Detour (1945 film)

Detour 1945 -- With cartoon, selected shorts, newsreel, snipes, bumpers and the main feature.

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• published: 15 Dec 2016
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From imbd.com Detour was the first "B" movie chosen by the Library of Congress for its National Film Registry, in 1992. Also the first Hollywood "Noir" honored. According to Ann Savage, she and Tom Neal did not get along during filming. Savage stated that Neal embarrassed her on the set by putting his tongue in her ear. She retaliated by slapping his face as hard as she could. After that incident, they did not speak to each other except when filming scenes. While setting up to film a hitchhiking scene, a passing car tried to pick up Ann Savage(made up to look dirty and disheveled), causing laughter in the rest of the crew. The budget PRC gave director Edgar G. Ulmer for this film was so small that the 1941 Lincoln Continental V-12 convertible driven by Charles Haskell was actually Ulmer's personal car. Shot quickly in mostly two locations: the hotel room apartment, and the car in front of a rear projection screen on a soundstage at PRC. The actual shooting schedule was 28 days, including a brief location shoot on old U.S. Highway 6 at Actis and Rosamond, California for the desert scenes, and backplates for rear projection. German filmmaker Wim Wenders called Ann Savage's performance as Vera "30 years ahead of its time". It is frequently reported that this film was shot only in one week. In truth, the shooting schedule was 28 days. The "one week" myth appears to be based on an off-hand remark by director Edgar G. Ulmer toward the end of his life. Ann Savage worked on her biography for the last decade of her life. It was released in early 2010 called "Savage Detours". Errol Morris' favorite film. He said of it: "It has an unparalleled quality of despair, totally unrelieved by hope." Ann Savage and Tom Neal made three movies together at Columbia Pictures before Detour. PRC re-teamed them for "Detour" to exploit the publicity and press buildup they had been given in 1943 and 1944. To save on production costs, Leo Erdody, the film's composer, was recorded and filmed playing two classical piano pieces, Frédéric Chopin's "Waltz No. 7 in C# minor" andJohannes Brahms' "Waltz Op. 39 no. 15 in Ab Major" as a favor for director Edgar G. Ulmer. Al Roberts (Tom Neal) "performs" the piano pieces during scenes set in the "Break of Dawn" nightclub. Erdödy's hands, in close-up, can be seen playing the Brahms. The failure of the original copyright holder to renew the film's copyright resulted in it falling into public domain, meaning that virtually anyone could duplicate and sell a VHS/DVD copy of the film. Therefore, many of the versions of this film available on the market are either severely (and usually badly) edited and/or of extremely poor quality, having been duped from second- or third-generation (or more) copies of the film. To show Al traveling west, shots of a U.S. map, with camera scanning right to left, are interspersed with shots of him hitch hiking. The sequence makes sense to us because Al, his rides, and the camera's movement across the map, all travel in the same direction (right to left). Later the direction is reversed (left to right) to depict Al returning back east from L.A. Without a quantity of westward bound shots he could use nor the means to shoot new ones, Ulmer simply had the eastward bound (left to right) shots reverse printed and used them to show Al traveling to, rather than from, L.A. This is why in the beginning of the movie we see Al hitch with his left thumb and ride in right hand drive cars. Peter Bogdanovich planned a remake in the mid 70's. Included among the "1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die", edited by Steven Schneider. Haskell's rare 1941 Lincoln Continental convertible is one of only 400 made that model year. It sold for $2,865 ($47,100 in 2016). In excellent condition it could easily fetch more than $70,000 or more at auction in 2016. In 2013 one sold for a record $209,000. The film is included on Roger Ebert's "Great Movies" list. Al's arrest at the end was not in the script. But the Hollywood Production Code at the time did not allow murderers to get away with their crimes. So the shot of Al being picked up by the police was included.