wheel, Haskell falls asleep in the passenger seat and dies under mysterious circumstances. Al fears that the police will accuse him of murder, so he buries the dead man and momentarily assumes his identity. After crossing the border into California, he gives a lift to a provocative female hitchhiker named Vera (Ann Savage), who subsequently identifies herself as the woman who scratched Haskell's hand. Vera scoffs at the idea that Haskell's death could have been an accident, and she threatens to expose Al unless he sells the car and gives her half the money. When they arrive in Los Angeles, she accidentally learns that Haskell was the heir of a dying millionaire, and she insists that Al continue his masquerade. She and Al spend the night in rented rooms, drinking heavily and quarreling over her scheme to collect the inheritance. When he refuses to go along, she picks up the telephone and runs into the bedroom, locks the door, and threatens to call the police. Al grabs the lengthy telephone cord and pulls it hard, trying to snap it free from the connection. When he breaks the door open, he finds that the cord has become entangled around Vera's neck. As he stands over her dead body, a dissolve takes us back to the diner in Reno, where the story began.
The haunted coffee cup in Detour (1945).
Detour is in many ways dated by its mode of production. The lush musical score by Leo Erdoty intensifies this quality, as do the cheap sets and the occasional technical flaws. But Ulmer is no Ed Wood. As only one example of his artistry, consider the early scene in the roadside diner, which involves a clever visual trick. As the jukebox plays 'I Can't Believe That You're in Love with Me,' Tom Neal is seen in medium shot from across the counter, a coffee cup near his right hand. The camera tracks forward to a tight close-up of his face, and the lights suddenly dim, signaling a transition into a subjective mood. A spotlight hovers around Neal's eyes, giving him a demonic look, and for a moment we can sense a technician behind the camera, trying to aim the light correctly. Neal broods, and the camera tilts down to view his coffee cup; what it sees, however, is a model, several times larger than the original, looming up before him in vaguely surreal fashion. (See figures 2527.)
Few people will notice that a substitution of coffee cups has occurred; indeed they are not supposed to notice, because Ulmer wants to create a dreamlike close-up of an apparently ordinary object and thus set the stage for the nightmarish flashback. In this regard as in others, he resembles Alfred Hitchcock, who once ordered his technicians to build a huge pair of women's eyeglasses for an important image in Strangers on a Train (1950). Not surprisingly, both directors were schooled in the German industry at a time when entire sets were constructed through the viewfinders of cameras. Ulmer had been Murnau's designer on Sunrise, one of the most artfully controlled films in history, and Detour is quite similar to that production in its studio-based expressionism, its careful attention to camera movement and offscreen space, and its intensely subjective narration.
Ulmer lacked the vast technical resources of Murnau or Hitchcock, but his relative poverty gave him certain advantages. Detour is so far down on the economic and cultural scale of things that it virtually escapes commodification, and it can be viewed as a kind of subversive or vanguard art. A radically stylized film, it is photographed almost entirely indoors, overcoming its severe budget limitations by means of process screens, sparsely decorated sets, and expressionistic designs. Ulmer represents his locales with a breathtaking minimalism: New York is nothing more than a foggy soundstage and a streetlamp, and Los Angeles a used-car lot and a drive-in restaurant. Meanwhile, he makes old-fashioned but highly effective use of optical devices such as wipes and irises, and he may be the only Hollywood director of the periodaside from Orson Wellesto deliberately exploit the artificiality of back projection. Notice the scene when Haskell falls asleep while Al is driving his car: behind Al, the white rails or fence posts on the side of the road become hugely magnified, flashing past in a hypnotic blur. 17
Detour also employs nearly all the modernist themes and motifs described in chapter 2.
