Detour

Edgar Ulmer's Detour (1945)is a febrile blast furnace of a film:  shot in black and white so deliriously dark as to be almost illegible, the movie doesn't show us characters so much as the x-rays of those characters.  Pillar-boxed, the movie looks dirty in most versions, like something glimpsed through a filthy windshield -- even on Turner Classic Movies, you watch the picture as if through a fog of black smoke.  The camerawork is a weird combination of extremely simple locations and set-ups -- for half the film a man driving a car with a blurry rear-projection showing behind him -- and baroque chiaroscuro:  huge shadows loom and people's faces are reduced to the masks of Greek tragedy -- dark eye sockets and cheek-bones sculpted by the light.  Ulmer doesn't pull focus and so several shots, conceived in depth, boldly feature one of the two principal figures blurred, out-of-focus, an effect that gives a curious documentary look to these scenes.  (Ulmer used the same approach in his equally hallucinatory, although more conventionally shot, The Black Cat made in 1934).  The film's story is proto-noir and vestigial:  a pianist ashamed of working in cheap bars to make a buck sets out hitchhiking across the country.  His plan is to meet his blonde girlfriend in Hollywood.  Along the way, a sinister small-time crook picks up the hero and, then, dies as they are driving across the desert, Although its probably a drug overdose, the pianist decides to hide the body, steal the dead man's money and identity, and continue to LA in the crook's huge finned and sepulchral vehicle.  The hero picks up another hitchhiker, Vera, and she turns out to be the dead man's girlfriend.  Vera played by Ann Savage, looks battered and has scary glaring eyes -- she's not exactly attractive enough to be a Hollywood leading lady and there is something distinctly strange about her features. (The scene is which Vera opens her eyes while the two of them are driving across the country and accuses the hero of murder is one of the scariest scenes ever shot:  it's like a nightmare emerging into the cold light of day.) Vera is monstrous, drunk most of the time, sexually taunting, and a blackmailer.  Vera demands that the hero pretend to be the dead man to inherit his money -- it turns out that the crook was also the scion of a wealthy family whose patriarch is dying.  The pianist refuses and, when Vera tries to call the police to inform on him, he kills her, albeit accidentally, in one of the strangest deaths ever contrived for a film.  In the movie's last scene, the hero, fatalistically awaiting his doom, is trudging along a black and deserted highway when a car ostentatiously labeled "State Trooper" pulls up alongside him.  Ann Savage's Vera is cruel and unpredictable; it's a great performance, verging on the tediously maniacal but never quite crossing over into caricature -- Vera's sloppy alcoholism and her sexual provocations give the part an unstable, demented edge.  The pianist is obsessed with fate, consciously superior to the lowlifes around him, but entrapped by them, afflicted by bad conscience and raving throughout the entire picture -- much of the film's action is underscored by his feverish narration.  The character has only one note -- that of panicked guilt and so he's a little boring to watch; clearly, he's not getting any pleasure from any of the exotic crimes that he's forced to commit and the actor tends to bellow his lines.  But this defect doesn't matter:  the film is short, only 65 minutes, and concentrated, a poverty-row symphony of doom.