Editor’s note: minor spoilers in the comments below
Despite its unsavory subject matter, film noir inspires much admiration for its superior craft and polished style. Devotees, historians and critics have sung its praises, heaping kudos on the actors, composers, screenwriters, set designers and especially directors and cinematographers. Not so surprising since the powers that be invested considerable resources in these films. Accordingly from a purely technical standpoint the elite of noir, especially those produced by the major studios, can stand alongside the best films from any genre, past or present.
However, there are also diamonds in the rough, the (mostly) under-the-radar, forgotten B noirs, produced by Poverty Row level studios, created on the cheap in a few weeks (a few days sometimes), with cut-rate performers, unheralded directors and various other little-known collaborators [1]. These little movies may not be minor masterpieces but they hold up exceptionally well, in spite of, perhaps because of, their rough-around-the-edges look and feel. Some are oddball, offbeat noirs with unusual twists, characters or settings, and some flirt with other genres but still have enough tropes to fit into the tent. And many have a more genuinely dark cinema quality than their far better known (and more expensively produced) brethren.
These films are a special sub-species, the poor cousins of their more respectable relatives, and it’s difficult to find the right description or classification: anti-noirs isn’t right, it defeats the idea; pulp noir is too cute, little noirs more than a trifle condescending, and second tier B movies is self-referentially redundant. The always-tempting-to-invoke guilty pleasures has been so overused as to be beyond cliché, and besides, there’s nothing guilty about the pleasures these movies inspire, except perhaps the vicarious titillation of immersing oneself in the sordid landscape. So I guess we’ll suffice with B-noir for now. In any event some of the more notable examples include Blonde Ice, Blast of Silence [2], Destination Murder, The City That Never Sleeps, Murder is My Beat, Night Editor, Quicksand, Fear in the Night, Please Murder Me, The Great Flammarion, The Spiritualist, The Hunted, Decoy, Inner Sanctum [3], Red Light, Escape in the Fog.
Tom Neal plays Al Roberts, our proverbial doomed hero. Worse for wear and edgy, he tells us of his current situation, attributing it to fate sticking out its hand and grabbing him. But his precarious state, like that of many a desperate noir hero, is more the result of his own bad choices, many of them improvised or made during panic brought about by a certain paranoiac fatalism that haunts him [4]. Al is dark cinema’s all too familiar guy trying to outrun and out-finesse his past, but as any student of noir knows, the past always catches up with us. We’re soon plunged into – literally and figuratively – a fog of flashbacks as Al ponders how he got into this fix.
Like so many noir heroes Al is really a romantic at heart. What’s more, he’s a classically trained pianist, a good one, too good to be wasting his time in the bistro where he performs, which is little more than a glorified dive. All he wants, it would seem, is to marry and live in eternal bliss with his beloved Sue, a torch singer who performs at the same club where Al works (Claudia Drake is perfectly cast as the familiar noir good girl [5]). Sure, he has a testy, grumpy side, who doesn’t? And perhaps this explains why Sue seems a little less than enthusiastic about a happily ever after future.
Vera is the femme fatale from Hell: she appears out of nowhere and doesn’t seem to have a past, at least not one she wants to reminisce about. Maybe she’s a succubus after all. With her fingernails-on-the-blackboard voice, unkempt hair, and thrift store wardrobe, she may be the frumpiest of the assorted creatures that populate noir’s hall of vixens. In short, a sexpot she’s not. Vicious, dominating and remorseless, Vera nonetheless hasn’t got anything on the Kathie Moffats, Phyllis Dietrichsons, or Kitty Collins’s of this world in the mean department. The thing about Vera is that it’s all up front: she doesn’t hide her evil behind a scrim of designer dresses, polished manners and sheer nightgowns. Vera’s really the unvarnished version of the more elegant, well tended spider women made so memorable by the likes of Ava Gardner, Marie Windsor, Audrey Totter, and Claire Trevor, women who can reduce a man to putty with a sideways glance or exhaled puff of cigarette smoke.
Be that as it may, my take on Vera is more generous than most. She may well be our most misunderstood femme fatale. Vera’s had a tough life; we can infer as much even if she doesn’t exactly spell it out [6]. She’s probably known plenty of abuse both physical and psychological, and actually wants Al to like her and even makes overtures in his direction, even though he’s sort of spoken for, at least in his own mind. Indeed, and fortified with generous helpings of alcohol to be sure, she's been coming on to Al continually in the hotel room. He rejects her advances, of course, for despite his wafty persona, Al is really a practical, low-risk kind of guy. Ergo Vera is the true romantic here. Basically she wants to be loved, but as we know love is a rare commodity in the noir universe and unlikely to be given by a guy already at the end of his rope and moreover unhappy, to put it mildly, about being held prisoner and ordered around [7]. Eventually she’s willing to do the more or less right thing – turn him in to the police at the risk of implicating herself – done so out of drunken vindictiveness but at the cost of her grand schemes to conspire with him for the big score.
