| Sophie Durbin |

Detour plays at the Heights Theater on Thursday, February 13th, as part of our collaboration on the 16th Noir Festival. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org.
Please bear with me as I begin this piece with (yes) a quick detour. I’ve always been fascinated by Low Production Values. I capitalize these words because I thought they were an official proper noun for an actual artistic style for many years. As a kid, I was fascinated by an episode of the sitcom Sister, Sister where instead of even approximating a scene of a live concert, they showed a few waist-up shots of people dancing on bleachers while clearly pretending to watch a concert. The sets were cheaply made. Everything was slightly faded and looked a little like it had been filmed using someone’s home video camera. Oddly enamored with this look, I asked my dad what it was called when TV shows “look like that.” (Nowadays I’d ask, “Why is everything slightly shitty?”) He dryly responded, “Low Production Values.” At that moment I genuinely thought, yes, Low Production Values! When I grow up and become a famous director, I want to make movies with Low Production Values.”1 With this aesthetic value system in place since childhood, watching Detour for the first time was like coming home. In Detour, Edgar G. Ulmer scrapes together every last dime he was given by his Poverty Row studio2 to create a grim meditation on an old theme: the inevitability of bad fortune. Without the Low Production Values, Ulmer’s masterpiece wouldn’t be nearly as beautiful or effective.

If Detour is legendary for being the ultimate B, C, or D-movie noir, its production history nearly eclipses the film itself in notoriety. Depending on who you ask, the film was shot in 6 or perhaps 14 days.3 Ironically, Ulmer was on Poverty Row making Detour for peanuts for roughly the same reason Al ends up alone in the Reno diner as sirens are heard in the distance: getting entangled with the wrong woman. Lucky for the audience, Ulmer’s judgment once he finds himself in an unlucky situation is much better than Al’s. Somehow the shortcuts that Ulmer takes never detract from the film. While every scene seems to be cut a little short, each set is cheap and nearly every sequence is riddled with continuity errors, the overall effect is eerily whole. Within the limitations of the Low Production Values, the audience sees the constraints that shape Al and Vera’s universe, which begins as vast as the wide-open road and ends no larger than their claustrophobic apartment.
Consider the opening scene. Al sits at a diner in Reno with what looks like plastic wrap for windows, a few signs sparsely strewn on the flimsy grey walls, a glass case of stale rolls on the counter. “NEVADA – DINER,” we see in a Western serifed font under the coved ceiling. There’s one coffee cup, a napkin holder, a menu that says MENU. The setting is reduced to its key referents, and still the audience is given all it needs to know. This guy is in a bad mood somewhere in Nevada, and we’re going to find out what brought him here. Thanks to the sparse decor, Al’s morose, sweaty, unshaven face, lit in classic “this guy’s been through it” noir fashion, becomes the centerpiece of the scene. Any more elaboration on the set would be a distraction. Ulmer can’t afford to film much and can’t switch locations often, so he focuses the camera on the diner jukebox for a good 30 seconds while Al reminisces bitterly in voiceover, transported against his will by the tune “I Can’t Believe That You’re In Love With Me.”

When we transition from the jukebox to a flashback from Al’s life in New York, the audience is eventually treated to one of cinema history’s most seamlessly filmed no-budget sequences. Walking outside the club, Al and his sweet singer girlfriend Sue discuss their future. A sign reading “BREAK’O’DAWN CLUB” establishes that we are still at the club. As the camera follows Al and Sue on their walk, the city streets are suggested by fog and a few streetlamps to distract the audience from the fact that they are moving through a vacant soundstage. The fog cleverly implies the full breadth of the imagined city as well as the emptiness of Al and Sue’s actual situation. Stripped of an actual dark city street to walk down, the actors can rely only on themselves. As the scene ends, Sue pathetically asks, “Aren’t you going to kiss me good night?” In Tom Neal’s capable hands, “Sure, why not?”—paired with a perfunctory little kiss—is a cruel, equally pathetic response. Later in a phone booth, Neal shows off the other side of his acting chops on a one-sided phone call with Sue. He is just a little too sincere and saccharine, and the effect is hair-raisingly unnerving. That we never hear Sue’s voice and aren’t even sure of her presence on the other end save for one quick shot of her listening clearly lifted from a later sequence makes the scene all the more uncanny. By dialing down the set and effects to the absolute bare minimum, Ulmer uses the shoestring budget to show off his prime asset: his cast.
A separate article could be devoted entirely to the juxtaposition between the film’s Low Production Values and Ann Savage’s baroque performance as Vera, the dime store femme fatale to end all femme fatales. When we first see her enter the film, it’s an atypical first reveal of a leading lady. Her cardigan looks threadbare, her skirt fits oddly, and we’re drawn to her thin calves, the dark circles under her eyes, her unkempt hair and her permanently bitter expression. It’s unclear how much of Savage’s costume was selected due to Ulmer’s budget constraints, but the effect is a leading lady with grit and depth. In the jump scare that turns the film from a typical seedy noir to an outright nightmare, the watchful viewer will notice Vera’s eyes suddenly come to life as she wakes up from her nap because they are the only organic thing in the frame. The obvious cheapness and artifice around Vera makes the realness of her reaction stand out. When Al and Vera bicker with each other drunkenly in their little apartment later in the film, the utter lack of decor means there is nowhere for the audience to look but at the miserable odd couple. There are no distractions in Detour.

The Low Production Values in Detour are nothing like those we might joyfully encounter in true schlock. There are no garish, unconvincing special effects or tacky-yet-overwrought sets. Instead, the background becomes the invisible scaffolding that makes the whole film possible; a noir distilled to its lowest common denominator. Given Ulmer’s genuine talent (just watch The Black Cat for an example of what he could do when somewhat properly equipped), the effect is more like when Matisse started making collages with construction paper when he could no longer paint, or art made by prisoners of war. Within the confines of what he was given, Ulmer’s vision offers the accidental brutality of a high school play directed by someone who could have been something. I am convinced that Detour with a big budget, all-star cast, and normal runtime would not have that ineffable quality that makes it as harrowingly memorable as it is.
Footnotes
1 I wanted to be a movie director until about the age of 5. I made one ill-fated home video featuring my Barbies and, not understanding the correlation between hard work and good outcomes, was devastated when I watched the final cut and it somehow didn’t include full-length animated musical numbers. I ended my directing career then.
2 Paul A. Cantor, “Film Noir and the Frankfurt School: America as Wasteland in Edgar G. Ulmer’s Detour,” in The Philosophy of Film Noir, ed. Mark T. Conard (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006), 143.
3 A Life at the Movies, “Detour (1945).” July 1, 2010. https://web.archive.org/web/20120308053857/http://www.alifeatthemovies.com/movie-of-the-day/detour/
Edited by Olga Tchepikova-Treon
I do love that the most expensive prop in the movie, the beautiful Lincoln V-12 convertible that Al winds up stealing, was Edgar G. Ulmer’s own car.