Trailer
Plot summary
Al Roberts earns his living as a pianist in a cheap New York nightclub where his girlfriend Sue Harvey sings. When Sue leaves for Hollywood to try her luck in pictures, Al decides to follow, and with almost no money he sets out hitching rides. In Arizona a bookie named Charles Haskell Jr. picks him up and tells him he is bound for Los Angeles as well. Al drives through the night, and in the rain he pulls over to find Haskell dead on the ground. Convinced the police would blame him for murder, Al hides the body, keeps the dead man's cash, clothes and papers, and continues west calling himself Haskell. At a filling station a woman named Vera joins the ride.
Cast
- Harry Mayoas Nightclub Patron
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Detour (1945)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Director Edgar G. Ulmer said in a 1972 interview that Detour was shot in six days, but his daughter Arianne later presented a shooting script title page reading "June 14, 1945-June 29. Camera days 14," and Ann Savage said the shoot took four six-day weeks plus four days in the Lancaster desert.
- Billy Halop was tested for the role of Al Roberts and selected for it, but Tom Neal replaced him just three days before filming on Detour began.
- Popular belief long held that Detour was shot for about $20,000, but Noah Isenberg's research found the final cost was closer to $100,000, still one of the highest profit margins, if not the highest, of any film noir in the National Film Registry.
SPOILER
Because the Motion Picture Production Code did not allow murderers to get away with their crimes, Edgar G. Ulmer satisfied the censors by having Al Roberts picked up by a police car at the very end of the film.- Detour's budget was so tight that director Edgar G. Ulmer used his own personal car, a customized 1941 Lincoln Continental V-12 convertible, as the vehicle driven by Charlie Haskell and later by Al Roberts.
- With reshoots out of the question on such a low-budget movie, director Edgar G. Ulmer flipped the negative for some hitchhiking scenes, so the westbound New York-to-Los Angeles trip flows right-to-left across the screen and cars seem to drive on the wrong side of the road.
- Director Edgar G. Ulmer died in 1972, before Detour's critical re-evaluation, but Ann Savage lived long enough to enjoy the renewed acclaim, making live appearances at public screenings of the film from 1985 until two years before her death in 2008.
- Composer Leo Erdody, who had worked with Ulmer before, took extra pains to underscore Vera's introduction with a sympathetic theme, a light musical shading set against her razor-sharp dialogue.
