Noir Watch: Detour (1945)

At some point in your life, set aside 1 hour and 10 minutes to make it through Detour (1945), one of the grimiest, most uncomfortable, brilliantly economical movies you're likely to ever catch.  It's a short bit of distilled noir which kind of meanders for the first third, and then it starts to pick up.  And THEN Ann Savage shows up and holy @#$%.

I don't know what it says about me that I adore Ann Savage in this movie.  There's some matrix I need to devise of "what's wrong with me?" that I need to make with attributes of various Femme Fatales, including Savage in this movie, Peggy Cummins in Gun Crazy, Stanwyck in Double Indemnity and Babyface, Marie Windsor in everything...  But Ann Savage is a special kind of nuts in this movie, that veers almost into noir Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf-ish territory sometime in the back 1/3rd of the movie.



Our story - a down-on-his-luck piano player is hitch-hiking across America (which looks suspiciously like Southern California) to meet up with his lady love when he gets a ride from a gentleman who promptly drops dead on him, leaving the guy in a precarious position.  It'll look like murder if he keeps going with the car, but he can't just stay there.  And... he could use the guy's money...

He decides to pick up a hitch hiker of his own whom he realizes knew his driver, and she decides to pin the driver's murder on him whether he killed the guy or not.  Romance blossoms.*

Ann Savage is crazy as a bag of cats, and in a very plausible, visceral way I'm not sure movies rightly capture very often.  It's all Tom Neal's piano player can do to keep up with her once she starts talking, and she swings wildly between threats and come-on's, all putting him further and further into a corner.

our story in a nutshell

Anyway, it's on TCM On-Demand at the moment and usually pretty easy to get ahold of as I'm not sure it's still actually owned by anyone, a small movie from a small outfit that went belly-up long ago.  The quality of the camera work and editing can sometimes remind you that this was a cheap, one-week movie made at an independent studio, but in that environment, lightning could strike when the right elements fit together.  And, honestly, a glossy Detour wouldn't have worked very well.  It needs that cheap and hard-scrabble feel and people who maybe understand that a couple of hundred bucks would mean the world to some people.

Anyway, Detour, everybuddy.



*no, it does not