Movie Time: Detour

It's Movie Time! 

Today's post is about a film noir that was released on this day 80 frickin' years ago. 

Wow! Time flies when you're caught in a web of deceit, betrayal, questionable life choices and.... murder!

From 1945, this is... Detour!

Meet Al Roberts, a struggling musician hitchhiking his way across America from New York City to Hollywood.

A woman done did him wrong and Al is determined to done did it right by following her out west.

Flashback time: Al Roberts was a piano player in a nightclub and Sue Harvey was the club's lead singer. Al and Sue are young and in love and life is good, at least for Al.

Sue thinks she can do better than schlepping as a singer in a two bit night club in New York City. So she books it for California to become a movie star.  

Al remains in the Big Apple all mopey and depressed then decides to fuck it all, quit his job and it's westward ho, young man!

Questionable Life Choice #1:  Al embarks on this journey with no money and no plan. It's thumb out and relying on the kindness of strangers to haul his butt as far west as he can git. 

Which is Arizona where a bookie named Charles Haskell Jr. gives Al a lift.  Charlie is on his way to Los Angeles to bet on a horse. 

Charlie is always popping pills for an unspecified medical condition.  While taking a turn behind the wheel, Al is unable to get Charlie to wake up.  Pulling over the car, Al opens the passenger side door and Charlie tumbles out, hitting his head on a rock.   

While it seems clear that Charlie died in his sleep, probably from a heart attack, Al is worried the blow to Charlie's head on the rock is going to make the police think Al killed Charles Haskell Jr.

I mean, yeah, the blow to the head will look kind of suss but an autopsy will show Charlie was dead from a heart attack before his skull collided with the rock.

But...

Questionable Life Choice #2:  Al hides the body in the brush and takes the dead man's clothes, money and ID, driving off to Los Angeles.  

All Al has to do is keep his head down, stay out of trouble, abandon the car somewhere outside of L.A. and proceed on his reunion with Sue. 

Questionable Life Choice #3: he picks up a hitchhiker, who gives her name as Vera.  She knows Al isn't Charles Haskell Jr. because damn the luck, she had hitched ride several states back with the real Charles Haskell Jr. He tried to rape her but she got away from him. So she knows the fucker she's with now ain't Charlie.

Questionable Life Choice #4: Al tells Vera what happened to Charles Haskell Jr. and she now uses that information to blackmail him into giving her all of Charlie's money plus whatever dough they can get from selling his car. 

Seems to me that Vera does not quite have the leverage Al thinks she has and could just very well drive off and leave her scheming ass by the side of the road.

But he doesn't. 

Questionable Life Choice #5: In Hollywood, they rent an apartment, posing as Mr. and Mrs. Haskell, because they need to provide an address when they sell the car. 

So "the Haskells" have a record of renting an apartment. This will come back to bite Al.  

But before Al can make the sale, Vera learns that were there was a Charles Haskell Jr., there is a Charles Haskell Sr. who is weathy, old and dying and looking to reconcile with his long lost son before he kicks the bucket.

Vera thinks Al could keep up the charade of being Charles Haskell Jr. and go claim Charles Haskell Sr's big bucks when he croaks.  

Al doesn't think this plan will work. Charles Haskell Sr. may be old and sick but come on, the man will know is own son and Al will NOT know stuff about Junior that the elder man will ask about.  

Questionable Life Choice #6: In a drunken rage, Vera argues that the plan will work and if Al doesn't cooperate, she's gonna call the police. To back up her threat, she runs into the bedroom with the telephone and locks the door.  

Vera passes out on the bed with the phone cord around her neck. From the other side of the door, Al pulls on the cord to try to disconnect the phone. When he breaks down the door, he discovers he has inadvertently strangled Vera.

What the fuck! Really?

Remember the whole reason Al embarked on this ill conceived misadventure in the first place? Yeah, he gives up on the idea that he and Sue will ever be a thing again and hits the road once more, hitching a ride to anywhere, nowhere.

Sitting in a diner in Reno, Nevada, Al hears on the news that Charles Haskell Jr. is wanted in connections with the murder of "his wife".  (Yeah, that apartment rental record back in Hollywood.)  

The film ends with Al imagining his inevitable arrest.

The Motion Picture Production Code did not allow murderers to get away with their crimes. That box gets checked off when the film ends with a police car picking Al up after he has his imagined flash forward to being arrested.  

Clocking in at a mere 68 minutes, Detour packs in a LOT of drama, crime and very Questionable Life Choices. (I counted 6 but I was being kind. The number is way higher.)    

It also also gained a considerable reputation among fans of film noir as perhaps the most bleak and nihilistic film noir thriller ever made.

Detour is a swirling nightmare of paranoia, death and despair.

Director Edgar G. Ulmer made this movie cheap and he made it fast.

• Shooting schedule:  six days
• Cast:  seven actors
• One outdoor desert location
• Six minimally furnished indoor sets. 
• New York City is a streetlamp on a fog-enshrouded sound stage
• Los Angeles is a drive-in restaurant and a used car lot. 

Ann Savage plays the venomous Vera and delivers what has been described as the most frightening femme fatale in the history of film noir.  Columbia had plans for Ann Savage in more glamorous roles but she was relegated to grade-B pictures.  

As luckless as Al Roberts is in Detour, the story of the man who played him is also frought with drama and questionable life choices.  Here is some of the shit that went down with actor Tom Neal.  

• an affair with Inez Martin, mistress of the notorious racketeer Aaron Rothstein
• Three failed marriages
• In 1951, Tom Neal got into a terrible fistfight with Franchot Tone. Tone was beaten unconscious and rushed to the hospital with a fractured cheekbone, broken nose, and brain concussion. 
• His acting career shot all to hell after that fight, Neal started a landscaping business that ended in bankruptcy.
• In 1965, he was accused of murdering his third wife, Gail Evatt, with a .45 caliber pistol. Neal was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to ten years in prison. 
• Eight months after he was paroled in 1972, Tom Neal died of congestive heart failure.

In 1992, Detour was selected for the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

Pretty good outcome for a film about  questionable life choices made fast and cheap.

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Next Saturday, Movie Time returns to the 21st century.

It's time for Wicked: For Good.