In the early noir Detour, piano player Al Roberts (Tom Neal) spends a lot of time talking about how fate has dealt him a bad hand. But the movie’s really about his guilt over how he plays those cards.
We first meet Roberts—tense, unshaven, sweaty—in a roadside diner where he nearly gets into a fistfight when someone plays “I Can’t Believe That You’re in Love with Me” on the jukebox. That leads to a flashback—director Edgar G. Ulmer kicks it off by tightening in on Roberts’ face as the lights around him go dark, leaving only a circle of illumination around his eyes—where we learn that Roberts is hitchhiking from New York City to Los Angeles in pursuit of the nightclub singer (Claudia Drake) who left him behind.
From there, as the title indicates, Detour takes various twists and turns, each of which envelop Roberts more tightly in a web of deception, theft, and murder. He’s never entirely guilty, but he’s not quite innocent either, and you can see that conflict play out on Neal’s pained face. (When Neal isn’t perspiring, Ulmer provides “rain” to make it look like he’s sweating bullets.) Indeed, given the biased perspective the movie offers—including Roberts’ own voiceover narration and camerawork that occasionally captures his blinkered point of view—it would be reasonable to read Detour as a subjective cover-up, a fictionalized softening of harsher crimes that Roberts actually did commit.
Except that the movie gives us an even worse apple: Ann Savage’s Vera. Another hitchhiker whom Roberts picks up after he’s snagged a car of his own, Vera immediately sizes up his desperate situation and pounces with a plan that’s a mixture of extortion, seduction, and brute force. It’s the latter element that distinguishes Vera from being a femme fatale; with wild eyes and a hard, unceasing stare (at one point Savage goes 34 seconds of berating Roberts without blinking), Vera doesn’t manipulate him as much as she dominates him. And unlike Roberts, she’s unapologetic about her dented moral compass. After another character encounters her, he observes, “There ought to be a law against dames with claws.”
Adapted by Martin Goldsmith from his own 1939 novel, Detour is heavy on that sort of hard-boiled language and as such is very much in the tradition of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Ulmer turns up the heat with inspired filmmaking choices, from those crisp close-ups to a vision Roberts has while looking in the car’s rear-view mirror, where he sees Ann performing onstage as giant silhouettes of musicians loom over her. This is a quick, grimy, and above all else guilty picture—a portrait of a sad sack who blames the world for his troubles, even as his actions cause worse troubles for those around him.
