Detour

One of noir's classics, made on the smallest of budgets. Al is an ordinary man playing piano in a New York nightclub. When his girlfriend leaves for Los Angeles he sets out after her. He has no money and hitchhikes. The man who picks him up dies along the way. Al panics; certain nobody will believe him, he takes the man's identity, his car and his money. So he becomes a criminal without having committed a crime. Then he picks up Vera. She knows what happened, and from that moment she sets the direction of the story. The character played by Ann Savage is counted among the hardest women's roles in the genre. The narrator is Al himself, and what he says does not always match what we see; that uncertainty is why the film is still argued about. It was made at a small studio, very quickly, with almost no sets. The budget was so low that some scenes play in fog because there is then no need to show a background. Edgar G. Ulmer directed. It was later added to the American national film registry. One of the genre's cornerstones for anyone who likes noir and what low-budget filmmaking can do. For a viewer after polished production values, the film is technically crude and runs only sixty-eight minutes.