Customer Reviews

Detour

5 star:		(32)
4 star:		(26)
3 star:		(11)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

An unshaven and weather-beaten young man sits brooding over a cup of coffee in an anonymous roadside café. A man of means by no means, as Roger Miller would put it. But Al Roberts (Tom Neal) is king of no road, and by the end of DETOUR we wonder whether he is even sovereign over his own soul.
A potential ride in the form of a friendly trucker strikes up a conversation. Where you coming from? West. Where you going to? East.
Roberts is wrong, though. He's coming from Hell and he's going to Nowhere, and the last thing he needs is a chatty trucker along for company.
DETOUR is told in a flashback from that lonely stool. Roberts and his girlfriend work as pianist/singer in a fleabag club out east. Comes a foggy night and she splits up with him to pursue fame out west. Weeks later he calls and they agree to get back together. He'll come out west and they can be married.
Being down at his heels Roberts is forced to hitchhike to California. All goes well until he reaches Arizona, where Fate deals Roberts one nasty hand after another. In short order the innocent Roberts finds and feels himself a hunted man.
DETOUR is a wonderful film. Neal is perfect as the moody young musician who finds himself trapped first by and accident and later by femme fatale Ann Savage, who know his terrible secret and has no scruples against using it against him for her own nefarious purposes. Veteran B-movie director Edgar Ulmer has enough tricks up his sleeves to surmount the Poverty Row studio conditions he was working under. If you're a fan of film noir, or enjoy hard-bitten stories, you'll enjoy DETOUR.

By the way, my thirty year old first edition copy of The Film Encyclopedia had an interesting entry on DETOUR'S star Tom Neal. He received a law degree from Harvard University in 1938. Throughout the forties he appeared in a number of B-movies, usually cast as a tough guy. In 1951 he found himself in the middle of a love triangle involving Franchot Tone and Barbara Payton. Neal "smashed" Tone's nose and a scandal ensued. Neal became poison and no studio would employ him, so he became a gardener and later established a landscaping business. In 1965 he was accused of murdering his wife. Able to prove that the gun went off accidentally, Neal had the charges reduced to manslaughter and served a six-year sentence. He died in 1971.

'Detour' manages to do in 67 min. what most films dream about in two hours. Made for almost nothing in 5 days by a small-time studio, this goes to show that you don't need money or big studio support to create an enduring movie. You can sense the tight budget all around. Take into consideration for example that Ulmer shot a big portion of the film inside cars (notice how the first few cars have the driver's seat on the left side, like English automobiles), a cheap nightclub and a creaky apartment. Also in the flashback sequence when Tom Neal is sitting in the restaurant, Ulmer simply put out the lights, made a close-up on Neal's face and shed a rectangular light onto his eyes to create the flashback effect. All this techniques, while not very innovative, add to the effect of this bleak little gem. A dark little drama that is deserving of it's cult following. Tom Neal is the ultimate screen chump as an innocent man who happens to land on Ann Savage's deadly lap. Ann Savage creates one of the most ruthless characters ever to grace the silver screen, her character doesn't have a shred of human kindness or decency, she's tough, greedy, ruthless and relentless. It has all the elements of great noir; a truly memorable femme fatale, dark foggy streets, acid-stingy dialogue and a hero who gets his just desserts. A dark little gem that deserves to be discovered by noir fans. From a scale of 1-10 I give this film an 8!

I love the way this story unfolds, in flashback, which is relatively common in film noir. This story opens with Neal looking back on events as they unfolded, similar to the way Fred MacMurray opens Double Indemnity with his narrative. The dialogue exchange between Neal and Savage is wonderful too, even hilariously unbelievable at times, like when they first meet. The only trouble I have with the DVD is that the master was apparently in sad shape. In more than a few places, it is apparent that this movie is in deperate need of a restoration. Several scenes have visual noise and thin vertical lines running across the frame. Even the audio fades and crackles at one point (where Neal and his girlfriend kiss goodbye), which is jarring when one considers this is a DVD. I do not regret buying this DVD because I love this moive--I only hope that it will be restored one day.

