Detour
Directed by Edgar G. UlmerAl Roberts is a piano player in a New York nightclub, unremarkable in every respect except his certainty that fate has singled him out for punishment. When his girlfriend Sue Harvey heads west to try her luck in Hollywood, Al eventually follows, hitchhiking across the country with little money and less hope. Outside Arizona, he catches a ride with Charles Haskell Jr., a garrulous drifter with scratch marks on his hand and a story he is not eager to tell.
Haskell dies under ambiguous circumstances during the drive, and Al, convinced no one will believe his account, assumes the dead man's identity and takes his car. The decision locks Al into a trap he cannot think his way out of. When he picks up Vera – a woman who knew Haskell and recognizes the car – the film's already narrow margins close further. Vera is not interested in Al's explanations. She holds his secret and intends to use it, steering the two of them toward a scheme that suits her purposes alone.
Detour belongs to the lowest rung of the noir world, a place where ambition has long since curdled into grievance and where the femme fatale operates not from glamour but from sheer economic desperation. The film compresses the genre's fatalism to its barest elements: a weak man, a dangerous woman, a dead man's name, and a highway that leads nowhere redemptive.
