Edgar G. Ulmer: A Retrospective Part 4 of 4: Detour(1945)

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And now we come to our final chapter of our look into the cinematic world of Edgar G. Ulmer. Even considering the huge flaws we’ve seen in the films, it’s been quite a world hasn’t it? A world where the sensitive have no place, a simple act of kindness can transform an artist into a killer, a satan-worshipper who marries his adopted daughter and lives in his own glass wonderland can call another man childish with a straight face, and justice can only be meted out by a knife-wielding Bela Lugosi by skinning a man’s face off. Say what you will about Ulmer, or his filmography as a whole, but what we’ve seen so far in two of the man’s three most famous and celebrated films has not exactly been a very pleasant(some would even say juvenilely nihilistic) worldview. So what have we to expect from his last truly-celebrated, and in many ways most notorious, film?
 

Would you believe that it’s his most mature film? Both in terms of an artist and as a judge of humanity; 1945’s Detour displays Ulmer at his directorial peak. The film is Ulmer’s masterpiece, and in many ways the definitive film noir as well. Certainly the best thing to come out of PRC along with Ulmer’s own Bluebeard and Frank Wysbar’s moody ghost film Strangler of the Swamp. Granted, it has some considerable flaws, but we’ll address those later. Let’s get rolling.



A surly looking but well-dressed man(Tom Neal) wanders into a highway diner. He has an angry, haunted look about him. He looks like a businessman who just lost everything in Vegas and has been hitchhiking back home, his mind marinating in his own thoughts of anger and frustration and what could have been. Or perhaps he’s a high-level crook on the run from the cops, his sneering attitude to the waitresses and a trucker asking for a riding partner seems to indicate this. But as we’ll soon see, he has a very good reason not to trust a man offering him a ride ever again, and has just been through an experience that would ruin anyone’s temper; you see, his life is over in just about every way possible that doesn’t involve being dead. How did he get this way? The genial but obnoxious trucker puts a nickel in the jukebox machine, and then it starts playing an upbeat jazz tune, pretty catchy in my opinion, but our mystery man isn’t going to have none of it. Why? Slowly, his mind begins to drift back, just a few months ago….
 

I don’t know about you, but this is the kind of opening that gets me 100% hooked!

Our man’s name is Al Roberts, and just a few months ago he was a struggling pianist in a low-level nightclub(actually, it may be a high-class nightclub where the pay just stinks, considering the resources of PRC, who were the most impoverished studio on Poverty Row, it’s a bit hard to tell). Roberts is in love with singer Sue Harvey(Claudia Drake), and although Sue’s quite attractive, it’s kind of hard to see why anyone would go for someone as stupid as her. Sue’s smart enough to know that she can’t get married to Al on her meager wages, but isn’t smart enough to realize just how the Hollywood machine works. Hollywood, you ask? Yes, Sue has delusions of becoming a big time starlet, being of the school of thought that anyone can make it in Hollywood because so many untalented people do. What she, along with lots of similar people in real life, fails to realize is that the reason those people in Hollywood strike it big is because they have connections. She doesn’t, but she’ll be damned if that’s going to stop her(something tells me that this is a role a lot of actresses in Poverty Row studios would have related to, and probably lived).
 

Star material.

Al is pretty pissed about this, and realizes the extreme unlikeliness of Sue striking it big just like that, but realizes he can’t stop her. She leaves. A while passes, and our sullen hero, who, while we see nothing to indicate he’s a hack or bad player, has apparently never been anything special on the keyboard. Now, one night when the crowds are packed, he plays a…DUCK! IT’S ANOTHER CLASSICAL PIECE IN AN ULMER MOVIE! GET OUT THE COTTON! COVER YOUR EARS!
 

Amazingly, and if you haven’t been impressed with the film so far, consider this evidence that Ulmer is doing something special with this film, the piece Al plays is amazingly good(I know, a well-used classical piece in an Ulmer movie. Has the world come to an end?), and with all his pent-up longing for Sue, he plays like a demon possessed. His performance is so impressive he gets a big tip from a well-to-do patron. Feeling confident, Al then makes the biggest mistake of his life. 
 

