Synopsis
He went searching for love… but fate forced a DETOUR to revelry… violence… mystery!
The life of Al Roberts, a pianist in a New York nightclub, turns into a nightmare when he decides to hitchhike to Los Angeles to visit his girlfriend.
The life of Al Roberts, a pianist in a New York nightclub, turns into a nightmare when he decides to hitchhike to Los Angeles to visit his girlfriend.
Deviazione per l'inferno, Μοιραία Συνάντηση, Detour: autostrada per l'inferno, El desvío, Peligros del destino, Kiertotie, Detour (El desvío), Détour, Umleitung, Detour: deviazione per l'inferno, מעקף, Παράκαμψη, Desviació, Desvío, Objížďka, Farlig omväg, Desvio, 绕道, Объезд, Curva do Destino, Отклонение, 우회, Bezdroże, Terelőút, 恐怖のまわり道, Об’їзд
This movie is 68 minutes long
95/100
Well, it makes sense that the name of the main actress happens to be Ann Savage, because that's exactly what this rugged masterwork is: fucking savage. From beginning to end, the tattered rear projections and the sweaty dialogue build the ferocious tension up to a level of murderous rage and nightmarish barbarity, further enhancing the second-rate production values and the film's constant state of alarming mystery. Only running a length of 67 minutes, the dreamlike hopelessness of Detour is akin to a vision that is only encountered because of a relentless fever.
Suggested double feature: Detour/Lost Highway*
*Preferably at 3 in the morning.
"The world is full of skeptics." Pure fiery, sad-sack noir; brutal and miserable right up until its final frame.
Deliciously nasty, style on a shoestring. Two idiots just smart enough to be a danger to each other. Distilled rotgut.
95
Slimy, putrid, lacking even the slightest bit of nonsense. A firecracker of nihilism and detachment, and *the* film noir.
One of the most intense and fascinating noir films I’ve ever seen. The film distills the essence of the genre with almost feverish urgency as if it were always one step away from total ruin. It’s something that goes far beyond the narrative of bad luck and cruel fate — it’s about the energy with which Ulmer directs his camera and his characters, transforming the scarcity of resources into an aesthetic of pure existential despair.
And in the eye of the storm of all events is Vera, one of the fiercest and most ruthless femme fatales in noir. Vera is the ruin incarnate, a fierce presence that doesn’t need much to crush any hope of redemption. Unlike the sophisticated femme…
There is hardly a more deliciously feral woman in early noir history than Ann Savage in “Detour.”
What starts as a narrative about a hitchhiking pickup gone awry is granted an acidic bile of such toxicity that you couldn’t even try to swallow it down.
As a woman who barely bothers to be femme, going for one hundred percent fatale instead, Savage may well have been taking out some of her ire towards costar Tom Neal, who allegedly got obnoxiously handsy towards her on set. A slap didn’t do, so Savage did one better:
She turned in a performance so memorable that it essentially left Neal and his own turn quivering in a corner of under compensation.
Director Edgar G.…
a film for those who've lived years of self-hatred, disappointment, mulling over mistakes, regrets, would-be worlds that never were going to be because you were never going to be in them -- the fool's journey begins with a single step, and the greatest traps are the ones we build for ourselves, slowly allowing our choices to pile into a suffocating cage -- ulmer's vision of noir is a voluntary purgatory, a dead-end diner in the midst of nowhere, a jukebox that only plays the songs you hate, an name that isn't yours, a pavement that hurts your feet, the fatal friction between us and everything else.
I couldn't get enough of how mean-spirited this was. Much like Jigoku this is a morality tale about how you should never have something awful that isn't your fault happen to you. Don't even think about it, asshole.
Everybody in this talks at a hilarious noir fever pitch. None of us Edward G. Robinson impression doing assholes born in the back half of the 20th century can touch this. It's the genuine article and it's beautiful. I've seen tons of rat-a-tat-tat noir and still I watched in awe like Sam Neill seeing a brontosaurus in person. "We clocked the Ann Savage at 32 mph"
"She was young - not more than 24. Man, she looked like she had been thrown off the crummiest freight train in the world. Yet in spite of that, I got the impression of beauty. Not the beauty of a movie actress, mind you, or the beauty you dream about when you're with your wife, but a natural beauty - a beauty that's almost homely because it's so real."
Watched with my mom, who laughed out loud at “…or the beauty you dream about when you're with your wife."
An example of how a short, low-budget, and constrained film can sometimes transform its overall impact for the better. One’s own fate, pure chance. Making choices in the depths of morality and the randomness of despair.
This is pure noir. Every conversation, every glance, every word, every scene holds meaning. Not a single moment is wasted. The film plays with light the way the mind wrestles with despair. It’s fatalism—is the story simply a surrender to fate, or is there a chance to veer off course, or you could say to take detour? That’s where its symbolic power burns brightest, sharp and unyielding.
Ann Savage embodies the archetype of the femme fatale so vividly that she almost transforms into a…
Edward G. Ulmer's Detour has become something of a perfect noir in the minds of those who want to encapsulate the genre in a single film: it's cheap, grimy, and dark, and it stars a man whose own life would fit very nicely into the noir universe. In spite of this, though, the film diverges considerably from the genre from which it's become a signifer, something which makes it all the more interesting.
First and most importantly, none of Al's (Neal) suffering stems from being the helpless victim of a curvy, predatory femme fatale. Instead, Al's seductress is the world around him — the environment that has fooled him into believing that anything could ever go his way. It's his…