Straight Down the Line: Into Film Noir

A down-on-his-luck hitchhiker sits in a roadside diner, his crinkled sad-sack eyebrows shadowed by a crumpled fedora. He broods over a coffee, then snaps at a chatty truck driver playing the wrong song on the juke box.

He is Al Roberts (Tom Neal) and his voice over takes us to a flashback, to not so long ago when he was doing swell, tickling the ivories in a New York City nightclub for a lovely songbird, who's also the love of his life.

Detour (1945) was directed by Edgar Ulmer who was one of the emigres that brought German Expressionism to film noir. In Germany, Ulmer had worked on FW Murnau’s films where he showed real talent. But when he landed in Hollywood, he had an affair with the wife of Carl Laemmle’s nephew, and said wife divorced said nephew.

As a result, Laemmle, Universal's studio head, saw to it that Ulmer was exiled from the major studios. Subsequently forced to make low budget pictures, his artistic skills were such that he turned his B’s into A pluses, (and he married the ex-Mrs-Laemmle-Nephew, who became Shirley Ulmer and his trusted script supervisor and sometime writer.)

Detour was produced through PRC. Part of Hollywood's "Poverty Row", it stood for "Producers Releasing Corporation". But the in-joke was that it stood for "Pretty Rotten Crap".

There are no lavish settings in Detour - everything looks tinny and juryrigged. But the fog machines they used to obsure a background of nothing, save for a few of lampposts, created a wonderful chiaroscuro, adding to the noir effect.

With such budget constraints, Ulmer saved by flipping the negative for some of the road trip scenes: from NYC to LA the cars seem to be driving on the wrong side of the road, with the hitchhiker getting into the vehicle on the driver's side.

Detour is now considered a classic.

Roger Ebert wrote in a 1998 review that Detour worked precisely because of its low budget: “Detour is an example of material finding its form. Two bottom-feeders from the swamps of pulp swim through the murk of low-budget noir and are caught gasping in Ulmer's net.”

Gasping all the way, Al makes one bad decision after another until he finally admits: “My goose was cooked.”

Vera (Ann Savage), the femme fatale, is relentless in her cruelty toward him. A blackmailer who's rotten to the core, she grinds out cheery comments like: "I'd hate to see a fellow as young as you wind up sniffin' that perfume Arizona hands out free to murderers."

Al plays her perfect whipping boy. He doesn’t put up much of a fight to get away from her constant berating and evil schemes. It’s like he needs her to beat him up. In real life it was Tom Neal who did the beating up.

A former boxer, Neal lived a noir life himself, hooking up with actress and party gal Barbara Payton, then using his fists to put her fiance, Franchot Tone, in the hospital. Hollywood blacklisted him. And his goose was more than cooked. He tried to go straight with a gardening business but ended up doing time for manslaughter in 1965. Released on parole six years later, he died from heart failure within a year.

Ann Savage fared better. She went on to make more films, get her pilot's licence and become involved in "the preservation and celebration of all things Hollywood". She lived to be 87 years old, checking out on Christmas day in 2008.

A year before her death, Guy Madden cast her as his mom in his biopic My Winnipeg (2007). Maddin said he cast her because she "would have scared the pants off Bette Davis."

He also said: “Savage comes from a time when faces, especially faces in luminous, silvery close-up, counted most. . . [her face] seizes the camera, arrests it, and loads even the newest, cheap film stock with quantities of silver not used in Hollywood since the 1940s. The power of her visage is still shocking.”

In Detour, she does more than seize and arrest, she demolishes and annihilates. This is the ultimate feel-bad movie - and it’s fabulous.

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