Al decides to hitchhike to California, and eventually gets pretty close, and for anyone who has ever driven on the lonely stretch of desert highway that you pass when entering the state, you probably know that there’s not a bleaker, more foreboding place in the world except maybe a bar where they’re playing Bill Maher on the TV and no one wants to change the channel(actual experience of mine), so imagine how it must feel on foot. Al then meets up with a friendly man named Charlie Haskell, not having had a soul in the world in the world to confide in for a long time, the two pour their hearts out to each other. Charlie comes from a well-to-do family, but has been running ever since he put a friend’s eye out and scarred his own arm while playing with his father’s expensive swords. He makes good money(mostly from gambling and more than likely robbery of criminal acts of some sort), but it’s rapidly dissipating and he was almost flat-robbed after an encounter with a woman he describes as a “Hellcat”. 
 

The two carry on amiably, and Al even agrees to drive for Charlie, who suffers from some unspecified heart condition where he has to sleep a lot and take pills constantly. Charlie falls asleep and Al drives for quite some time, until it starts to rain. Al attempts to put the hood up and attempts to wake up Charlie, who falls from the car dead when Al opens the door abruptly. Whether he died in his sleep or from hitting the ground(unlikely) is never explained, all Al knows is that out here know one will believe his story about what has happened, especially with his disheveled appearance and filthy clothes. Al is forced to do the only thing he can, he must hide the body and impersonate Haskell! If hitchhiking was his first big mistake, then this is his first nail in his coffin, and the final nail is coming up soon….
 

Yeah, he's pretty much fucked.

So our hero spends a night in a motel where he is plagued by nightmares, then he takes off. While passing down the highway, we catch a brief glimpse of…something. A person? Sure enough, it is a person, a half-asleep young woman(Ann Savage). Al, showing a remarkable display of stupidity for a man in his situation, agrees to give her a lift. Not exactly talkative, the woman, whose name we learn is Vera, goes(apparently)to sleep, but not before asking Al several questions and eyeing him suspiciously. Slumped and apparently asleep, Al notes Vera’s natural beauty, but also how…dirty she seems(“like she’d just been thrown off the crummiest freight train in the world.”) as well as how, and he never mentions this; how very, very cruel she looks. We never learn her profession, but as likely a one as prostitute would seem, we’re quickly going to learn that Vera isn’t the submissive type, oh no. Remember Haskell’s story about the “Hellcat” he’d picked up? How much you wanna bet that she and Vera are one and the same?
 

“WHERE’S CHARLIE HASKELL??!! WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH HIS BODY!!? ‘’
 

Anyone who was mislead by the film’s poster and expected that the film would involve a romance between Al & Vera, I can safely say don’t count on it. While the incredibly implausible events that have happened so far, along with Al’s hard-boiled narration(this guy was Mike Hammer before Mickey Spillane had written anything more substantial than comic books, and Al‘s narration is too seedy to be comparable to Raymond Chandler) may not seem too impressive to some viewers, maybe even corny and cliché, I consider the antagonistic nature of the Vera character as proof that Ulmer really had something here, and knew it. Most films would turn these two’s meet-up as grounds for romance, but not here. Al even says at one point “If this was a movie I’d fall in love with her, marry her, make a decent woman of her” but as dumb as he is at times, he knows that’s not going to happen. Vera is no hooker with a heart of gold, she’s a gold digger with no heart. You just didn’t find female characters like this in other media of the time.

It wouldn’t have mattered anyway if either of the two had fallen in love, because Vera now has our hero so under-the-thumb she’s going to make sure they are inseperable. Oh, she intends to let him go after they sell Haskell’s car, but first she wants to spend some of his money…then the sale fouls up, then she hatches a scheme…It fails too. Then she hatches another, and another, and then one so ludicrous it defies explanation….
 

"What does 'Implausible' mean, Al?"

