the best film noir femmes fatales

    I hate these kinds of lists, much of the time anyway. But since I’m on a bit of a list binge these days, insofar as compiling them, I thought I’d share a few thoughts and, more to the point, create my own, highly subjective, ergo highly arguable, list of the best femmes fatales in noir history.

    Hitchcock once famously said that a thriller is only as good as its villain, and likewise it’s not too much of a stretch to say that a film noir is only as good as its femme fatale. Aside: I’ve noticed that the phenomenon of the femme fatale in the classic noir era [1] peaked in the late Forties and dropped off around 1950. Though indeed there are exceptions, I’m hard pressed to name a lot of classic femmes fatales that appeared after 1950. Even the greatest noirs of that era – Touch of Evil, Night and the City, Kiss Me Deadly, Sweet Smell of Success – to cite just some of the best known exemplars, lack a true femme fatale [2] (there’s at least one notable mid-1950s exception, see below).

    The fatal woman isn’t really new, much less a creation of mid Twentieth Century male fantasies (and fears). You could say she’s been around as long as human history and storytelling has been around [3]. The femme fatale runs rampant in opera, for example, but the best-known incarnation is surely Carmen. Indeed she more or less set the mold for the modern femme fatale, if we define ‘modern’ as beginning in the late Nineteenth Century. Be that as it may, for better or worse, in the popular imagination the image of the femme fatale is pretty much cemented definitively in mid- and late 1940s crime and thriller movies.
    The noir literature then is voluminous and there’s almost as much written on the femme fatale as that of film noir itself (aren’t the two really the same thing? Well, maybe, and maybe not). In any case, aside from purely cinematic takes, feminist, behaviorist, romanticist, Freudian, supernatural, socio-economic, political, and literary analyses have surged forth.

    Comment: in the films cited below, most of them anyway, it’s the role the actress is best remembered for. Seldom, if ever, did the respective actresses shine so well as they did in their essays on the dark woman. Stanwyck and Gardner are a couple of exceptions who had substantial careers and other roles just as memorable. Second comment: as opined in my post on ‘greatest movies’ elsewhere on this blog, at the top level – in the case of femmes fatales, the best twenty or so – the standings are pretty much interchangeable, and as such one shouldn’t make too much out of the specific rankings. Still, without further ado here then are my choices for the best femmes fatales in noir history [4].


“You’re not too smart, are you? I like that in a man”

    1) Matty Walker (Kathleen Turner). Body Heat. Turner's Matty Walker is ensconced in the noir pantheon as one of the deadliest of the deadly, and perhaps the most remorseless – and relentless – of them all. Turner’s wondrous performance can be appreciated for its many layers and subtle touches, all the more miraculous considering Body Heat was her first starring role in a major film.

    2) Kathie Moffat (Jane Greer). Out of the past. As Out of the Past’s reputation has grown over the years to where it vies with Double Indemnity as the consensus quintessential noir, so has Jane Greer’s essay as the incredibly manipulative Kathie, sometimes kept woman, sometimes wayward waif, always very sexy, and very dangerous. Miss Greer had a fairly solid career as an actress but never reached these heights again.

    3) Tie: Vera (Ann Savage). Detour. Vera isn’t evil so much as repellent, both physically and morally, and utterly opportunistic, so her lofty rank may be a little generous. Still, she’s a one-of-a-kind villain and a force to be reckoned with. That fingernails on the blackboard voice is cringeworthy just thinking about it, but her tubercular cough engenders at least some sympathy.
       Elsa Bannister (Rita Hayworth). The Lady From Shanghai. Elsa Bannister is another of those femme fatales that don't quite get their due in the noir pantheon. Blonde, shorn hair and all, Rita Hayworth never looked better, or was better cast: that Orson Welles knew what he was doing ... :-) Elsa is one of the most alluring, mysterious – and deadly – of fatale femmes, and is much deserving of reconsideration as one of noir's most fascinating characters.   

   4) Lulu (Louise Brooks). Pandora’s Box.  Brooks’ Lulu is a decade or so outside the classic noir era but she merits a place simply because she set the template for all the cinematic femmes fatales that were to follow, though Theda Bara’s ‘vamp’ of a decade earlier might merit a mention as a precursor.  
  
