DETOUR... THE HOLY GRAIL OF AMERICAN NOIR.
by JIMMY VARGAS
DETOUR....1945...Film Company PRC
Director Edgar G Ulmer.
Starring Tom Neal as Al Roberts and Ann Savage as Vera.
Story from the novel Detour: An Extraordinary Tale by Martin Goldsmith.
DETOUR... THE PLOT
B-boite piana-thumpa AL ROBERTS as played by Tom Neal, and his blonde canary ammorata Sue, (Claudia Drake) squawble out pre-war juke hits in an lower east side cabaret. Miss Peroxide soon ditches both the double douche act and said affair, high-keeling it off to Hollywood, as a single-o in aspiration of becoming a Z-grade Bronx Bettie Grable.
Al is left behind plucking both heart and piana strings shucking out a deaf toned career in the same skid lounge, to zilch clientele.
Months pass.
Al, still a-strokin at the cuckold horn he's born forced to bear, fones his cuckoo on the humiliation hot line for another ear wax of rejection.
But Susie, jerkin the hankie routine that her Hollywood hubba hubba hopes has turned to hash, coo ca choos that she misses him, and as a result both, pitch'n'woo a California rendezvous in order to jump-start both their love life and showbiz careers.
With no coin, our galah-cad, sets out to hitch hike across the ol' USA on the cuff. A good samaritan Edmund McDonald (Charles Haskell) gives him a lift, but through a fatal accident, Eddie tragically dies en route to the West Coast. Al decides to dump Ed's body, hijacking both car and identity of his deceased benefactor.
One half reel later, Al himself picks up hooch cooch hitch-hiker, the viperous VERA aka AnneSavage. An existentialist tragedy on the Route 666 ensues. Al, caught up in the double crossin of Vera's low harlot high heels, never to reconnect with his blonde tweetie bird.
DETOUR... THE BACK STORY
Based on the cult novel Detour: An Extraordinary Tale by Martin Goldsmith... 1938. The screenplay was also written by Goldsmith with uncredited contributions by a Martin Mooney.
The script had been purportedly shopped around at Warner Bros studio as early as '42, with brooding broadway boxer and method actor, Julius Garfinkle aka John Garfield mooted for the lead of Al, with those nitrate saloon dames Anne Sheridan, and Ida Lupino propo'd for the wraith persona Vera that Anne Savage eventually claimed.
The orphan script eventually landed on the desk of a Leon Fromkess, President of glitter gulch studio... Producers Release Corporation, a cheapjack production house, that was known in the trade as PRC, initials that the Big Five of the Hollywood studios spurned with the epithet of Poverty Row Crap.
The trades were more polite, monickering PRC with the euphemistic title of "That haven of no- budget 'melos'," a term that distinguished it from other nickle grindsters like Monogram and Eagle Lion in the late forties. PRC, in reality was the iconic Hollywood bottom feeder, where black balled directors and actors went to expire.
DETOUR... FILM PRODUCTION AND COSTS.
Detour was shot on 3 sets, with the standard cheapjack back projection scenery, as befitting a dime store corporation as PRC. The reeler was filmed over six days, with Ulmer zipping through 52 set ups per diem. (A Normal production schedule, filmed at A studios, MGM or Warners would usually cover a mere 10 set ups per day.)
The flick could have passed in under budget of $14,500 but there were major editing problems.
In order to parallel the westbound New York to L.A. travel of the characters Al and Vera with right-to-left movement across the screen, many scenes had to be flipped. This caused the cars to appear to be driving on the wrong side of the road, and the hitchhikers to enter the car on the driver's side. Negative and promotional costs eventually came into the bone-crunching cost of $15, 332 dollars.
DETOUR...THE CINEMATIC AESTHETIC.
The paucity of PRC's budget, props, decor, and the soiled sweaty character wardrobe of it's anti-heroes however informs and legitimizes the existentialist nightmare that is DETOUR. It is this very construct that reverberates a true noir resonance from its grimy sepia cels.