Al may be close to Sue, but he’s not going to see her for a long, long time. There’s only one way out. Only one way…
 

Detour is a film of which a whole essay could be written about, a whole seperate post in fact, but I include it as the final part of my retrospective because it nails home something I’ve noticed about Ulmer’s films, and mentioned, but haven’t really gotten the chance to expand on. In each of Ulmer’s three most beloved films, we have as a hero a man who is searching for love but ends up doomed to kill, trapped in a world run by madmen(and women). Vitus Werdegast of The Black Cat sets out to rescue his family, only to get caught in Poelzig’s mad satanic playground, where logic, reason and morality have no place. In Bluebeard the sycophantic, delusional artist Gaston Morell allows his simplistic, black and white view of the world to cloud his judgement to the point that when his delusions are broken he becomes dangerously psychotic, and gets caught up in a web of blackmail, police traps, and betrayal that finally ends in his own destruction. Yet when he tries to set himself up symbolically as a fiendish mastermind(symbolized by the Mephisto puppet)in order to control this new, evil world, he is always still answering to other people’s terms, from the woman whose mocking visage haunts him, to Lamarte the blackmailing art dealer, to the police hunting him and finally to Lucille. In Detour, Al Roberts allows his love for Sue to also cloud his obviously better judgement(he knows that Sue won’t make it as an actress overnight) and goes on a trek for her. When he encounters the seemingly friendly Charlie Haskell, he ends up haunted by the man literally and figuratively. First he ends up caught in an incriminating trap when Haskell dies on him, then when he assumes his identity, he digs himself deeper and deeper. Although he didn’t kill the man, Al is still driven by his guilt over the incident, and even has dreams involving the man. Vera even has him assume Haskell’s identity on more than one occasion, and her final and most ludicrous scheme(which never comes to the fore) involves him impersonating Haskell in front of Haskell’s own family. It’s like his life is now dictated by the man, his very identity stolen and replaced by that of the friendly little man who let him drive his car. And then there’s Vera; a woman who defines the term shrew. Vera is a controlling bitch who will never, ever let Al go, and even if her stupid impersonation plot had worked, she very likely still wouldn’t have let him go. 
 

"Where do 'ya think your going?"

Be it Sue, Haskell or Vera, Al is constantly being controlled by them, even after their deaths or long-time seperation from them. Perhaps it is significant that it is Sue who not only is the only one of Al’s dominating influences who lives, but also the one whom he is separated from. Just as how a stupid accident as a kid reduced the wealthy Haskell to a cheap gambler, look at how Sue’s dreams of stardom doom her to a life flinging hash in a restaurant. Perhaps going back to Sue would have guaranteed Al more misery. Also, although we never learn anything about the woman’s background, it is obvious something must have happened to Vera to make her the hardened, nasty, venomous bitch she is. Al virtually becomes both of them through similar experiences. I’ve already discussed how he becomes Haskell, but he also becomes like Vera; a desperate criminal on the run, and when we first meet Al in the diner scenes where he has his flashback, his nasty, quick-tempered insults and domineering manner towards the café patrons smack unmistakably of how we first meet Vera. Perhaps had Al gone back to Sue, he would have become too much like the two cheap crooks who ruined his life for him to be able to relate to her; just like Richard Marshall of the 1968 film Witchfinder General, or Joe Wilson of Lang’s 1936 film Fury, or the narrator of the Black Freighter comic in Watchmen.
 

Fun fact: Tom Neal later killed his wife accidentally in real life.

If the theme of the sensitive man who is trapped in a world of lunatics and is forced to kill is a genuine recurring and personal theme of Ulmer’s, than Detour offers it up in it’s most intelligent and artistic form, and if Ulmer really is an auteur who intended all this, than it makes him a genius and validates all the praise critics have for him.

But does it?