I am a great admirer of "Detour" which is probably the best low-budget film noir ever made. But this DVD is a piece of junk. It is transferred from a lousy, battered 35mm print that has badly spliced gaps and screwed-up film footage in crucial scenes, obliterating some of the best dialogue. The company that put this out should be ashamed of itself, especially considering this film is now considered a low-budget masterpiece. If you have no copy of this, get the Sinister Cinema VHS. It is a much higher quality print.

Five stars for the movie. I agree that this is a great work of film noir.

I knew upfront that the print quality of this film would be less than perfect. So, in order to get the very best print, I purchased all three DVDs that were available - Alpha Video, Image Entertainment, and the A2zcds Remastered Edition.

The A2zcds Remastered Edition of "Detour" is a piece of junk. Don't waste your money. It has the picture quality of an amateur You Tube video. The various shades of black and gray are broken down into large digital cubes. The digital cubes are about a half inch in size and dance all over the screen when there is any movement - which is very distracting. Also, for more than half of the movie, from the point of the movie where Tom Neal picks up Ann Savage and they begin talking in the car - the voice audio track is not in sync with the lip movement. You hear what the person says before their lips even move.

The Alpha Video release of "Detour" has problems with its grays. The grays are not crisp and have a very small hint of sepia color. Also, the audio seems a little muffled.

The Image Entertainment release of "Detour" while far from perfect is the better one of the three versions currently available.

1945's Detour is not only one of your truly vintage film noir classics of all-time, it is also ranked by many among the best low-budget films ever made, largely due to the memorable performances of Tom Neal and Ann Savage. The directorial slant which frames the story is dead on, and one has to think that a larger budget would probably have done more harm than good to this gritty, realistic, film noir tour de force. Tom Neal plays Al Roberts, one of those unfortunate men who was born both stupid and incredibly unlucky. Shortly after his girl Sue up and goes to California looking for stardom, Roberts decides to go west and join her, hitchhiking his way across the country. This one fellow picks him up in Arizona and says he will take him all the way to L.A.; then the guy has the audacity to keel over dead. Afraid he will be accused of murdering the guy, Roberts decides to hide the body, take the guy's money, and assume his identity until such time as he can ditch the car in a big city. Then he himself picks up a hitchhiker, a woman who ends up being the last person on earth he would ever have wanted to encounter. Vera (Savage) know that Roberts is not the man he claims to be, and Roberts quickly finds himself quite at the mercy of this shrew of a woman. Her greed knows no bounds, and Roberts' life becomes more and more complicated and unhappy by the hour.

Ann Savage's character Vera is perhaps the most blunt, cold, evil, wholly unlikable woman I have ever heard tell of. It is quite easy to see why the man we meet in the opening scene is as hateful and short-tempered as he is. As we flash back to the whole story of Roberts' hard times, accompanied by plenty of voiceover narration, one cannot help but feel sorry for the guy. His initial decision to cover up the death of the guy who picked him up is a bad, undeniably stupid, mistake, but he certainly does not deserve the level of vitriol and pure evil that afflicts him in the form of Vera. The ending is a tiny bit flat, but the story itself is fascinating and the performances of Neal and Savage are not to be missed. Detour is vintage film noir and should not be missed by any and all fans of the genre.

While it's true that this is one of the seminal movies of film noir, the print here is absolutely reprehensible. I use that word not only because of the quality of the print, but also, much more insidiously, because on the packaging, it boasts that this is a "pristine new film-to-video transfer from original source materials" AND "Beautifully restored from the original 35mm nitrate masters".

Well, "original" is the operative word here. This must have been a direct transfer with absolutely NO digital remastering AT ALL. And original? It's like they found the cheapest print of this film available and then purposely messed THAT up. There are so many unintentional jump cuts and skips in the film it is absolutely infuriating. Image Entertainment is charging (...)full retail price for this; they should be charging (less).

Yes, you can still make out more than enough to understand the entire film, but with technology what it is today, why should there be this many errors and omissions? This is completely inexcusable. The three stars are for the film itself. If the print had been clean, I definitely would have given this five stars.

