Customer Reviews

Detour

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I am a great admirer of "Detour" which is probably the best low-budget film noir ever made. But this DVD is a piece of junk. It is transferred from a lousy, battered 35mm print that has badly spliced gaps and screwed-up film footage in crucial scenes, obliterating some of the best dialogue. The company that put this out should be ashamed of itself, especially considering this film is now considered a low-budget masterpiece. If you have no copy of this, get the Sinister Cinema VHS. It is a much higher quality print.

An unshaven and weather-beaten young man sits brooding over a cup of coffee in an anonymous roadside café. A man of means by no means, as Roger Miller would put it. But Al Roberts (Tom Neal) is king of no road, and by the end of DETOUR we wonder whether he is even sovereign over his own soul.
A potential ride in the form of a friendly trucker strikes up a conversation. Where you coming from? West. Where you going to? East.
Roberts is wrong, though. He's coming from Hell and he's going to Nowhere, and the last thing he needs is a chatty trucker along for company.
DETOUR is told in a flashback from that lonely stool. Roberts and his girlfriend work as pianist/singer in a fleabag club out east. Comes a foggy night and she splits up with him to pursue fame out west. Weeks later he calls and they agree to get back together. He'll come out west and they can be married.
Being down at his heels Roberts is forced to hitchhike to California. All goes well until he reaches Arizona, where Fate deals Roberts one nasty hand after another. In short order the innocent Roberts finds and feels himself a hunted man.
DETOUR is a wonderful film. Neal is perfect as the moody young musician who finds himself trapped first by and accident and later by femme fatale Ann Savage, who know his terrible secret and has no scruples against using it against him for her own nefarious purposes. Veteran B-movie director Edgar Ulmer has enough tricks up his sleeves to surmount the Poverty Row studio conditions he was working under. If you're a fan of film noir, or enjoy hard-bitten stories, you'll enjoy DETOUR.

By the way, my thirty year old first edition copy of The Film Encyclopedia had an interesting entry on DETOUR'S star Tom Neal. He received a law degree from Harvard University in 1938. Throughout the forties he appeared in a number of B-movies, usually cast as a tough guy. In 1951 he found himself in the middle of a love triangle involving Franchot Tone and Barbara Payton. Neal "smashed" Tone's nose and a scandal ensued. Neal became poison and no studio would employ him, so he became a gardener and later established a landscaping business. In 1965 he was accused of murdering his wife. Able to prove that the gun went off accidentally, Neal had the charges reduced to manslaughter and served a six-year sentence. He died in 1971.

Detour is one of the finest examples of the magic of film noir. Made with an unbelievably low budget, you would never guess it was because it comes across as a professionally well made film. A simple story, yet has dialogue that one would find in a complex story from a major studio release. No name actors who perform like stars. A director who through a flash of genius directs one of the greatest film noirs ever made. This film is so good, that in 1992 it was chosen for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being what they call, "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant." Now a cult classic, it gives hope to any aspiring film maker that he or she can indeed make a classic film no matter what the resources at their disposal may be.

What I particularly like about this film is its atmospheric mood and style. It is like the recipe for Coke, try as you like, you simply cannot replicate it. The film has a transcendent quality to it as a film noir that makes it a distinctly unique cinematic experience.

I liked Tom Neal in this movie very much. It is too bad we did not see more of him, probably because his real life was very much like a film noir.

If you want to learn and understand the beauty and magic of film noir as an art form, this film would be a good starting point.

Well, Steve said most of what I'd say, but I was struck by the unique dynamic between the two leads. She calls the shots, but then he ignores her obvious invitation. His worldweary gloom is effectively rendered throughout. My copy was somewhat flawed, clearly the movie has not been "remastered", but that's the way it should be, particularly given the director's low budget: notice the cars are driving on the wrong side of the road at one point, and Tom is picked up he gets in on the drivers side? great!

One of my favourite movies of all time. A sleazy tale filled with bleakness that never lets up. Tom Neal plays the fatalistic Al spot-on. Ann Savage as the delightfully psychotic Vera is shrew-iffic. Oh my, is she ever a feisty dame! Gotta love a woman who isn't afraid to bite, kick and claw (the scene where a hitchhiking Al inquires about the scratch on the hand of the man who picked him up = classic). The voice-over (unreliable) narration can be cheesy, and so can some of the dialogue (though a good deal of it is clever and well written), yet it all works, and has become less cheesy-seeming as I've grown to love this film.

