Detour
Director: Edgar G. Ulmer
Year Released: 1945
Rating: 2.0
Lounge pianist (Tom Neal) from New York City wants to visit his girlfriend out in Los Angeles, so he takes to hitchhiking and winds up with a dead man on his hands and a guilty conscience. Can't say it did much for me - sure it was made for spare change and with plenty of ingenuity, but how does that make the endless conversations in the car, overwrought acting and the truly flagrant contrivances (two of them, in particular - the pickup of a bug-eyed Ann Steele who knows about the car's original owner and the events leading to her subsequent death by phone cord) any more bearable? As a model for 'Cinema Povera,' it's perfectly all right, but that doesn't mean it's a great movie - it has plenty of champions and I am not one of them.
