Reputedly shot in six days for $20,000 at the Producers Releasing Corporation (better known as PRC) on Hollywood’s “Poverty Row,” Detour (1945) is one of the all-time great B-movies made from practically no budget. Few directors other than Austrian émigré Edgar G. Ulmer could have pulled off the project with as much style and panache, having refined his workmanlike talents on The Black Cat (1934), his esoteric twist on Poe for Universal starring Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, and Bluebeard (1944), his thoroughly creepy take on the legend of the French ladykiller. The technical flaws only add to the film’s surreal artistry, and the spare production, brisk editing, and economic storytelling have the visceral impact of the best hard-boiled pulp fiction from Black Mask or of the expressionistic illustrations in EC Comics’ Crime SuspenStories.Tom Neal stars as a piano player hitchhiking to California, who descends into a personal hell the closer he gets to Hollywood, first in his nocturnal encounter with a dead man, then with a femme fatale (played to the hilt by Ann Savage) who blackmails him. It’s a noir cult classic that turned giant cups of black coffee into uncanny objects before Twin Peaks (1990) and the open road into a route towards the recesses of the male unconscious before Lost Highway (1997). Neal’s last words are still among the most fatalistic ever uttered in the genre: “Someday a car will stop to pick me up that I never thumbed. Yes, fate, or some mysterious force, can put the finger on you or me…for no good reason at all.” Like a good shot of scotch, this biting little film stings your system when it first hits you and then goes down smooth.
