“That’s life,” the anti-hero of “Detour” growls in voice-over. “Whichever way you turn, fate sticks out a foot to trip you.”
Hardboiled, archetype-upending and gorgeous in its bare-bones minimalism, “Detour” is quintessential film noir.
“The Maltese Falcon” preceded it and “The Big Sleep” followed it — big studio productions with Bogie and Lorre and Bacall and John Huston conjuring up a genre that the French would later label “film noir.” But cheap, briskly-shot and briskly-cut “Detour” is the great primer on the genre.
Nobody in it got famous. And the director never shook his “B-movie” bonafides.
Even in this now-acknowledged classic, we see the sloppiness of low budget haste — images flipped to show cars going east instead of west, with the driver and steering wheel on the wrong side — and the crutch of “narration” was never more superfluous in a film that was voice-over narrated to death.
But this lean, blunt and talky thriller grew in stature over the decades. The lore attached to it was added to again and again, and was often wrong — “shot in a week” — and troubling when it wasn’t. Read boxer-turned-star Tom Neal‘s later life biography if you want to know what I mean.
In 1992 “Detour” was added to the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress, denoting it as essential cinema and one of the finest films to come out of that cynical, world-weary/underworld-friendly genre that took Hollywood by storm after World War II made the movies and America grow up.
I hadn’t seen it since its 2018 restoration. That’s as good an excuse as any to dive back into an all-time favorite.
Neal plays a rumpled, grimy hitchhiker when we meet him in a Reno diner late one night. Al Roberts has the haunted look of a man who’s seen things, done things and heard things.
He’s been west. He’s headed east. And that’s about all you’ll get out of him.
So whatever you do, don’t play the wrong song (“I Can’t Believe You’re in Love With Me”) on the jukebox.
“Wait a MINUTE, pal! That’s my nickel, see?”
As the lights in the diner dim around his stubbly face, Al’s interior monologue — the flashback of the life that brought him here — begins.
There was New York, a nightspot called the Break’O Dawn. And there was a dame — Sue (Claudia Drake) — the singer where Al played the piano.
“Let’s split this town,” says she.
“Next week we’re gonna make with the ring and the license,” he counters.
But “split” she did. And when the longing grows too much, Al takes a $10 tip, a “piece of paper covered with germs — it couldn’t buy me nothin’ I want” and sets out by thumb across country as “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows” wafts into the score for the first of many times.
“If only I’d known what I was getting into that day in Arizona,” when he thumbed that last ride to the left coast in the Lincoln V-12 convertible of a big-talking bookie (Edmund MacDonald).
A death will follow, one “nobody’ll believe” was an accident. And a brassy, bullying hitchhiker — Vera (Ann Savage) — runs into our guy Al in that high-end Lincoln and proceeds to guess what’s happened and work the angles, threatening her way into blackmail.
We don’t have time to wonder why this piano player would give an obvious femme fatale his real name. We’re dumped into this jam with him, wondering if she’ll rat him out, help him out or somehow manage to do both.
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