7. Detour (1945)
Dir. Edgar G. Ulmer
At best, Detour should have been unmemorable. At worst, it should have been unwatchable. Shot in six days on a budget of $100,000—which when adjusted for inflation comes to around $1.3 million—Detour was such a barebones production that they had to rely on fog-filled stages to stand in for city streets and flipping the negatives for hitchhiking scenes that they couldn’t reshoot. And yet, somehow, it ended up being one of the defining examples of noir. The film is one of the greatest accidental masterpieces in film history, a veritable text-book for wannabe filmmakers for how to stretch budgets and cut corners. It also doubles as one of the most nihilistic films to come out of the classic Hollywood studio system. Following a jazz musician hitch-hiking from New York to Hollywood and a vicious femme fatale he meets on the side of the road, the two protagonists get drawn into an accidental death which might get them arrested for murder…at least if they can’t figure out a way to con the dead man’s father first. Ironically, the Hollywood Production Code which specified that criminals must be punished for their crimes resulted in the film having one of the most startlingly down-beat endings imaginable. Who said good things never came out of censorship?
Advertisement
