Noir Bites: Detour (1945)
"That's life. Whichever way you turn, Fate sticks out a foot to trip you." - Al Roberts
I can't say I was immediately taken by this film as the beginning (and at times throughout) the acting all seemed a bit melodramatic. Pay attention and give it time to kick in though, and this picture should be capable of working its gritty magic on you too.
Detour is the story of Al Roberts (Tom Neal), a pianist who plays in a New York bar and hitches his way to meet his girlfriend in California. He gets a lift from a guy called Charles Haskell Jr who has some nasty scratches on him - "I was tussling with the most dangerous animal in the world, a woman," he explains. They take turns at driving while the other man dozes.
This ride Al gets, it turns out, will seal his fate. The film changes its pace at around 23 minutes in and the decisions he makes are cringe-worthy (we watch as his classic noir-style narration vocalises his dilemma). This is when we start to really feel for Al, and his American dream that has just taken a nose-dive.
Detour was shot on a very low budget and takes place in three main locations, first of all the new York jazz bar where Al plays piano: "It wasn't much of a club really. You know the kind. A joint where you could have a sandwich and a few drinks and run interference for your girl on the dance floor". There are also a few minor locations like the cafe that opens and closes the film as Al recollects his misfortune.
The nice thing about Detour is that there are only a few characters to keep tabs on. There are often too many people in noir films to keep up with (e.g. in The Big Sleep and Gilda). Here we're really only talking about the two leads, Al the narrator and Vera (Ann Savage), who is wonderful. Even in her short time on screen (only around half of this already brisk film) she becomes one of the most neurotic, tragic femme fatales in the noir genre.
After she weaves her web of deceit and blackmail and ultimately falls you'll end up wanting to take a shower.
It is pretty obvious that Frank Miller's neo-noir Sin City borrows heavily from Detour in its mid-section, perhaps more than it pays homage to any other noir (Sunset Boulevard springs to mind). The rain, the car and the policeman stopping the main character for a minor road offense when he has other things on his mind. The film and the situations it portrays are certainly still relevant today, then.
At a snappy 67 minutes Detour delivers a taut, stylish tragedy filmed on a shoe-string. All you could want from a noir.
I'll close with a (notoriously thoughtful) note from film critic Roger Ebert:
"This movie from Hollywood's poverty row, shot in six days, filled with technical errors and ham-handed narrative, starring a man who can only pout and a woman who can only sneer, should have faded from sight soon after it was released in 1945. And yet it lives on, haunting and creepy, an embodiment of the guilty soul of film noir. No one who has seen it has easily forgotten it." - from Wikipedia
Detour is now in the public domain (you can legally download it for free). You can get your copy here.