This is really a shame. Image should be REALLY ashamed of themselves, especially given the specious advertising on the package.

DETOUR is the ultimate work of art on human fate. "Wherever you go, fate is stretching his feet to trip you" says the doomed hero. Unlike many film noirs and crime movies, the hero is an "ordinary healthy guy" as he describes himself, trapped in an extraordinary unhealthy series of situation. In another word, the film is truly chilling because it evokes the frightening sensation that this might happen to myself.

This film has inspired generations of filmmakers from the French new wave to Quentin Tarantino, because it is a masterpiece of low budget esthetics. It is indeed one of the most influential film in film history.

Produced with a next-to-nothing budget and a production schedule of a mere week of shooting, the precision of and ingenuity of Edgar G. Ulmer's direction realized a rich cinematic universe filled with extremely expressive details. Take for instance the way the lighting changes from naturalistic style to a haunting spot-lighting effect on Tom Neal's eyes as he goes into a flashback of his doomed story (a technic that, by the way, Scorsese has stolen so effectively in THE AGE OF INNOCENCE) . Or the cleverness of expressing his nightmarish state of mind simply by shifting the focus of his point of view shot in and out.

Even though it is a low budget film in which it was impossible to hire known actors, the performance is incredible. Tom Neil's haunting voice-over sets up the entire mood so effectively, and Ann Savage is... well, she is the ultimate femme fatale, so savage and brutal.

Before the DVD release, I had been able to see the film only with dupy grainy prints and low quality video. But now we have the DVD which is TRANSFERRED FROM THE ORIGINAL CAMERA NEGATIVE. Overall, the image is incredible, so crisp sharp and full of nuances it is difficult to imagine that they shot the film in only a week. But even the original is not in the best shape. A few scenes shows severe deteriorations of the film elements; some shots are distorted and some frames are missing (so it looks like a jump cut). I hope some serious restoration works will be done in the future to correct those flaws, then I'm sure I'll be the first one to buy it.

One of the most famous of all films noir, DETOUR was made for less that $60K in less than a week's time, and features excellent camerawork, an incredibly doomy plot, a fine performance by the hunky Tom Neal as a hapless drifter and an even better one by Ann Savage as Vera, one of the angriest and most malignant characters ever to appear in a film. (Though her time on the screen is brief, her performance is what most people remember about this film even though the rest of it would be memorable in its own right.) Unfortunately, neither of the two prints available of this film on DVD as of this writing is any good: in both cases the film stock is at some points distorted and even jumps, and there is no supplemntal information whatsoever on this version from Image. Wait until the film is released in a fully restored form untiul you buy it on DVD.

`Detour' is either the worst B movie ever made or it's a masterpiece, I can't decide which. Roger Ebert includes the film in his book `The Great Movies,' yet other critics dismiss it with a laugh. So which is it?

From the opening, I immediately had my doubts: Shaky camera work on an already unsteady highway, shots of a stationary car while the background changes, lights going down in a restaurant with the main character's face lit up for a flashback...all cheap B movie stunts, which you expect.

But what you don't expect are good performances. `Detour' contains at least one good one and one superb one. Tom Neal plays a piano player from New York hitchhiking to L.A. to meet his sweetheart. Neal is right on target as the passive loser. His face looks like it was formed in a vat of perpetual disappointment. Something happens on his trip to L.A. that makes his life even worse, if that's possible. Then he meets a woman named Vera.

If they had a Best Actress category for B movies, Ann Savage's portrayal of Vera would be the standard by which all other actresses would be judged. She's evil, scheming, conniving, wicked, hateful, vengeful...and that's all before breakfast. Savage multiplies Neal's problems a thousand-fold and grinds the tension out all the way until the end. With a better script and better production values, Savage and Neal could have lit up the screen for the definitive film noir. But director Edgar G. Ulmer makes the best use of the limitations he has. Despite its problems, `Detour' is a better than average B movie/film noir that deserves to be seen.

69 minutes, black and white