 5) Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck). Double Indemnity. For a long time Stanwyck’s proletarian schemer was the default choice for the best noir femme fatale, but changing tastes and greater visibility of other films have caused her to slip a rung or two, but she’s still pretty competitive for a spot in the top ten.

   6) Sherry Peatty (Marie Windsor). The Killing. No compilation of noir fatale femmes would be complete without at least one Marie Windsor character, and this one’s a doozie. In the noirverse Marie Windsor is probably best known for her essays in Narrow Margin and The Killing, but for sheer mean-spiritedness and nastiness it’s no contest. She’s simply unforgettable as Elijah Cook Jr.’s trophy wife from Hell. Her duplicitousness, greed, and do-whatever-it-takes attitude causes all sorts of problems and leads directly to the film’s violent denouement.

   7) Paula Craig (Janis Carter). Framed.  It was pretty much a toss-up between Miss Carter’s deadly turns in Framed and Night Editor. She more or less plays the same character in both films but I went with Framed for Paula Craig’s utter ruthlessness and callousness: she’s willing to sacrifice two, maybe three, men to satisfy her lust for money. Janis Carter is one of the true unsung (anti)-heroines in the noir hall of infamy, and she remains to be rediscovered. Confined to B movie purgatory for most of her career, she disappeared from the movies entirely in the early 1950s. Look for her also as the temptress in The Woman on Pier 13. 
    See also Leslie Brooks' Claire Hanneman in Blonde Ice. Her murderous female is almost a carbon copy of the two Carter roles mentioned above. Both women specialized in B movies, and moreover, Leslie Brooks even bears a vague physical resemblance to Janis Carter, and likewise remains an under-the-radar noir vixen.

     8) Margot Shelby (Jean Gillie). Decoy. One of the most irredeemable bad girls in the canon is Margot Shelby. The near forgotten Jean Gillie does a brilliant job of projecting the woman’s malevolence, obscured by a veneer of affluence and civility. Once we’ve heard her maniacal laugh when she finds the loot, can we ever forget it?

     9) Katharine ‘Kitty’ March (Joan Bennett). Scarlet Street. A bit of a sleeper, this one. Like Claire Trevor, Joan Bennet is under-appreciated as a noir actress, and this is her definitive role. Kitty March is as manipulative as they come and Bennett’s interpretation almost makes her a sympathetic character.

     10) Helen Grayle (Claire Trevor). Murder, My Sweet.  Among noir’s dangerous women Claire Trevor has never really gotten her due as she tends to be overshadowed by other actresses of the era, of both a noir and other persuasion. Thus her femmes fatales don’t quite have the high profile of the likes of Kathie Moffat, Matty Walker, or Kitty Collins. But her noir credentials are right up there with the best, having appeared in such classics as Born to Kill, Raw Deal, Key Largo, Crack-Up and of course Murder My Sweet, as well as the quasi-noir Borderline. But it’s the Helen/Velma character that takes pride of place for spitefulness and evil. Hers is perhaps the greater evil simply because she’s more or less sane, or at least more sane than her counterpart in Born to Kill.
   Trivia: Trevor nabbed an Oscar for her turn as the alcoholic floozy in Key Largo. It’s one of the few instances in which a noir won an Academy Award in a major category.

     11) Kitty Collins (Ava Gardner) The Killers. Along with Rita Hayworth in Gilda *, Ava Gardner’s Kitty is my choice as the best visual incarnation of the femme fatale when she wears that slinky black dress. This was her first major role and she hits it out of the park. She even gets to sing a tune, using her own voice!

   * However, for a conniving, evil character I prefer Hayworth’s blondized Elsa Bannister in Lady From Shanghai.

