Detour

Edgar Ulmer's Detour (1945) is revered as the secret source for much of  today's independent cinema.  A Poverty Row production, Ulmer manages to make the film's deficiencies seem illustrative of the movie's theme: hopes for happiness are futile, the open road leads nowhere, and we are all the playthings of a malign Fate.  The tiny cast are trapped together in a film that becomes increasingly claustrophobic -- there's no false beauty, no showy camera-movements, scarcely even any sets.  The movie is film noir as imagined by Samuel Beckett -- it could be staged with a single open mouth speaking in the darkness. In fact, it's almost that minimal as it stands.  Critics have observed that the film's embattled minimalism is an emblem for Ulmer's career.  After making The Black Cat in 1934, Ulmer was blacklisted by Uncle Carl Laemmle, the production head at Universal Studios who served as a patriarchal figure for German-speaking Jews fleeing Berlin's UFA for Los Angeles.  Apparently, Laemmle perceived the poetic and extravagant vehicle for Lugosi and Karloff (crammed with embalmed sleeping beauties, Black Masses and torture all taking place on the Golgotha of a nameless Mitteleuropaische WWI battlefield) as too extreme, too expensive, and too stylized.  There was some suspicion that the handsome Ulmer was messing around with the wife of Laemmle's favorite nephew.  In any event, Onkel Carl put the hex on Ulmer and he spent the rest of his life making zero--budget pictures for bottom-of-the-line studios.  (Detour was financed by P. R.C. -- Producers Releasing Corporation).  The sinister Destiny that corrupts and damns Ulmer's protagonists, the detour that diverts them from happiness, may be an allegory for the director's own thwarted career.

Detour is a savage system of disappointed expectations.  Al, the anti-hero, sets off cross-country to rejoin his girlfriend who has left New York for Hollywood -- he never makes it to the goal of his journey.  Al's girlfriend, a cabaret singer, goes out to LA to find her fortune in show business -- she ends up a "hash-slinger".  The film's terrifying femme fatale, Vera, hatches an elaborate scheme to defraud a wealthy dying man -- but the scheme is never implemented.  The characters are so doomed that they can't even accomplish a simple transaction such as selling a car to a rapacious used car dealer.  People set off on trips only to die inexplicably.  The hero arguably is responsible for two deaths and expects to be arrested at any moment -- but he gets to the end of the film and, only in the last shot, do we see him staggering down a dark road on which he gets into a police car as if accepting a lift from a taxi:  there's no drama at all and the final scene on the dark road might not even be real, just another disconsolate fantasy of the doomed hero.  The movie is narrated as a flashback -- in the first shots after the peculiar title sequence, we see the protagonist stumbling through the desert like a man walking to his execution.  Al ends up in a miserable diner where he fights with everyone, knocked into a reverie by a big band tune someone plays on the jukebox.  From the very outset, we know that Al is trapped and doomed, that there's no way out, that we are, in effect, hearing a dying declaration.  (Oddly enough, the actor who plays the perpetually morose Al, Tom Neal, was doomed himself -- after making the movie, the ex-boxer almost beat Franchot Tone to death in a brawl over a woman; later, he was convicted of manslaughter for killing his girlfriend and served six years in prison.)