Ann Savage steals every scene she’s in, and her take on Vera must be counted among the half dozen best femme fatale performances in the noir canon. The character is multilayered and complex, something not so apparent when we first meet her, and Savage – alternately brittle and vulnerable, dictatorial and cajoling, beautiful and plain (and sometimes just plain ugly) – captures the subtleties brilliantly. Accordingly Vera is of indeterminate age. Al pegs her as twenty-four, but sometimes she looks eighteen, sometimes forty. (Al had it right all along; Ann Savage’s actual chronological age at the time was twenty-four). This is surely Miss Savage’s signature performance, and a choice role it is. Vera is one of the genre’s most memorable and in her strange way most sympathetic fallen angels.
Both typical of and standing out among similar films of its era, Detour is a flawed but irresistible anomaly. It draws us in and seduces us in much the same way fate entices Al with its deadly embrace and come hither promises. Times and tastes change, but people and emotions don’t change. We all have weaknesses and dark sides, as well as the potential for grace and virtue, and we’re all subject to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, be they \whims of bad luck, deceptive temptations, or questionable choices with devastating results. These are portrayed with timeless resonance in Detour. It explains why the film still says something to us three quarters of a century on.
[1] Of course defining exactly what a B movie is has always been a slippery slope. Do we go with the literal meaning and say it’s a second feature? Perhaps. But my arbitrary definition, at least in the context of this post, is based more on what it’s not: the B noir is a film produced by a small operation (Poverty Row, or Poverty Row-like). In other words it can’t be a movie helmed by one of the more respectable studios of the era, even the smaller majors like Universal, RKO and Columbia. ‘B movies’ made by these studios have a well scrubbed look at odds with the bottom feeder ethic that defines a film as truly hardcore noir. Thus the B noirs produced by the majors will be excluded from consideration, mostly because they had access to resources – material, human, financial – that the little guys simply didn’t have.
For an exceptionally thorough traversal of unheralded B-noirs see: Arthur Lyons, Death on the Cheap: the Lost B Movies of Film Noir, Da Capo, 2000.
[2] Okay, Blast of Silence falls outside the generally accepted classic noir period, by a couple of years. But it has such a seedy, seat-of-the-pants quality that I include it here.
[3] I refer to the 1948 film starring Mary Beth Hughes and Charles Russell, not the 1940s series of psychoanalytic thrillers with Lon Chaney, Jr. Probably the most memorable thing about these potboilers was a prologue of David Hoffman’s floating head staring out of a crystal ball intoning the mysteries of the mind’s inner sanctum and what it’s capable of. Both the Inner Sanctum mysteries and the later stand-alone film were based on the same series of books but otherwise have no connection. Interesting that the 1948 feature was the first and only film of MRS Productions. The ‘Inner Sanctum mysteries’ might well have been considered for mention along with the seedier B-noirs cited in this post except for their having a certain polish and competence (they were all Universal releases) and, more to the point, that they are usually thought of as horror films and not films noirs.
[4] One possible interpretation is that Al is quasi-delusional, maybe even psychotic, and much of his story, including his supposed romance with Sue, is simply made up and reflects his mental disintegration.
Another explanation is that Detour is an amalgamation of the quintessential highway movie (not uncommon in noir) and the so-called ‘spectral incognizance’ film in which the protagonist has been dead, or dying, all along but doesn’t yet know it. The idea was used to great effect in the 'Hitch-hiker' episode from the tv series The Twilight Zone. Thus Al’s story is merely a hallucination in which he doesn’t recognize his own demise. His being apprehended and whisked away in the police car at the end is his final acquiescence to the inevitable, the crossing the bar to the other world.
Yet another take might be that Al has no moral center, no True North to follow, and this would explain his terrible, self-destructive choices.
[5] Sue isn’t your typical long-suffering girlfriend: remember, she’s already ditched the Big Apple – and, by implication, Al – for her try at the promised land, and it’s Al who follows her to California. She has her own ambitions, and Al seems to be a part of them, but it’s by no means a done deal, even if Al’s travel plans work out.
[6] This is another example of the Hemingway-like practice in Detour of saying more with less: what’s left out is more significant than what’s stated or otherwise indicated directly. In Detour so much is left for the audience to fill in from its own experience – and imagination.
[7] Actually Al has more chemistry with Vera, in a perverse sort of way, than with his more or less official girlfriend Sue, but then again where would noir be without offbeat, perverse love stories? If he could only loosen up, shed the victim routine and acknowledge an attraction to Vera – indeed, his initial response was a kind of appreciation of her unconventional beauty, and he can’t possibly fail to notice her attraction to him in the hotel room. If a bizarre romance angle had been pursued it might have ended up being a more interesting movie. Then again maybe not.
In any event Vera wants not only to be loved but also to give love. But we get the unswerving and unnerving sense that she’s been injured beyond repair or redemption; the pain is just too great. Consequently her softer moments are fleeting and she soon reverts to venal form. It’s a typically noirish, no-exit prison, partially built by Vera herself, partially created by circumstances. Her consumptive, Camille-like cough serves as a reminder that she too is headed towards a preordained, destructive end.
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