Programme notes CH 02 — Noir After Dark
Detour
A hitchhiker, a dead man's wallet, and the worst phone call in noir.
Shot in six days for nothing, and the nothing shows — as style. Rear-projection deserts, one motel room, a narration that keeps explaining and keeps incriminating. Ann Savage's Vera is the genre's most feral performance, no glamour anywhere near it. Detour is the proof text of the B-picture thesis: constraint, fully accepted, becomes a worldview. Fate, in this film, is just the road with the lights off.
Credits — follow anyone
- Directed by
- Edgar G. Ulmer
- Photographed by
- Benjamin H. Kline
- With
- Ann Savage · Don Brodie · Tom Neal · Esther Howard · Tim Ryan · Claudia Drake
Every name is a door — each opens onto everything else that person made in the network.
The thread · every thread
Two men narrating their own autopsies. Noir's boldest structural idea — the voice that already knows how this ends — done first on poverty row, then with a studio's polish.
The fatal ride, from both sides: Ulmer's drifter accepts one, Lupino's killer is one. Between the two films, the American road stops being freedom.
Two pictures in which a few dollars are the whole of fate. Detour gets there by bad luck on the road, Quicksand by a bad choice at the till. Both end up nowhere near where they meant to go, and neither can find the way back to where they began.
Ulmer at PRC in 1945, twice in one year on almost nothing. Detour lets fate win in a motel room; Strange Illusion lets a dream save the boy. Same fog, same cheap sets, opposite verdicts.