     12) Jacqueline Gibson (Jean Brooks). The Seventh Victim. Jacqueline Gibson is a most unusual entry in this compilation in that her cinematic pedigree is supernatural horror and not the crime thriller. Some might even argue that Victim isn’t film noir at all. So be it. Then again, it has most of the noir tropes, including a very noirish look. In any case, and make no mistake, there’s a fatale quality about Jacqueline: several dead bodies along the way prove it. Then there’s her goth, vampire chic look: Cleopatra flapper wig, dark fur coat, somnambulist visage.**

   ** Brooks reprised the Jacqueline character, sort of, with her black drenched garb, Bettie Page hairdo, lugubrious persona, and ambiguous sexuality, in the (post)WW2 exploitation thriller Women in the Night (1948), in which she plays the exotic Maya. Women in the Night, by the way, was Brooks' last film.

  13) The Princess (María Casares). Orphée. Much like the previously cited Seventh Victim, Orphée is not a true film noir but rather a supernatural fantasy with a few noirish touches, not least of them the character of The Princess, who is no less than the Angel of Death herself. The role is played to icy perfection by the great María Casares, and her all black look makes her a natural for the femme fatale hall of fame. Indeed the messenger of death is about as fatale a character as can be. See also Gloria Holden’s lesbian vampire in the creepy 1936 film Dracula’s Daughter.  

     14) Lily MacBeth (Ruth Roman). Joe MacBeth. Yes, I'm getting quite a bit over my usual top ten limit, but I just caught Joe MacBeth again and simply can't leave out Ruth Roman's brittle take as Lady MacBeth. In fact I can't imagine a better choice to play the overly ambitious femme in Twentieth Century packaging. The film just gets better upon repeated viewings, and Roman's performance is a treasure. She remains a much under-appreciated actress, and even considering she was in her share of noirs, this may well be her darkest, and most evil, character. 

[1] The consensus bookend years are 1941-1958, though I’m quite a bit more restrictive myself as I’d put the classic era as roughly 1944-1952.

[2] In the case of Kiss Me Deadly the psychotic Lily/Gabrielle might fit the mold, if we interpret the definition liberally. On the other hand, she’s not classic fatale material in that she lacks the uptown glamour and style we usually associate with the character. By the way, when I opine above that “ … I’m hard pressed to name a lot of classic femme fatales that appeared after 1950,” I’m talking in the context of the generally accepted classic era that ran until about 1959. This is not necessarily my classic era, see above. On the other hand, the films of neo-noir, post-noir, or postmodern noir, take your pick, are considered for this exercise (perfectly clear?). Ergo the explanation for Matty Walker’s inclusion and lofty ranking.

[3] The first usage of the term in the English language is rather vague, but sources tend to go with the 1880s or 1890s, though some opt for the early Twentieth Century – in either case exact references are difficult to come by.
    Aside: The mid-Twentieth Century film version of the fatale femme can be seen as a more modern variant of the enchantress, sorceress or witch, characters which have been around it seems since time immemorial. Some of the better known examples from antiquity are Circe and Medea.
 
[4] But what about Brigid O’Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falson, you might ask? As brought to life in Mary Astor’s brilliant performance, Brigid fits most of the tropes, but as hinted above, my rather arbitrary definition of the noir chronology begins around 1944, and Falcon dates from 1941. And besides, though it has the requisite anti-heroic private detective, urban milieu, and much the look of noir, I don’t really consider Falcon to be film noir at all, but rather a tough, very well told detective story. As for Mary Astor, in a noirish context, I like her better as the shady lady 'Pat' in Act of Violence, in which she's cast, somewhat against type, as a worse-for-wear 'lady of the evening.'
     [Update, 10 Nov 2025]: Though I'm already well over my supposedly self-imposed limit of top ten fatal femmes, after recent viewings of two films, I've concluded that it would be criminal not to mention as strong honorable mentions two of the most memorable of dangerous women (one of the films' alternate title of Deadly is the Female is right on the money!). The two characters are Annie Laurie Starr (Peggy Cummins) in Gun Crazy and Crystal Shackleford (Geraldine Fitzgerald) in Three Strangers. These are truly two of the darkest and most remorseless ladies in the canon, ruthlessly determined to do whatever is necessary to reach their ill-gotten goals, though in the case of Annie Starr the goals are a little obscure, which just makes her more interesting. 
     [Update, part 2, 19 March 2026]: I'd be remiss if I didn't also mention Lizabeth Scott's lethally psychopathic Jane Palmer of Too Late for Tears, one of the smoothest and most calculating of all fatale femmes in the entire noir canon.  
     
