Detour

“That’s life. Whichever way you turn, fate sticks out a foot to trip you.”   

If this were Noir 101, Detour would be required watching. Here is grit and crime, the weight of fate, and lost souls who take detours to a dead end. The plot is pure pulp: a hapless, unemployed piano player unwittingly tumbles down a rabbit hole of murder, blackmail and betrayal, done-in by a tough, cunning dame played by Ann Savage - a "B-actress" with a well deserved cult noir following as a "bad-ass."

Detour hit the screen in 1945. Bleak films were common. Look at noirs released that year, such as The Lost Weekend, Scarlet Street, Mildread Pierce, Leave Her To Heaven - all as dark as they get. After fifteen years of depression and war, no one was in a good mood.

The production got decent reviews and made a handsome profit, but none at the time thought this 68-minute movie shot on a shoe-string budget with hardly known actors would go on to make the National Film Registry - which contains less than 1% of all American films - and be enjoyed almost a century later by legions of fans.

Film critic Roger Ebert says: "This movie from Hollywood's poverty row shot in six days, filled with technical errors and ham-handed narrative, starring a man who can only pout and a woman who can only sneer, should have faded from sight soon after it was released in 1945. And yet it lives on, haunting and creepy, an embodiment of the guilty soul of film noir. No one who has seen it has easily forgotten it."