For one, if this was a genuine intention of Ulmer’s, how come he only expressed it in three films? Plenty of directors working under even worse conditions than Ulmer ever did had managed to express their so-called recurring themes and motifs better, even *shudder* Coleman Francis; who managed to get into every one of his films his obsession with coffee, the folly of war, the metaphorical power of the desert, nihilism, the wanton murder of innocents and protagonists who “run all the way to hell”. Roger Corman, whom I’ve already discussed and dismissed as an artist, still does manage to cram an awful lot of his films with stuff he claims to be recurring themes in interviews(more than likely ideas he wants to milk for all they are worth), and Mario Bava did the same, much more admirably. So why couldn’t Ulmer if he was supposedly greater than any of them? Universal may have butchered much of Black Cat, but they still let him get away with an awful lot for 1934. PRC, where two of Ulmer’s three great films were made, undeniably couldn’t have cared less, since they were notorious for lack of taste(they bought The Brute Man from Universal because Universal was appalled by it)and letting crazy ideas get expressed onscreen(This was the studio that greenlit The Devil Bat). There’s even evidence that shows that the Breen office only really cared about altering the ending of Detour, and the ending is one of the things which helps the film. So, censorship obviously wasn't much of an issue; He clearly had plenty of opportunities to go wild.

So if Ulmer was the only auteur to ever work in B-movies, he must go down as the most bored and unreliable. Only three worthwhile films in a filmography that large and with films filmed with much better resources? Not a good sign. Again, even Corman and Francis put more personal insight into their films(not that anything Coleman Francis did is worth watching, but going by auteur theory, then yes, he did express himself better than Ulmer, every one of his three sordid films Beast of Yucca Flats, Red Zone Cuba & The Skydivers has his undeniable stamp on it). So if Ulmer truly was making some kind of statement, he didn’t like showing it a whole lot even if he had the chance.

Detour is also not without it’s glaring flaws too. While the plot is quite well crafted and admirably handled onscreen, tell me, if you saw this on a television show, read it in a pulp magazine from the 30’s, or read it in a comic book or some other similarly maligned medium, would you take it seriously? I have a sneaking suspicion no one would. If the film had had a supernatural elment, had been marketed as a horror film, would you take it seriously? Would all the critics praising Ulmer still do? The plot is an idiot plot, full of contrivances, coincidences, amazingly dumb decisions, and characters who do things for extremely silly purposes. Just as one could argue that Al Roberts is the definitive Ulmer hero, one could also write him off just as easily as a Mary Sue. While I don’t usually like fan theories which claim entire film storylines are hallucinations or lies told by the protagonist, one could totally believe it if Al’s flashbacks were. For example, as unlikely as it is that people would believe that Haskell died from hitting his head when he fell out of the car(I’ve fallen out of a moving truck once and not even caused myself pain that would last a minute), wouldn’t people listen if Al specified that Haskell died in his sleep due to a heart condition? He has the pills and everything to prove it. But no, Al goes with the pavement story and only clarifies that he may have died from a condition well after he’s already in an unsalvageable position. Possibly he was in such a state of shock it didn’t occur to him, but the fact remains, it’s still a plot built solely on contrived coincidences and stupidity. As Vera says “That’s the greatest cock and bull story I’ve ever heard!”. I hate to say it, but I would agree. 
 

Detour is saved however, by the acting, direction and cinematography. Other than the scenes in the club, which were probably intended to evoke a small, trashy place anyway, the entire film asks nothing of it’s budget that couldn’t be filmed as a home movie. This is a brilliant use of economizing, why waste money if the scene doesn’t need it? MGM could not have done a better job. The cinematography is great, the desert scenes, while comparatively brief, are the heart and soul of the movie, and accurately capture the sense of despair.

The acting is excellent too. Edmund McDonald gives a very believable performance as the deceptively amiable, but obviously sleazy Haskell, we learn so much of him in so little time, and his importance reverberates so much throughout, that a whole prequel could have been made about the character. Claudia Drake is the perfect starry-eyed airhead as Sue. But the standouts are leads Tom Neal and Ann Savage. A common complaint is that Al is either too nasty or too passive, but Tom Neal gives such a good performance you see him instead as a much more stable and believable character. Neal gives us a sense that Al is a young man who tries to come off as cynical(his scenes with Sue)but only as a way to mask his vulnerability(consider how he just gives up every time an obstacle comes his way)and essential innocence(he still makes some incredibly dumb decisions). Neal also deserves praise for convincingly handling one of the best, if most cliché monologues in film history. Few actors can do so without looking stupid.