With the director Edgar G. Ulmer verbally whipping his stars with the autocratic command of "Faster , Faster, Faster !", due to budget/schedule constraints, the dialogue whip-cracks with a viperous velocity, as if both Vera and Al, with their cryptic clipped delivery, don't want to breathe in each others halitosic despair, the soylent fart of each other's reply, or for that matter inhale the evil air of their Americana skid domain, in fear of having their souls sucked out.
For in this route 666 diner, Al and Vera are not only bereft of air conditioning, salvation ain't on the menu either.
As the sets, that are stripped to skeletal frame, so too is the husk of Al's and Vera's existence shucked to a crude, boned, venal desperation.
The arid, desolate tundra that is America's desert, over which they sport in a stolen jalopy, mirrors their own spiritual vacuum.
Ulmer, in aiming to avoid having the viewer witness the collapsing three wall set, kept his subjects nailed in to the hacksaw furnishings like roaches to a pool hall dartboard. The patina rimming off PRC's substandard film stock, bastes it's subjects with a glaze of putrefication and decay, and the oily smear of the character's greed/lust engulfs and vaselines inside the camera lens, meta-phylizing the stonk of rank roadside diners, the odourous soiled sheets of a skid crib, Vera's sour mash dimestore parfum, and the fetid groin sweat of the American underbelly.
DETOUR... AMERICAN FILM NOIR & THE FRENCH EXISTENTIALIST CONNEXION
Detour the novel, in both it's philosophy and plot/narrative influenced, (as had many American pulps at the time), the burgeoning French Existentialist and Italian Neo-Realist auteurs that sprang forth at the end of the Second World War. This was not a casual synchronicity.
One can see a direct umbilical thread between Goldsmith's classic noir of 1938, and Jean Paul Sartre's Huis Clos (No Exit), the stage play which was premiered shortly after the liberation of Paris in 1944.
Both Goldsmith's and Sartre's opus' deal with people who are trapped in the hell of themselves and each other, damned in a soul scorching environment, suffocated by an external and internal fascism.
Ironically enough, Ulmer, tonight's film director utilises certain embellishments in his mounting of Detour, particularly the skid row crib scene between Vera and Al, that recall similar staging mechanics, physical dynamic and interaction, of the lead characters, from the original transcript of Sartre's play No Exit, where the Parisian anti-heroes too are bound in an airless, barren hotel room not unlike their American doppelgangers.
And for another example of the helixical twining 'tween Sartre’s and Ulmer's opuses, Sartre's Huis Clos is a Parisian slang term for "In Camera". The existential author not merely pre-meditating his play's cinematic appeal, but revealing that the play itself was a camera.
Ulmer in DETOUR too, places this instrument as a third accomplice, his deleriant-tremened, hand-held camera baits his subjects with a claustrophobic clawing that suggests more than a peep show voyeurism that predates Hitchcock, but a succubian nightmare, and a diabolic invasion.
Ulmer gazumps Sartre's assertion to cinematic notoriety, by re-claiming Detour back to it's original American terrain and street vernacular, before it's imitator No Exit managed to get to the screen in 1954 with female director Jacqueline Audry at the helm of the French production. Ulmer, it most be noted was no dervativist nor plagiariser however, for he himself had started in the film industry as a set designer for famed German director F.W. Murnau at that progressive Berlin film studio UFA in the twenties.
He arrived in the U.S.A. in 1923, as one of Murnau's trusted adjutants, a benefitee of the Hollywood studio carpetbaggery system that raided a dissolute Berlin in the pre-WW2 years, cherry-picking willing creative krautskis from the rubble of the inflation stricken Wiemar Republic, and the simmering fascist putsch.
It must be noted that all of Ulmer's own Hollywood film work, bears the UFA's Expressionist birth mark, the principal DNA of that bastard American offspring we now classify as film noir.
THE POLITICAL POLEMIC OF DETOUR.
