Product description

Detour [1945] [DVD]

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Binding : DVD
EAN : 5050457627997
Label : Elstree Hill Entertainment
Manufacturer : Elstree Hill Entertainment
Publisher : Elstree Hill Entertainment
Release date : 2005-10-17
Title : Detour [1945] [DVD]
Actor : Array
Audience rating : Universal, suitable for all
Format : PAL
Languages : Array
Number of items : 1
Region code : 0
Running time : 67
Studio : Elstree Hill Entertainment

Customer reviews

review by: date: 2009-04-01 rating:

Startling film noir
There are several fascinating things about this film, and in a way the fun begins once you've watched it and if you are drawn to find out a little about its making and makers. br / br /The movie comes in a very poor DVD print - grainy and gloomy. But bear with it as in a way the strange subject matter is almost improved by the lousy print. br / br /This B-movie was shot in six days with a budget of approximately $20,000, and we are told that scenes left over from other films (and even included in them) were used here to keep down costs. The director Edgar Ulmer found footage of the eastbound Los Angeles to New York highway, and decided to use it in the scenes where Tom Neal picks up the hitchhiking Ann Savage and then drives on. As Neal was heading west to LA, the film had to be flipped over to show the reverse; this caused the cars to appear to be driving on the wrong side of the road, and the hitchhiker to enter the car on the driver's side. But still Ulmer used the footage! br / br /Tom Neal, the co-star, was an actor of little talent and unpleasant habits - drunken, violent and abusive. On set he was more than once disciplined for groping female members of cast and crew. A dumb, nasty piece of work you think - and then you read that at 24 he was awarded a law degree from Harvard University! Well worth checking out his wikipedia entry. br / br /Ann Savage, the other co-star (who died on Christmas Day 2008), never built on her success here as the movie quickly passed into oblivion until it was picked up decades later as a film noir B-movie classic. She dropped out of motion pictures and took office work. In 1983, she attended a screening of Detour held as a tribute to director Edgar Ulmer. Ulmer's widow was saying in a Q/A session that she had no idea what had happened to Savage, whereupon a half-remembered voice came loud and clear from the back of the cinema: "I'm right here!" br / br /The film itself is a classic exposition of film noir - creepy atmosphere, tasks undertaken that seem doomed from the start, dislikeable characters, impure motives, harsh lighting. But really its status is all about Ann Savage. From her extraordinary introduction when Neal stops to pick her up, she burns with an energy that consumes him and the viewer as she plays with and humiliates him. It's fitting that Neal never manages to quell her since her demise is a clumsy accident. br / br /Just a bravura acting performance that takes the breath away. Highly recommended.

review by: date: 2009-02-12 rating:

"Detour" the Cockroach Edition
This DVD edition was done by cokroaches I suspect. The digital br /transfer has a quality much lower than the multitude of illegal br /copies that you can download using BitTorrent. br / br /Editions like this make the pirate bay look like editors of the br /Criterion Collection. Let me just enumerate some items to ponder upon: br / br /1. Frame rate is somewhere in the vicinity of the silent movie era br / frame rate, probably around 18/20 fps. br / br /2. Interlacing problems. Is seems to have been bootlegged from a 720i br / digital tv feed. br / br /3. Video-audio synch problems. br / br /4. No menus. br / br /5. No extra features. br / br /6. In Linux mplayer refused to read the DVD. Only VLC or xine will br / take it. br / br /Thing like this happen when the people selling the rights do not have br /the authors best interest in mind. They're just after a quick br /buck. Let those who come after worry. Not even the rights holders br /best interests are served. They gave permission for this company of br /cockroach DVD editors to botch up a great film. Originally the film br /was done on the cheap by a poverty row studio. That doesn't mean that br /it must have an underdog DVD edition like the present. br / br /It's a great film. A true classic. Get it in a decent edition. br / br /Stay away from this cockroach edition by the "Pickwick Group" br /"Elstree Hill Entertaiment". br / br /I surely will avoid any of their other offerings. I do have great br /respect for cockroaches, the insects. They have their place in the br /gene pool. But companies like the "Pickwick Group" br /"Elstree Hill Entertaiment" have no place in the free market. If this br /DVD edition isn't a scam, then surely I will need to revise my notion br /of it. br / br /I hope Amazon give them the boot. They're costing them money. I just br /printed my return label. It's a returner.

review by: date: 2009-01-31 rating:

