Detour

Though never intended to be anything more than a PRC time-filler, Detour has in the last two decades achieved cult status, thanks in great part to the auteurist disciples of director Edgar G. Ulmer. The story begins when hitchhiker Al Roberts Tom Neal accepts a ride from affable gambler Charles Haskell Jr. Edmund MacDonald. When Haskell suffers a fatal heart attack, Roberts, afraid that he'll be accused of murder, disposes of the body, takes the man's clothes and wallet, and begins driving the car himself. He picks up beautiful but sullen Vera (Ann Savage), who suddenly breaks the silence by asking "What did you do with the body?" It turns out that Vera had earlier accepted a ride from Haskell and has immediately spotted Roberts as a ringer. Holding the threat of summoning the police over his head, Vera forces Roberts to continue his pose so that he can collect a legacy from Haskell's millionaire father, who hasn't seen his son in years (at this point, its sounds suspiciously as if the plot was made up as the filmmakers went along). All intrigues come to a sudden halt when Roberts accidentally strangles Vera. He wanders into the night, thumbing rides, awaiting his inevitable arrest. Filmed in just a few days on a threadbare budget, Detour has a curious hallucinatory quality, rather like a recurring nightmare. Ignored for many years, the film was rediscovered by the French cineastes of the 1950s and hailed as the vanguard for France's "nouvelle vague." Directer Ulmer, limited to a six day shooting schedule, while crude and lacking in finesse, succeeds in creating a memorable, dark, nightmare world, uncaring, cynical and brutal. The haunted leading performance of star Tom Neal is eerily prophetic; in real life, he would serve six years in prison for killing his wife.