Detour (1945)

"Detour" is, quite simply, the most famous B-picture of all time. It's 64 minutes of low budget-cheap sets-unknown actors all wrapped up in a classic noir tale, led by the hand of director Edgar G. Ulmer (who had among others directed Karloff's "The Black Cat" in 1934). The films starts with a tramp entering a bar (Tom Neal). As he sits at the bar, he recalls, in flashback and voice over, the events that lead him from his NY job as a piano player in a pub, to that bar as a tramp. Aiming to follow his girlfriend to L.A., he hitchhikes across the States. But the wrong car picks him up, changing his fate forever. Edmund MacDonald, a no good crook, is driving, but after a while suddenly drops dead. Neal, afraid he will be accused of murder, buries MacDonald in a ditch and changes identity with him, getting his car and his suspicious money. But soon after, he picks up Vera (played brilliantly and neurotically by Ann Savage), a girl who, coincidently, knew MacDonald. So Vera blackmails Neal, and the tension between the two grows and grows, to disastrous results. "Detour" was made on a shoe string budget, and has a lot of tricks to disguise it (fog, shadows, darkness, claustrophobic apartments). Yet these features heighten its noir tension, aided by a fast paced screenplay and a tacky genre-specific dialog that makes you smile with delight. The second half hour belongs to the two main actors, as Savage gets more and more possessive and money obsessed, and Neal, until then an innocent by-standard, capitulates to his fate and throws himself to its mercy. Their interaction build-up is superb and mesmerizing. In the end, "Detour" has a moral, and that moral is of a destiny no-one can escape. If that car hadn't stopped, if I hadn't given her a ride... But the car did stop, and he did give her a ride, and everything goes wrong from there. An average Joe is corrupted, and his soul destroyed by chance, by fate. A classic tale about fate, death, in a depression-dark-road-side America. A well beloved movie, which has gained, with time, a very respectable status, much higher than its original creators intended at the time of its release, when it was just a fill up, before the main feature.