Not surprisingly, its narrative technique reminds contemporary critic Andrew Britton of both Henry, James's fiction and Sigmund Freud's writings on 'secondary revision.' Britton seems to me to overstate the moral culpability of Ulmer's protagonist, but he is surely correct to argue that Al Roberts is an unreliable narrator who travels through an American wasteland. The last of these themes is particularly important. Like a great many films noirs about the open road, Detour represents the western frontier as a desert and the quest for individual freedom as a meaningless circle or a trap. It anticipates the imagery of Hitchcock's Psycho by almost thirty years: a barren landscape viewed through an automobile window; a protagonist who drives by day and night, staring into a rear-view mirror and hearing voices from out of the past; a sinister highway patrol officer with dark glasses; a used-car dealership; and a cheap and deadly motel room.
Here again, Ulmer's low budget works to his advantage. Detour has no need to indulge in a Hollywood designer's idea of despair, because its own cost-cutting produces an atmosphere of pinched difficulty and claustrophobia. The flimsy sets reinforce the theme of social and cultural impoverishment, and the actors seem to belong to the same marginal world as the characters they play. Everyone in the film is a low-rent pretender or impostor (even Haskell turns out to be a 'hymnal salesman'), and nobody has a chance of success.
The most disturbing of these pretenders is Vera, who makes every femme fatale in the period look genteel by comparison. Like Al, she has been hitchhiking across country, and she claims that when Haskell picked her up just outside Shreveport, she fought off his advances, leaving him with an infected hand. In some ways, she is a double for Al, but when she wakes from her brief nap on the passenger seat of the car, she also suggests a ghostly reincarnation of Haskell, come back to wreak vengeance. Al can't figure out what to make of Vera. 'She looked as if she'd just been thrown off the worst freight train in the world,' he says, but then he notices her 'beauty,' which seems 'homely, but real.''
Actually, she has dark rings around her eyes, and she suffers from a consumptive cough. ('Hitching rides,' she comments, 'isn't exactly the way to keep your schoolgirl complexion.') Al compares her with Camille, but clearly she is no wilting, sacrificial heroine of sentimental melodrama; instead, she taps into a raw nerve of greed and exploitation that lies at the core of the film. Ruthlessly hard and half-crazed, she lolls about the Los Angeles hotel rooms in her bathrobe, downing straight whiskey, chainsmoking, and plotting to get rich. She probably knows that she is dying, but she easily dominates Al, first insulting him and then inviting him to bed. A sullen, dangerous, yet sympathetic figure, she leaves an indelible impression, and it is impossible to imagine any A-budget picture that would have been allowed to depict her. When Al sits alone in the Reno diner and recalls her image, he seems to be looking into a void.
On many levels, Detour provides justification for the idea that down-market thrillers are more authentic, less compromised by bourgeois-liberal sentiment or totalitarian spectacle, than the usual Hollywood product. Unfortunately, however, few if any of the most critically respected films of this type were so unsettling, and none were made on such a low budget. The Poverty Row mode of production was given its death warrant in 1948, when the major studios were ordered to divest themselves of theaters; connoisseurship of so- called B film noir began much later, and the use of the term by critics often has less to do with actual costs than with a misperception of povertya misperception that involves a particular blend of failed theatricality, artistic sophistication, and subversive implication.
One of the best illustrations of such critical reception can be found in the writing about Gun Crazy, another movie about violence on the American road, which inspired several other pictures about outlaw lovers. Gun Crazy has much more elaborate production values than Detour, and its premiere was held at the somewhat dilapidated but still respectable Palace Theater in New York. Nevertheless, it was produced at a minor studio (Allied Artists); its mise-en-scene creates what Dana Polan accurately describes as 'a typology of nonpastoral, wasteland sites'; 19 and it lacks the formal coherence of a well-made, major-league feature. Veering back and forth between badness and brilliance, it repeatedly subverts its own earnestness with an anarchic romanticism. As a result, latter-day critics have usually disregarded its actual position in the market and placed it on the level of the pulp sublime.
Shortly after Gun Crazy opened, Bosley Crowther gave it a mixed review in The New York Times, devoting most of his favorable comments to the script, which was adapted from a story by MacKinlay Kantor in the slickest of all magazines, The Saturday Evening Post. Otherwise, Crowther thought the film was 'pretty cheap stuff,' on a par with 'the most humdrum of pulp fiction' (25 August 1950). For later critics, Gun Crazy has seemed charming precisely