Grade B, but one of the most memorable of film noirs
"What kind of dames thumb rides? Sunday school teachers?" br / br /I guess this would be the most appropriate tagline for this black and white grade B noir from 1945. Al Roberts (Tom Neal) is the one asking the rhetorical question, although it could have been Charles Haskell Jr. (Edmund MacDonald) who has some nasty scratches on his hand to prove he can speak from experience. The lady in question is Vera (Ann Savage) who can turn on you like a cornered rat and strike at you like a rattlesnake, which is what she does to Roberts after he's picked her up hitchhiking. In a scene as startling as any I've seen in quite a while, Vera wakes from a nap and suddenly, without warning, but in retrospect with plenty of foreshadowing, viciously tears into Roberts who finds himself caught in a deadly vice of his own making. br / br /Roberts plays it passively, a born loser who knows he's losing again. A pianist who once dreamed of Carnegie Hall, he just knuckles under to Vera who comes off as a dom...--well, I won't use the word, but she appears to be the kind of dame who likes black leather while welding certain items of inducement, shall we say. But Roberts can't get a yen for her since he's still in love his sweetheart, a night club singer named Sue Harvey (Claudia Drake). Too bad, if he had, he might have gotten the upper hand in his relationship with Vera because she certainly wants him. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, it is said, and 'tis true, I can tell you, but Vera had the fury from first glance. br / br /Some of the dialogue is pretty lame, dime novel realistic you might say, the kind of talk that is written on the fly without imagination. E.g., "As I drove off, it was still raining and the drops streaked down the windshield like tears," which might not have been half bad except that the windshield wipers were flapping and there were no tracks of anybody's tears... Or, how about this: "Life's like a ball game. You gotta take a swing at whatever comes along before you find it's the ninth inning." br /Strange to say though, sprinkled among the prosaic and the banal are such gems as the one at the top of this review and this: "So when this drunk handed me a ten spot after a request, I couldn't get very excited. What was it I asked myself? A piece of paper crawling with germs. Couldn't buy anything I wanted." br / br /Sociologically speaking, this is a bit of a retrofit from the Depression era which featured gritty tales about guys down on their luck hitchhiking and looking for that one big shot at something, anything, love, money, half a break. And Roberts, even though a pianist of some talent, is like a James M. Cain protagonist, an ordinary Joe who gets involved with a dame (or two) and somehow makes the wrong moves and ends up in the deepest of deep quagmires. And like many another antihero, we can sympathize with him although we know and can see it's mostly his own damn fault. Fate has dealt him a bad hand that he should have tossed in, but he plays it out with the kind of fatalism that would befit a minor Greek tragedy.

review by: musician and coward date: 2008-04-27 rating:

Interesting film, abysmal DVD
My low rating is not for the film itself, but for this DVD release. It is transfered from a pretty damaged print, with scratches and marks in most scenes and even a few missing frames and dropouts in sound. What's worse, there are no subtitles, so I have no way of finding out what lines I missed other than searching online for the script. Most disappointing, a cult classic deserves better treatment.

review by: date: 2008-01-13 rating:

"You know, there oughta be a law against dames with claws!" Al Roberts (Tom Neal) couldn't agree more
"That's life," says two-bit loser Al Roberts. "Whichever way you turn, Fate sticks out a foot to trip you." Roberts, played by Tom Neal, is the whining, complaining protagonist in Detour, one of the worst, and best, pulp noirs you'll ever enjoy. And if Roberts doesn't have a good moment in any of the film's 67 minutes, you will if you get a kick out of pulp fiction so ripe it'll remind you of how old Charles Haskell's corpse is. Roberts, a piano player in a New York nightclub, was hitch hiking to L.A. to reunite with the woman he loves, his girlfriend Sue. When Haskell stops and gives him a ride, then dies of a heart attack, Roberts makes the first of many bad decisions. Haskell had several hundred in his wallet and three big, raw scratches on one hand. Wouldn't you know it, after ditching the body, taking the cash, the car and Haskell's identity, Roberts winds up stopping to pick up a hitchhiker...who turns out to be the dame who gave Haskell those scratches. "Man, she looked like she'd just been thrown off the crummiest freight train in the world," Roberts says. We can see for ourselves. Vera (Ann Savage) is tough as nails. She's a tramp. She's poison. She knows Roberts isn't Haskell. She sets a hook in Roberts' mouth and pulls him around from one scheme to the next to get money. When Roberts finally resists...well, see the movie. br / br /How can a film be so bad yet be so satisfying? It was shot by Edgar Ulmer in only six days on a tiny budget and looks it. Ulmer probably paid more for all that rear screen projection than he did for the actors. Neal and Savage are barely even B-level quality. The movie is hardly more than an hour long. And yet... br / br /First, the movie moves quickly. There is absolutely no wasted time, even when Ulmer is padding out a few shots. Second, Tom Neal is perfectly cast. He has a petulant, greasy face and a plump, weak mouth. Neal was not a sympathetic or likable actor. In what career he had, which wasn't much, he usually was at his best whining or playing bullies. Here, he's just weak. His career was effectively over when he beat Franchot Tone nearly to a pulp over a bimbo actress named Barbara Payton. A few years later he married and then was accused of murdering his wife with a gunshot to the head. He spent several years in prison on a manslaughter conviction and died of a heart attack a few months after he was released. Not much to admire here. Ann Savage is so over the top as the tough Vera that we sometimes do a double take over how she handles her dialogue. Still, the two of them, perhaps inadvertently, do full justice to the concept of Detour as full-bodied pulp fiction. Third, the script is great. Pulp, when it works, is sleazy, dirty entertainment. That's Detour. Neal and Savage make this fatalistic pulp cartoon vivid, not by how skilled they are, but by how well they meet the conventions of pulp action. Fourth, let's hear it for Edgar Ulmer. Some of Ulmer's films -- Strange Illusion, The Strange Woman, for example -- are fun to watch but none of them, in my view, are worth spending too much time thinking about. Like Val Lewton, Ulmer was a man of limited talent who could sometimes squeeze more interest out of so little to work with that one has to admire his persistence. He certainly sets up Vera's fate with style, even though Roberts' fate seems perfunctory to me. br / br /No one, I hope, would call Detour a great film. In my opinion, it's not even a great noir. But it succeeds as great pulp fiction. When that highway comes on the screen, when we see the credits and when we start to hear Al Robert's voice-over, we know we're in for a cheap, sleazy ride...and an entertaining one, too. br / br /Detour is in the public domain, so it's buyer beware. The DVD I have is watchable. I've heard that the Region 1 version put out by Image is in fairly good shape.

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