A Film Canon

The strongest B-noir of the 1940s, Detour incorporates all the restrictions and setbacks of its shooting schedule into an extraordinary anti-aesthetic of sordidness, or impoverishment, in which the bourgeois self-hatred of classical noir is replaced by two, desperate journeys from New York to Los Angeles, in search of more promising employment. This divests the central 'crime' - nightclub pianist Al Roberts' (Tom Neal) manslaughter of the driver giving him a ride - of any exoticism, or voyeuristic thrill, while ensuring that the ensuing complication - another hitchhiker, Vera's (Ann Savage), discovery of the crime, and subsequent blackmail of Roberts - is similarly devoid of any sexual tension, or agenda: "If this were fiction, I would fall in love with her...or else she would make some supreme class-A sacrifice for me, and die..." The result is a profound, nihilistic banality, which finds most explicit expression in the gradual relocation of the antagonism between Al and Vera from a criminal, to a merely domestic, register, but is perhaps most poetically figured in the use of back-projections for virtually every scene. These collapse New York, Los Angeles and, most strikingly, the miles of highway between them, into a single, blurry, gritty medium, as if to reinforce that, in the world that these protagonists (if they can even be called that) inhabit, all such distinctions are meaningless; or, rather, that the initial journey to Los Angeles, made by Al's lover (Sue Roberts), in search of Hollywood stardom, neglects the continuity between the studios and the gutter from which that journey 'begins'.