- Edgar G. Ulmer's Detour is one of those films noir that has all of the right ingredients. A down-on-his-luck hitchhiker, in this case named Al (Tom Neal). A nightclub singer named Sue (Claudia Drake) who loves him but is forced to move out West. A chiseler named Charles (Edmund MacDonald) who ends up dead. And that most essential of elements, a doozy of a femme fatale named Vera (Ann Savage). Jazz plays on the jukebox, the nights are plenty foggy, and itinerants huddle in late night roadside diners.
- It's in one such diner that Al recalls the events of the past few weeks. The lights dim, leaving only Al's eyes illuminated as the flashbacks begin. He was once a piano player in the club where Sue used to work, but he got sick of living off of $10 tips from drunks. Desperate to start a new life, he sold all of his possessions and started hitching his way from New York to Los Angeles to be with Sue. Along the way, he's lucky enough to get picked up by Charles, who seems plenty crooked but also plenty rich. Too bad that Charles died, but you have to believe Al when he tells you it was a freak accident.
- Next day, Al is driving Charles' car when he picks up a hitchhiker of his own. Strangely enough, she turns out to be the same woman that Charles had picked up a few days before. In the late Charles' words, Vera is "the most dangerous animal in the world, a woman." Charles made it through the experience with only a few scratches, but we soon gather that Vera is capable of far worse. Perhaps needless to say, she recognizes an opportunity just as easily as she recognizes Charles' car, and pretty soon she has Al under her thumb. Vera had better hope that she doesn't have one of those freak accidents, too.
- So why is Al mulling all of this over now? One possibility is that he really does regret the tragedies of the past few days. Another equally likely option is that he's trying to practice his story before the cops show up, which they eventually do. You see, there's really not much room for optimism in this movie. Either Al is a unreliable narrator or a truly unlucky sap, and in either case he's likely to "wind up sniffin' that perfume Arizona hands out free to murderers." In fact, Detour's nihilism and ambiguity are probably the only reasons people would watch the film today. Aside from Ann Savage's amusing turn as a woman who is somehow worse than everyone's unfavorable descriptions of her, there's not much to recommend the acting, and the film seems to be employing the usual noir tricks primarily to hide its low production value. I'm sure Al would simply respond that "the world is full of skeptics."
