DETOUR (1945) B/W 67m dir: Edgar G. Ulmer

w/Tom Neal, Ann Savage, Claudia Drake, Edmund MacDonald, Tim Ryan, Esther Howard, Roger Clark, Pat Gleason, Don Brodie

While hitchhiking cross-country, a piano player meets a scheming dame and is innocently involved in a sudden death.

From The Movie Guide: "DETOUR puts the noir in film noir. Utilizing 'night-for-night' cinematography, this amazingly dark genre landmark unfolds with the logic of a nightmare as Al Roberts (Tom Neal) recounts in voice-over the unlikely chain of events that landed him in a purgatorial diner in the middle of nowhere. A triumph of talent and inspiration over budget, it was made on the cheap by a Poverty Row studio [Producers Releasing Corp.] in just six days. This road picture was filmed almost entirely in the studio, but director Edgar Ulmer transforms limitations into virtues. The sleazy look somehow feels right for DETOUR's self-consciously Freudian allegory of Oedipal rage and misogyny. ...

"DETOUR is a film that must be seen to be (dis)believed. Today it enjoys a richly deserved cult-film status. The wooden Neal is just right as the fatalistic protagonist and Savage is one of the most memorably off-kilter vixens in movie history."