Further reading: Mark Jancovich, “Female monsters: Horror, the ‘Femme Fatale’ and World War II,” European Journal of American Culture, v27 n2 (July 2008), pp133-149; Samantha Jane Lindop,  Femmes, filles, and hommes: postfeminism and the fatal(e) figure in contemporary American film noir. PhD Thesis, School of English, Media Studies and Art History, The University of Queensland, 2014.

brief candles: Lola Montez (1821-1861)

    Lola Montès [videorecording (DVD)]. Gamma-Film prèsente un film de Max Ophuls; scenario de Max Ophuls; adaptation de Annette Wademant et Max Ophuls; dialogue de Jacques Natanson; une co-production Gamma, Florida, Union Films; producteur délégué, Albert Caraco. Criterion Collection, 2009. 2 videodiscs (114 min.). Based on the novel by Cécil Saint-Laurent. Originally produced as a motion picture in 1955.

   Performers: Martine Carol, Peter Ustinov, Anton Walbrook, Henry Guisol, Lise Delamare, Paulette Dubost, Oskar Werner, Jean Galland, Will Quadflieg, Helena Manson, Germaine Delbat, Jacques Fayet, Friedrich Domin, Werner Finck, Ivan Desny. Summary: The life of the notorious showgirl who had affairs with kings, became a courtesan, and traveled the world trying to fit in. Lola Montès charts the course of Montès's scandalous past through the invocations of the bombastic ringmaster of the American circus where she has ended up performing


whatever Lola wants ...

   The woman we know today as Lola  Montez was actually of impeccable British pedigree, having been born in Ireland as Eliza Rosanna Gilbert to well-to-do upper middle class parents: her father was a career officer in the King’s army and her mother’s father a member of Parliament. Most decidedly she did not descend from a Spanish noble family, as she later would claim. But somehow along the way the deception stuck, and she metamorphosed, spectacularly, into the more modish and exotic identity of ‘Lola Montez.’

   She was best known as a notorious dancer but from all accounts wasn’t very good. As if to compensate she sometimes danced naked. She was also an actress but apparently couldn’t act. More to the point, she was the century’s most notorious femme fatale before the term existed. Indeed some sources say the phrase had to be invented to describe Lola.

   If contemporary portraits and vintage photographs are any indication she was an attractive woman but not really a great beauty, at least by Twentieth and Twenty-first Century ideals of female physical perfection. But like Cleopatra she had something that inspired various male suitors – rich, famous and otherwise – to seek out her company, often with unfortunate consequences for both the suitor and Lola. Anyhow, and to invoke Twentieth Century comparisons further, Lola might be described as a Nineteenth Century version of Marilyn Monroe, Bettie Page and Eva Peron all rolled into one, with more than a touch of the Gabor sisters. In a word she was famous for being famous.

   Accordingly Lola’s life had numerous permutations, convolutions, confluences and connections. Classical music buffs glimpse her as one of Franz Liszt’s many amours. Other liaisons included author Alexander Dumas, newspaper publisher Alexandre Dujarier, and King Ludwig I of Bavaria. Herein another, albeit tenuous, connection with Liszt. Ludwig’s grandson, later King Ludwig II, was a near fanatical admirer of Richard Wagner’s operas. Wagner just happened to be Liszt’s son-in-law, having married Liszt’s daughter Cosima. Indeed some sources claim that Lola had a fling with Wagner himself, though this is doubtful. By all accounts Wagner met Lola only briefly and didn’t much like her ("a heartless, demonic being," he later wrote of her).

   Her liaison with Ludwig I created a furor at court and resulted in the king’s eventual abdication. Thus with her star fading fast in Europe Lola in the early 1850s moved to America and eventually made her way to the bawdy environs of San Francisco in the Gold Rush days. Lola was an immediate succès de scandale in America, with one of the more sensationalist stories about her being, apropos her fiery ‘Latin’ temperament, that she whipped a German policeman who had offended her. She later disowned the story but it’s a great story all the same, so much so that she always carried the horse-whip onstage during performances to discourage men from treating her disrespectfully. As her popularity waned she took her shtick to smaller mining towns in northern California and eventually made a tour of Australia.