This is a short, low-budget film, but it leaves a BIG impact!
I'm not going to give away the plot except to write:
You wouldn't want to trade places with Tom Neal's character for anything by the end of the film. And you'll never pick up a hitch hiker, that's for sure. If you like film noir, this is a must-see.

... It was awful, in my opinion... I can't believe that they couldn't have come up with a cleaner copy. For a DVD with no extras, this was pretty edgy quality. I can't add anything to previous reviews of the film itself -- it is what it is: a quality example of noir. But don't expect superb reproduction because this is a long way from that.

"Detour" is an accomplished work--and was recognized as such at the time of its original release, (see the "Parent's Magazine" review from 1945 for example).

Way too much has been made of its low budget. Neither the story nor script call for a high budget. It is, after all, an intimate drama focusing on only a few characters depicted in merely a few settings. Were this same story to have been shot by RKO, Columbia, Universal, or even MGM, I daresee today's viewers might be startled by the pictorial similarities. For example, compare the outdoor highway/hitchhiking scenes in "Detour" against the roadside tramping of Lana Turner and John Garfield in "The Postman Always Rings Twice" and you will note a strong similarity in visual presentation.

Indeed, the sets are really on the beam, since, overdressed, overly lavish settings would have defeated the picture's intentionally shabby mise en scene.

Moreover, the lighting is superb in the cafe scenes and the fog bound walk on Riverside Drive--very ghostly, very dreamlike. All of which is to suggest, that had Mr.Ulmer a great deal more $$$ here, I very much doubt he would have approached this script, this story, by hurling unnecessary oodles of cash at it. He was shrewd enough to use such funding for those films of his which required a more opulent look, such as "Club Havana" or "Bluebeard".

Again Edgar Ulmer hits a home run. For a PRC production this is one great little film noir. But we all know that. My 2-cents worth is that the cheap Alpha dvd is a decent transfer.... for Alpha, that is. There are three or four hiccups along the way but overall the dvd looked fine. Sharp print, good contrast, a little bit of sound fluctuation, but it's only a third of the cost of the Image release so if you are not too particular (and I AM most of the time) this is a very good buy for the price... especially if you find a used one in good condition. There are, of course, no extras but the cover art is pretty cool.

1945's Detour is not only one of your truly vintage film noir classics of all-time, it is also ranked by many among the best low-budget films ever made, largely due to the memorable performances of Tom Neal and Ann Savage. The directorial slant which frames the story is dead on, and one has to think that a larger budget would probably have done more harm than good to this gritty, realistic, film noir tour de force. Tom Neal plays Al Roberts, one of those unfortunate men who was born both stupid and incredibly unlucky. Shortly after his girl Sue up and goes to California looking for stardom, Roberts decides to go west and join her, hitchhiking his way across the country. This one fellow picks him up in Arizona and says he will take him all the way to L.A.; then the guy has the audacity to keel over dead. Afraid he will be accused of murdering the guy, Roberts decides to hide the body, take the guy's money, and assume his identity until such time as he can ditch the car in a big city. Then he himself picks up a hitchhiker, a woman who ends up being the last person on earth he would ever have wanted to encounter. Vera (Savage) know that Roberts is not the man he claims to be, and Roberts quickly finds himself quite at the mercy of this shrew of a woman. Her greed knows no bounds, and Roberts' life becomes more and more complicated and unhappy by the hour.

Ann Savage's character Vera is perhaps the most blunt, cold, evil, wholly unlikable woman I have ever heard tell of. It is quite easy to see why the man we meet in the opening scene is as hateful and short-tempered as he is. As we flash back to the whole story of Roberts' hard times, accompanied by plenty of voiceover narration, one cannot help but feel sorry for the guy. His initial decision to cover up the death of the guy who picked him up is a bad, undeniably stupid, mistake, but he certainly does not deserve the level of vitriol and pure evil that afflicts him in the form of Vera. The ending is a tiny bit flat, but the story itself is fascinating and the performances of Neal and Savage are not to be missed. Detour is vintage film noir and should not be missed by any and all fans of the genre.