Detour can be so regarded as the holy grail of pure American noir. Beyond it's existensial allusions, it's a demented 16mm travelogue of underworld U.S.A, circa '45 - a nation facing an atomic annihilation, recession, communism, and gender battles in the bedroom.
Al can be well viewed as the crippled American every-man - a hicksville joe doe, de-neutered by a Great Depression, de-balled by an Iwa Jima land mine, still stalking the heartland of America's shadow psyche, haunted, paranoid on a freight train to noir-town.
The Manifest Destiny of Self Determination and Success has been denied this returning doughbuoy.
As Al constantly voice overs in a monotnous mantra of self loathing "That's life. Whichever way you turn, Fate sticks out a foot to trip you."...He carries preternatural guilt, for a yet uncommitted crime.
The schnarl 'n' spit coupling of Al and Vera too is stripped to the pornographic husk of the true male/female relationship in post war America.
In Detour sexual extortion is the courtship.
Psychic rape is romance.
Death is matrimony.
Al and Vera... Vera and Al... Bound eternally by the swangin' wire coil of Ma Bells telephone cord.
Detour presciently pronounces the shift of the sexual gestalt in the late forties USA. The gelding and eventual sissification of the American male, and the masculinization of the new American woman, who through the social and economic liberation of war is unshackled by Depression era propieties and can now party on independent coin, hustle and pursue her own sexual self determination.
As Vera's tongue alternately coos and cobras with convoluted hustle-baits, Al's responses, echo the strangulated coitus of the new american castrati. When Vera lashes him with the flip "Shut up... you are making noises like a husband..." She has him pegged as a submissive, a wife, and she, Vera, has already appropriated the status of dominant male.
THE BOX OFFICE
Detour was released as a bottom of the bill filler to grindhouses in the fall of '45, where-after it recouped it's negative cost, was shuttled off the big screen and into the junkyard of midnight TV reruns after PRC sold off the rights. With the expiring of its copyright the movie shunted into public domain.
Upon the noir revivals of the seventies and eighties, Detour slowly circulated back into the cinematic radar, no doubt assisted too by ANNE SAVAGE who was known to hawk her own 16 mil copy of the flick at Festivals held in her honour.
In 1992, the Library of Congress named Detour as the first film noir and "B- movie" inducted into the National Registry of Film.
In the same year a remake of DETOUR was produced by Wade Williams and starred Tom Neal, Jr. playing his late father's ill fated role.
THE CINEMATYRS OF ALL AMERICAN SHOWBIZ LOSERS
TOM NEAL and ANN SAVAGE had both shared screen time together as cinematic pardners in three 'B' reelers for Columbia Studios, KLONDIKE KATE, TWO MAN
SUBMARINE , and UNWRITTEN CODE between 1942 and '44.
Thus their rythmn, and risque rapport had already been cemented into the American cinematic psyche as a tussling, torrid two-some during those warrin' forties.
But by 1944, both were dropped by Columbia Fuehrer HARRY 'KING' COHN within weeks of each other, their careers subsequently spiralling into Z-grade obliviana at PRC.
An observant viewer can witness a mutual cognizance of each other's decline in Ulmers pix. It adds a poignant, epitaphical note to the sordid cine-massacre that is Detour.
SAVAGE's and NEAL's nitrate sizzle is all too real. As the two of them gnash, claw, and shred up both each other and their cheapjack soundstage, they are not merely playing out the death throes of a screen marriage, but a snuff reel of the double shotgun suicide of their respective careers.
THE ACTORS... ANN SAVAGE.
Though having enjoyed 'A' league status with Columbia Pictures in the early forties, and cache as a popular Esquire pin up girl during World War 2, the post war ANN SAVAGE, like the character of Vera she played, was doomed to B grade hell after her Detour appearance. Her career went south to TV land throughout the forties and fifties, where she appeared intermittently in turkey productions such as the Schlitz Playhouse at C.B.S - on the same Columbia stages she used to exalt on not yet ten years before. With the death of her husband/agent BERT D'ARMAND, in 1969 she left the busines all together.