   Lola returned to the United States in 1856. At this point, only 34 years old and in poor health she turned to spirituality and lived quietly in New York, mostly doing charity work for homeless women, until her death from complications of pneumonia and syphilis at age 39 in 1861.

   Lola’s tempestuous life and career has been essayed by most every art form and entertainment medium, but film connoisseurs best remember her from the 1955 widescreen extravaganza Lola Montès, directed by legendary German auteur Max Ophuls, with Martine Carol in the title role.

   Mirroring the woman herself the film Lola Montès has had a bumpy evolution. From its riotous, scandalous premieres in 1955 – accompanied by mixed, mostly negative, reviews – to its gradual comeback, it has survived various studio-imposed cuts and revisions, finally receiving a glorious and much deserved full restoration in 2008. Still, Lola has polarized fans and critics since its first screening nearly seven decades ago. Jacques Rivette and Francois Truffaut praised the film on its initial release, and in 1963 the eminent American critic Andrew Sarris famously proclaimed it the greatest movie of all time [1], surely an exaggeration but not really that far off the mark. Moreover Lola is getting further, more recent, critical love: in 2012 the film received five votes in the BFI/Sight and Sound poll of the greatest films of all time, which might place it as a low grade honorable mention but nonetheless a sign of its growing critical acceptance.

   Today Ophuls is the cult director par excellence and Lola Montès his cult movie of choice by devotees (even if his The Earrings of Madame de … remains the critical darling). Indeed if we grant that Lola Montès is an art movie then it’s not hyperbole to describe it as one of the half dozen or so greatest art movies ever.
   Hitherto best known for appearing in French boudoir farces in the 1950s, Martine Carol is the perfect embodiment of Lola, a little too much as it turned out. As though providence itself had been tempted Miss Carol was struck down by cardiac arrest in 1967 at the youthful age of forty-six.

[1] Mr. Sarris seems to have had second thoughts given his subsequent reflections on the ‘greatest films.’

noir's dark heart: Detour (1945)

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.

Whatever the pedigree or ultimate classification, the true cream of the crop, if that’s the right phraseology, has to be Detour, sometimes cited as the best B movie of all time, or less generous, the best bad movie of all time. And unlike many of the titles mentioned above, the film deservingly has a legendary repute and dedicated following. All the now-familiar devices are there – doomed hero, voice-over, fate reaching out, remorseless femme fatale, murky visuals, transgression and cover-up, and several others. Martin Goldsmith’s pulpy script in particular is full of gems that today border on pure camp but in the surreal world of Detour are just right. Mostly it’s the stifling, relentless mood of existential despair that wraps itself around us and never lets go that makes the film so unforgettable and places it a cut above the usual cut-rate B noir. Indeed, seen in this context, Detour might well be the first true film noir. The short version: this is a very dark movie, even by noirish standards, and a very good movie, despite its ragged look.

   Appropriately enough, Detour opens in a bleak environment: a lonely road in the desert Southwest located in a kind of limbo somewhere between California and Nevada. Here we meet our protagonist and (anti)-hero as he takes a break at, where else, a sleazy diner.

   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.

Fast forward about 20 minutes and, through various quirks of fate, we have Al cruising in a huge convertible on a lonely road somewhere in Arizona near the California border. Al picks up the mysterious hitchhiker Vera and it’s here where Detour’s emotional juice kicks into high gear. You could say that in many ways the movie really begins once Vera hits the scene, and hit it she does.

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 had worked 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.
   Update, 30 May 2025. I was lucky enough to catch Detour on the Movies TV Network channel recently. It had been a few years since I'd seen the film, and – contrary to my memory, and belying its sleazy, unsavory reputation – what struck me most was just how (relatively) polished it looks. Not only the look but the acting too. Visually maybe it was just a good print. Who can say? Either way, what they say about director Edgar Ulmer is true: nobody ever got better results from such a small budget.