Sometimes called the best B-movie ever made, Edgar G. Ulmer’s ultra low-budget Detour IS, at least, the bleakest film noir you might ever see. Every time you think life can’t get worse for our hangdog hero, Al Roberts (Tom Neal), it does. Again and again. There is no ray of light here. This film plays best at 3 AM.
Told as a flashback from our doomed protagonist as he broods at a coffee shop counter, the story details how a few accidents of fate lead to his ruin. While hitchhiking across the country, he manages to be on the scene of a fluke death that looks exactly like a murder. Certain that the law would never believe the real story, Roberts runs off only to get mixed up with a surly, bird-faced woman named Vera (Ann Savage) who happens to have KNOWN the guy who died and doesn’t believe Al Roberts when he explains it was an accident. Rather than call the police on him though, she—one of the most abrasive cunts in the history of crime movies… almost a female Frank Booth—instead takes advantage of the firm grip that she now has on his balls by coercing him into helping her with a scam she’s cooked up.
Shot in six days on only six sets, the nickel-and-dime production values of this sixty-seven minute story of losers and lowlifes feels searingly appropriate, even poetic in a way.