Ann Savage however, makes the film as Vera. One reviewer once called her “the most fatale of femmes“, and I have to agree. You feel stunned at how beautiful she is in some scenes, but just one look from her, not even a sneer, just a look, and your testicles shrivel up and run away. Vera is a truly despicable and frightening character. Savage is so powerful in the part, so(forgive me) savage that she’s one of the few femme fatales that both the film's protagonists and the audience won’t find themselves having any romantic fantasies about, as Al states in a monolgue. Some people criticize the character for being too one-dimensional, but I think the performance works best that way. It’s great when you can create a three-dimensional villain, one who has a soul, but ones without a soul can be just as effective in a different way. There’s a big difference between cartoonish, one dimensional villains like Quatrich from Avatar, Ulmer’s own Hjalmar Poelzig and equally motiveless and one dimensional but far more memorable and terrifying villains like Vincent Price’s Matthew Hopkins and Heath Ledger’s Joker. Ann Savage as Vera falls into the category of Price as Hopkins and Ledger as the Joker. These characters are effective not because they have no soul outright like Poelzig and political strawmen like Quatrich, but because they’re so frightening that we want them to have a soul, to show some humanity, some vulnerability, some kind of redeeming quality, but there is none. It’s truly scary when a character is like that, and it take a powerful actor/actress to convey that quality without descending into camp. Ann Savage succeeds. In fact, she succeeds so well that it colors all her performances before and after; for example, try and watch her in one of her pre-Detour roles as a simpering ingenue or sassy love interest and see how unconvincing she is, you’ll see what I mean. I honestly can’t decide who is the best villain of 1945; Ann Savage as Vera or Boris Karloff as John Gray in The Body Snatcher. 
 

One eeeevil bitch.

I also can’t help but wonder if Russ Meyer saw this film and Vera was an influence on a similar character created by Meyer; a scheming bitch-goddess who dominates everyone around her, hatches mad schemes, sneers, has a similar name, an unmistakable hair style and whose primary territory is the desert. 
 

Hmmm...

So, faults aside, great direction and acting is what elevates Detour to masterpiece status. It’s clearly the reason Ulmer is thought so highly of even though I’ve demonstrated that he had probably the least consistent output of the major B-directors. Detour however, for all it’s flaws, can easily be mistaken for an A-movie and probably angered more than a few A-directors who wished they had made it, of all cult films, it is probably the only one not directed by Kubrick, Bergman or Whale that snobs can appreciate as “real” films, and thus, the reason Ulmer and his fans are canonized and excused from criticism while better directors, but of less “respectable” films are continually shit on. I have a feeling that the majority of these critics secretly know that Ulmer was no great shakes, and that Detour was quite obviously either a fluke, an anomaly in in his career, or an exception that proves the rule. My guess is that they keep up the deception that he was some kind of genius simply so that they won’t get called out on only liking one film of his, which is also why The Black Cat and Bluebeard are canonized as art along with the genuinely masterful Detour; they are his only other films of equal fame, even though that fame is not for his direction, but for their star-power and controversy.
 

"Go on Pete, pick a B-movie director to canonize so we can not look like assholes."

So what does it say about Ulmer as a whole? I think it says that he is only well-liked by the snobs because he directed one great film and that they feel they must be fair by liking at least one B-movie or Cult film director, so they chose him to elevate to “auteur” status because he did make one film that they like. The recurring themes in his three most well-known films? Maybe that is evidence that he was an auteur or had something to say, but he was still wildly inconsistent and never explored it further. And if he was an auteur, then that still obviously isn’t the reason critics like him. It’s sad, but probably true that my theory for his canonization as a diamond in the B-movie rough is the most likely.

As for my opinion about the man and not about his critics? Here’s what I think about him:

He was a director who made a lot of movies; some good, some bad, and some in-between. Nothing more, nothing less. But he should feel grateful in the afterlife, if such a place exists, that he is remembered so fondly today, as well as that his films, warts and all, continue to entertain millions(Detour is one of the most watched films on Archive.org). If I was a director, I’d be thankful to know I had achieved just that.