or he is lying. The entire film is told in flashback as Al Roberts (Tom Neal) sits in a dingy diner. At the beginning of his story, Al is a piano player in a low rent club in New York and his best girl is the singer. But then she grows tired of their professional stagnation and decides to go out west and try to get into pictures. Al gets lonely, calls her, and says he is coming out there too. She enthusiastically embraces the idea. He has no car and so he hitchhikes. He gets all of the way to Arizona before his bad luck hits. By the film's end Al has implicated himself in two murders that were accidents in both cases, but would be impossible to prove they were not murder, and is held prisoner by a dragon lady who wants to get him involved in a preposterous fraud scheme that he rightly decries as being impossible to pull off. The acting and much of the dialogue is very melodramatic, bordering upon soapy, but it fits the story as so much of it involves conveying the emotion and doing so from the point of view of Al. Bogart and Mitchum wouldn't have been right for this lead role. Either one of them would have come across as either too cool or too tough to put up with such a domineering femme fatale as Ann Savage's Vera and seem so depressed and pathetic. Instead, Tom Neal is perfect as a guy who sees himself bound by fate and doomed.But maybe the entirety of the story is made up. Al's voice over could just be him sitting in the cafe creating an alibi story. Ann Savage's performance as Vera was over the top maybe because it's Al telling the story, and he wants to make himself look good. I don't buy half of what he tells us; I think he was much more complicit in all of the deaths than he wants the audience to believe. Vera is a caricature of the noir femme fatale because he's trying to convince us that everything was her idea or an accident or fate based on his act of true love - trying to get to his girl in California - and he's completely innocent.On the technical side, this one showed a great use of light, shadows, and music, and fine direction by Ulmer to keep the mood. It's too bad nobody has restored this one as it resides in the public domain. This is one noir that will stay with you.

Dear Film-Noir fans, Detour is a powerful noir. It wears its noirness on its sleeve. And does not try to come across as a polished big budget film or anything. Nor does it overstay its welcome - it is only 66 minutes long. The plot is quite interesting - the two encounters of a pianist hitchhiker when he is on the road to meet his girlfriend in Hollywood. The first encounter is with a talkative and sympathetic bookie who buys the broke piano player some food. The second one with a vicious blackmailing femme fatale that tears his life apart.The jaded psyche of the hitch-hiker is underscored in the film's second scene at a café when he turns away someone who tries to start small talk and reacts angrily when music is played on the jukebox. We are treated to his inner monologue which is utterly pessimistic and misanthropic throughout the film. He is a paranoid character who is unable to deal with the outside world. His only act of kindness (give a woman a lift) lands him in deep trouble. He does utter some cool one liners once in a while, though.Tom Neal is all right as the loser protagonist who is hard to like. Ann Savage as the vicious blackmailer steals the show in the film's second half.(7/10)

When the pianist Al Roberts gets tired of being miserable and missing his girlfriend who traveled across the country to seek her fortune in Hollywood, he decides to leave New York behind. He has no money to pay for the trip from one coast to the other, so he decides to hitchhike, something that proves to be his downfall. A man who picked him up dies during the journey and Al panics when he pessimistically expects to be accused of the death. He steals not only the man's car, but also his identity and stows away the corpse in a ditch. He then decides to pick up a hitchhiker named Vera, but he will soon regret it because she seems to know his dark secret and will not hesitate to take advantage of it.The story feels more than a little strained on more than one occasion. It's hard not to fall in love the hopelessness that constitutes Detour. A low-budget thriller directed by Edgar G. Ulmer. Sure, it's an extremely simple B-movie, but it is packed full of interesting quotes, friendly cynicism, pitch black darkness and at least as much rain. It is insanely entertaining to see Vera and Al throw sharp barbs at each other while the tones are so miserable that they find it hard to laugh at them.With a playing time of over 70 minutes says Detour goodbye long before it has time to start to feel tiring.

A movie with a lot of dark dim lighting portrays the era of despair and struggle. The movie used a lot of think speaking. Using off camera talking so that you could hear what the actors were thinking. His story is told in this manner as he is sitting in a diner.His travels to get to his love he gets a ride by a man that dies while he is driving and he gets out to put the top of his car up due to rain and realizes the car owner is dead. He panics and puts him in the woods and switches into his clothes and takes his identity and leaves. While trying to get the top up an officer comes by.His story continues to be told the narrative aspect of the movie being told is very detailed and breaks in and out between narrative and actual on screen speaking.He himself picks up a hitch hiker who finds out he is not who he says he is and she blackmails him. She tries to get him to come forward as Haskels son that they are searching for. Her having a hold on him via his identity so he tells her he refuses to do what she says so she attempts to call the police. The struggle over the phone from different rooms and he finds that he strangled her with the phone cord not meaning to.A wide range of events unfold for a man that was just trying to get to his true lost love. He eventually gets picked up by the police.