, Al (the piano-playing protagonist portrayed by Tom Neal) is quite bad at pretending to drink coffee in the opening diner scene, and his fake piano playing is even worse. I smiled to myself when the club employee approaches Al at the piano to hand him a $10 tip—the employee stands in the perfect position to block Tom Neal’s hands. When Al was dragging Hazkell’s body (the man he was hitching a ride with who he accidentally kills) in the rain, I admit that my mind, instead of contemplating the serious situation our protagonist found himself in, focused for a moment on the uncanny resemblance between the film's fake rain and the soaker setting on the garden hose I used to play with in my backyard. When watching the Youtube version later, I saw that the detail of the rain was something you could hardly see on the unrestored version.
Despite these somewhat comical moments, I was gripped by director Edgar Ulmer’s ability to convey such a fascinating story with questionable resources. I believe it was Ulmer’s direction that enabled me to become engrossed in a story whose two main characters, Al and Vera, were thoroughly unlikeable. Al is mean when we first meet him in the Nevada diner, which makes the audience wonder what made him this way. However, the events of the movie don’t turn Al into the bitter man we see yelling at a jukebox in the opening scene. He is bitter from the earliest moment we meet him, before any death has occurred—he has no hope for his piano career and hardly any faith in his relationship. He doesn’t even seem to like his girlfriend/fiancé Sue very much. His voiceover says, “I was an ordinary, healthy guy, and she was an ordinary, healthy girl, and when you put those two together you get an ordinary, healthy romance.” That is hardly an endorsement of the relationship. Later, despite claiming to love Sue, he immediately calls her Hollywood dreams “stupid.” She confesses her plan to move to Los Angeles to him after they leave the club. We see the lights of the club’s sign turn off, and the couple descends into the foggy streets. The fog is so unrealistically intense that it seems intended to represent a turning point in the narrative. Our protagonist is about to lose his way, and he won’t be able to find a path out.
Of course, I must mention Ann Savage’s Vera, who enters Al’s story in the middle of the movie, completely altering the course of both the film and Al’s life. Her first scene in the car with Al was thrilling. As she accuses Al of killing Hazkell, she speaks for sentences at a time without blinking. Her staredown is terrifying, and the audience can almost empathize with Al getting dragged down by her threats so quickly. I also loved Ulmer’s choice to move the frame in and out of focus when Al discovers he killed Vera. While his voiceover narrates, the visual language shows his complete lack of mental stability.
Overall, Detour moves quickly, showing us only what we need to know to fit into its 68-minute run time. Of course, the voiceover helps us fill in the details. While there are times when I prefer that a character’s perceptions are revealed through the principal action rather than a voiceover, I think Tom Neal’s narration was fine, especially considering its role in the film’s pacing.
Lastly, the ending is as fascinating as it is abrupt. Is Al actually arrested in the final scene, or is it just a premonition? And if the shot of the cop picking Al up (the “car he didn’t thumb”) is fiction, could Al have fabricated the rest of the story as well? Are we seeing Al craft his version of what happened? Can we trust anything we’ve just been told? The lights in the theater came on instantly after the police car rolled away, and I was brought back to reality just as all of these questions simultaneously ran through my head. Luckily, I don’t need the answers. It’s the act of questioning that brings all the fun.