Upon the art house revival of noir in the eighties, Savage was lured back into the spotlight, by notable noir curators such as EDDIE MUELLER who having her make stellar appearances at his annual SAN FRANCISCO FILM NOIR FESTIVAL, helped resurrect Miss Savages's dormant career.
Her reappearance onto the national stage brought her back into cinematic circulation, and she was awarded an "icon and legend" commendation by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences at the 2005 Oscars.
In 2006, she was coaxed before the cameras again by Canadian director GUY MADDIN, having her play his mother in his own autobiographical flick My Winnipeg.
In 2007, Time Magazine named ANN SAVAGE as one of the "Top Ten All-Time Best Cinematic Villains", for her "walking nightmare persona' of Vera in Detour.
She is still alive in Los Angeles today.
TOM NEAL
The plotline of DETOUR itself however served as a prescient forecast of the tumultuous career spiral of TOM NEAL - his own life a harrowing sequel, living out the obscene nitrate curse of his cinematic alter ego, AL ROBERTS.6
Neal, originally coming from prime American moneyed stock, had been a member of the boxing team at the esteemed Northwestern University, and had earned himself a law degree from Harvard, before scoring plaudits on the Broadway stage in '35 season.
In 1936 he went west, and enjoyed both inkage and wattage under the Columbia umbrella, where he was groomed as the studios answer to Clark Gable. His careeer slinked to sewer city in the mid forties due to his boozing, whoring and cop bashing activities, and by '44 Harry Cohn shucked off his contract, and he was a muscle mouth for hire. Throughout the late 1940's and into the 1950's, NEAL appeared mostly as bruisers, and hard-hearted hucksters in Hollywood low-budgeters.
In 1951, in a dispute with his former clutcheroo, the faux platinum Barbara Payton (herself a blonde doppelganger junkie hooker version of Vera), he took to violence against Payton's new and more successful Hollywood beau, the bisexual actor Franchot Tone, mangling the matinee idol's head into the gawping mouth of the gold dragon mascot outside Sid Graumanns Chinese Theatre at a Hollywood premiere.
As a result of the very public altercation, the major Hollywood film studios black-listed Neal.
Turning to the production side of the industry, TOM NEAL, with fledgling pulp crime scribbler, bit actor, and James Dean confidante JOHN GILMORE, vainly attempted to get seed money together for their filming of 1940's Hollywood murder mystery, the BLACK DAHLIA onto the screen.
L.A.P.D cops and A-list Studio executives, who were complicit accesories in the killing breathed relief, when in 1965, NEAL was found to have shot his third wife Gale, with a .45-caliber bullet to the back of her head after a domestic dispute.
Californian Prosecutors sought the death penalty for Tom Neal, aiming him for a gas chamber bounce for the felony, however a sympathetic trial jury, convicted him only of "involuntary manslaughter", and Neal was sentenced to 10 years in jail, of which he served only six. Eight months later, in February 1972, Tom Neal died of heart failure.
The nitrate ghost of Al Roberts was purportedly seen to rise up from that grindhouse graveyard of the Hollywood Forever cemetary to greet him with..."That's life. pal... Whichever way you turn, Fate sticks out a foot to trip you."...
DETOUR... EPITAPH... ROAD CLOSED.The movie Detour itself can be caustically viewed as an industrial promotional film for a dying studio, a funereal vignette created by director Ulmer, offered as a nitrate corsage to his reel life/ real life doomed actors Savage and Neal, and the moribund production house that boasted this cheap flickeroo.
Allegorically Detour is not only about the ill-fate suffered by one emotionally marooned and failed pianist heading for Los Angeles, but a paean to the failure of American showbiz, a clueless caste who without success to define them, wander L.A. as the new class of Un-American Untouchables, mooching and scooching nickel bait hustles, not realizing that their harping skeletal frames are merely coal-bait to keep that noir dime-factory of Hollywood Auchswitz a-grinding.
(C) JIMMY VARGAS 2009… www.jimmyvargas.com
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