Detour (1945): watch the full film free, legally

Al Roberts heads west by thumb

Edgar G. Ulmer directed Detour, a 1945 American independent film noir starring Tom Neal and Ann Savage. Martin Goldsmith and an uncredited Martin Mooney adapted the screenplay from Goldsmith’s 1939 novel of the same name. Producers Releasing Corporation released the film, as one of the so-called Poverty Row studios in mid-20th-century Hollywood.

Neal plays Al Roberts, an unemployed pianist who arrives at a roadside diner in Reno, Nevada, after hitching a ride. A jukebox song recalls his New York life, where he had been squandering his talent at a cheap nightclub. His girlfriend, the nightclub’s lead singer Sue Harvey, leaves her job to seek fame in Hollywood. Depressed and nearly broke, Al decides to go to California and marry her, travelling across the country by hitchhiking.

In Arizona, bookie Charles Haskell Jr. gives Al a ride in his convertible. During a rainstorm, Al pulls over to raise the car’s top. Haskell falls from the passenger side, striking his head on a rock, and Al finds him dead. Though he suspects Haskell may already have suffered a heart attack, Al fears an arrest for murder. He hides the body, takes Haskell’s money, clothes and identification, and continues toward Los Angeles under Haskell’s name.

After crossing into California, Al picks up Vera, played by Savage. She recognizes the car and says Haskell had picked her up in Louisiana before she left him in Arizona after he tried to force himself on her. Vera threatens to turn Al over to the police, takes the money from Haskell’s wallet, and demands a share of the proceeds from selling the car. In Hollywood, they rent an apartment as Mr. and Mrs. Haskell to provide an address for the sale. A newspaper report about Haskell’s wealthy, dying father gives Vera a new plan: Al should impersonate Haskell and seek the estate. Al refuses, saying he lacks the detailed knowledge the scheme would require. Claudia Drake plays Sue, and Edmund MacDonald plays Haskell.

Conflicting accounts of the shoot

Accounts of the production schedule differ. In a 1972 interview, Ulmer said Detour was shot in six days. In a 2004 documentary, his daughter Arianne presented a shooting-script title page dated June 14, 1945 to June 29, with 14 camera days noted. Savage was contracted to Producers Releasing Corporation for three six-day weeks, and later said filming took four six-day weeks, plus four days of desert location work in Lancaster, California.

The film was long believed to have cost about $20,000. Research by Noah Isenberg found a final cost closer to $100,000. Even at that figure, it had one of the highest profit margins, if not the highest, among film noir titles in the National Film Registry. Billy Halop was tested and selected for Al Roberts, but Neal replaced him three days before filming began. Erdody’s hands appear in close-ups when Al plays piano.

A growing reputation after release

Detour received positive initial reviews from the Los Angeles Times, The Hollywood Reporter, Variety and other major newspapers and trade publications. It also played venues beyond grindhouse theaters. In May 1946, it appeared at downtown Los Angeles’s 2,200-seat Orpheum with a live show featuring the Slim Gaillard Trio and the Buddy Rich Orchestra. Business was reported as excellent despite a transit strike.

Motion Picture Herald reviewer Mandel Herbstman rated it only fair shortly after its November 1945 release, while praising its structure. He wrote that Ulmer had made an adroit, if unpretentious, production about a man entering circumstances that seal his doom. Television reviewers in the 1960s and 1970s recommended it as a worthwhile B movie. By the 1980s, critics increasingly cited it as a prime example of film noir, and revival houses, universities and festivals presented it in tributes to Ulmer.

Roger Ebert described the film in The Great Movies as haunting and creepy despite technical errors and ham-handed narrative. Sight and Sound reviewer Philip Kemp wrote that Ulmer used unknown actors, minimal sets, stock shots and shaky back-projection to create a black, paranoid vision of shabby characters trapped by irrational guilt. In 2007, Richard Corliss ranked Savage’s Vera sixth among cinema’s Top 25 Greatest Villains. In 1992, the Library of Congress selected Detour for preservation in the United States National Film Registry as culturally, historically or aesthetically significant. The Academy Film Archive restored the film in 2018, and its 4K restoration premiered that April in Los Angeles at the TCM Festival.

Film details from the Wikipedia article “Detour (1945 film)”. Text adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0.