Detour's plot is less a story than a kind of bitter anecdote of the sort that we might read in de Maupassant or Ambrose Bierce.  A gifted pianist is trapped playing jazz is New York City dives.  He's in love with the girl who sings with the band.  The girl is ambitious and, also, perhaps, perceives her relationship with Al to be going nowhere.  After hours, they walk along Riverside Boulevard in New York in a dense, all-enveloping fog -- Ulmer can't afford sets showing the city, but the chilly fog effects are wholly consistent with the movie's theme:  people are moving around in a sort of delirious haze.  The girl departs for Los Angeles to pursue her career as a singer leaving Al behind.  And, then, as is said laconically in Icelandic sagas she is, with the exception three inserted shots, "out of the story."  (One of the inserts is the film's showiest image, a picture of the girl singing while colossal shadows of jazz musicians are cast on the white wall behind her -- the image is obviously Al's fantasy, something he has imagined, since its a complete non sequitur:  she never makes it in Hollywood and ends up a waitress "slinging hash.")  Playing at some sort of upper crust soiree, Al gets paid ten dollars as a tip.  (We see him performing a spectacular set of variations, improvising wildly, with his hands entirely detached, it seems, from his brooding, upturned face -- as in David Lynch films, Ulmer portrays music as a kind of ecstatic trance.).  With his ten bucks. Al calls long-distance to his girlfriend and promises that he will come to her even if he has to "crawl."  Then, he sets off cross-country hitchhiking.  On a lonely and desolate stretch of highway in Arizona, Al rides with a sleazy grifter named Haskell.  Something is wrong with Haskell -- he keeps popping pills.  Haskell has bad scratches on his hand.  He boasts about picking up a female hitchhiker with the expectation that he would rape her -- but she fought back.  No paragon of virtue, Al seems mildly amused by the story and seems to accept that Haskell was well within his rights in assaulting the woman and, then, apparently, dropping her off in the middle of nowhere.  Haskell buys Al a dinner and, then, falls asleep in his convertible while the hero is driving.  Rain falls, flooding the inside of the convertible, and Al stops -- he can't revive Haskell who may, in fact, be dead.  When he opens the car door, the man sprawls out, banging his head on a rock -- now, he's dead for sure.  Al immediately concludes that he will be accused of murder and, so, he assumes the dead man's identity, loots his wallet, and, then, sets out for Los Angeles in Haskell's convertible.  At a god-forsaken desert crossroads, he encounters a woman hitchhiking and picks her up.  The woman is a harpy with greasy hair and a tight-fitting sweater and huge glaring eyes.  She falls asleep as Al drives and, then, in one of the most frightening moments that I can recall in a film, she suddenly wakes up while the car is plowing through the rear-projected desert, transfixes Al with her huge, accusing eyes and tells him that she knows that he has murdered Haskell and stolen his car.  Of course, she was the woman that Haskell attempted to rape.  Vera, blackmails Al into taking her to LA where they rent a cheap apartment as a man and wife -- at this point, the film has slid into delirium:  there's no objective reason why Al would take up housekeeping with Vera in a shabby furnished apartment, but he does.  It's as he's found his true soul-mate and that their fates are now locked together forever.  They try to sell the convertible to raise some cash but before the deal is completed, Vera finds out that Haskell's father is dying and that the tycoon is searching for his long-lost son, someone that he has not seen for 20 years.  So, Vera hatches an insane plot to have Al present himself as the elder Haskell's son and heir -- the plan is so palpably insane that the weak-willed Al refuses.   The leads to a fight with Vera in which she ends up dead, also accidentally killed by Al.  The protagonist now has two deaths on his conscience and, so, he flees, hitchhiking east across the same desert that he crossed a week earlier.  This brings us full-circle to the opening scenes in the wasteland and at the cafe.  The film doesn't so much end as just stop -- Al hallucinates his arrest by a cop on a dark road while he is hitchhiking.  Without resisting he gets in to the cop car, seemingly relieved to be captured and out of his misery. 

The film's execution is brilliant, a marvel of economy -- the movie is only 69 minutes long and was reportedly shot in six days.  Ann Savage as Vera is not conventionally attractive, indeed, she's very odd-looking for a movie star in 1945.  She alternately belittles Al and attempts to seduce him.  This is one of the few Hollywood films in which the suggestion of sex is treated with horror and disgust -- the viewer does not want to find out what is beneath Vera's sweater and skirt.  She and Al live together as man and wife in a kind of nightmare parody of a marriage -- they guzzle whiskey, play cards, and quarrel incessantly.  Periodically Vera tries to get Al in bed with her, but he rejects her, leading to her outraged indignation -- Al is not only ineffectual but possibly impotent. (These aspects of Ann Savage's performance resonated with the great Canadian film maker, Guy Madden -- he cast the actress in her old age in his own nightmare film My Winnipeg).  Al tries to call his girlfriend, but, when she answers, doesn't speak -- he's already so deep down in Hell that he can't reach her.  After Al accidentally kills Vera, the camera simply tracks around the blurry apartment, now and then, focusing on some of Vera's effects -- Al's chief concern seems to be that she has left so many traces of her existence in their rented rooms that he can never elude responsibility for her death.  All the while, the soundtrack persists in playing variations on the Judy Garland song "I'm always chasing rainbows."  In the title sequence, the camera surveys a barren desert landscape that is receding from us -- it's a shot out the rear window of a moving vehicle.  The sequence is disorienting --- we are moving away from something, not progressing toward a goal.  What  is ahead of us?  It's a fancy allusion but one recalls Walter Benjamin's "Angel of History" wings outstretched and looking fixedly into the ruinous past as a great gale blows his appalled angel into the future.  Ulmer is working so quick and dirty here that he doesn't bother making the some of the shots match -- some of the hitchhiking scenes show Al getting into the wrong side of cars, as if he were hitchhiking in England's green and pleasant country.  This is what Manny Farber called "termite art", a nasty little hellscape without pretense that destroys itself from within.