Detour

In 1942 Hollywood, a hitchhiker, Al (Tom Neal Jr.), stops at a roadside diner and thinks back to how his life became nightmarish. He was a pianist in a New York nightclub in love with a singer, Sue (Erin McGrane). When Sue leaves Al to pursue stardom in Hollywood, Al grows bitter and gets fired from his job. He decides to follow Sue, unaware that she has become a struggling waitress in Los Angeles.

Al hitchhikes his way to California, getting picked up along the way by a bookie named Charlie Haskell (Duke Howze). Meanwhile, Sue ends a bad date with a cowboy named Lance (Brad Bittiker), hoping never to see him again. Al takes over the wheel from Haskell and discovers during the rainy night ride that his driving companion has died. Fearing the police will blame him for murder, Al decides to hide Haskell's body on the road, steal his money and identification, and ride off in the car.

Al then picks up a woman at a rest stop, Vera (Lea Lavish), but she happens to be someone who knew the real Haskell. Nevertheless, she promises to help Al rather than blackmail him. Back in Hollywood, Sue reads that Lance has had an accident, but plans to star on Broadway after his recovery. She immediately goes to visit the actor and propose marriage to him, as a way to hitch her wagon to his star. Then she leaves him as soon as she discovers he is no longer wanted for the Broadway show.

Al and Vera, meanwhile, arrive in Hollywood, and take a room in a hotel as man and wife. They go to a car dealer to sell Haskell's car, but Vera stops the deal when she reads in the paper that Haskell's father is a wealthy dying man. Al resists Vera's idea for him to pose as Haskell in order to inherit the money, but Vera threatens to turn him to the police if he doesn't cooperate. After a drunken tussle, Al accidentally kills Vera as she tries phoning the police. He then runs away from the scene. Later, he learns that the police are chasing after Haskell, but he keeps on running, never meeting up with Sue.

The 1945 DETOUR marked the grungy peak of wartime melodramas that came be known as film noir after WWII. The "Poverty Row" quickie was shot by Edgar G. Ulmer, an Austrian-born director who learned light-and-shadow expressionistic film techniques from Max Reinhardt and F.W. Murnau. Martin Goldsmith's screenplay anticipated postwar preoccupations with irony, fate, and existential angst. The female lead (Ann Savage) gave a striking, even scary performance, way ahead of its time. Not surprisingly, the ultra-low-budget picture became a "sleeper" in its day and cult favorite ever since.

Clearly, independent producer-director Wade Williams reveres the first version (he even purchased and now distributes the best- quality public domain print). In his 1992 remake, Williams follows the original script and story closely and even casts Tom Neal Jr. in the part that made his father, the original Al, semi-famous. Regrettably, Williams lacks the skills of Ulmer and offers nothing new in the way of contemporary insight into the old material.

The pacing is slow and sluggish. The use of color ruins many of the scenes that made the first version so perfectly grim. The technical gaffes include echoing soundstage dialogue. The actors look uncomfortable and amateurish aping 1940s styles, although Lea Lavish progressively grows into her role as Vera, throwing off sarcastic lines to Neal's Al like, "I'll bet you're in big demand now that all the men are overseas." This time, even the two story lines--Al's and Sue's--don't work in the same way (as ironic counterpoint in 1945); here, it's like watching two different movies in one package. In this DETOUR remake, that's two too many. (Violence, sexual situations, adult situations.) leave a comment