5/5 - DETOUR (1945)

'Detour (1945) is a film noir cult classic that stars Tom Neal, Ann Savage, Claudia Drake and Edmund MacDonald. The movie was adapted by Martin Goldsmith and Martin Mooney (uncredited) from Goldsmith's novel and was directed by Edgar G. Ulmer. The 68-minute film was released by the Producers Releasing Corporation (PRC), one of the so-called "poverty row" film studios in mid-twentieth century Hollywood.
Although made on a small budget with bare sets and straightforward camera work, Detour has gathered much praise through the years and is held in high regard.
In 1992, Detour was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". Critical response to the film today is almost universally positive. Most reviewers contrast the technical shoddiness of the film with its successful atmospherics. Film critic Roger Ebert wrote: "This movie from Hollywood's poverty row, shot in six days, filled with technical errors and ham-handed narrative, starring a man who can only pout and a woman who can only sneer, should have faded from sight soon after it was released in 1945. And yet it lives on, haunting and creepy, an embodiment of the guilty soul of film noir. No one who has seen it has easily forgotten it." He also included it in his list of great films.
Sight and Sound reviewer Phillip Kemp would later write: "Using unknown actors and filming with no more than three minimal sets, a sole exterior (a used-car lot) to represent Los Angeles, a few stock shots, and some shaky back-projection, Ulmer conjures up a black, paranoid vision, totally untainted by glamour, of shabby characters trapped in a spiral of irrational guilt."

Novelists Edward Gorman and Dow Mossman wrote: "...Detour remains a masterpiece of its kind. There have been hundreds of better movies, but none with the feel for doom portrayed by ... Ulmer. The random universe Stephen Crane warned us about—the berserk cosmic impulse that causes earthquakes and famine and AIDS—is nowhere better depicted than in the scene where Tom Neal stands by the roadside, soaking in the midnight rain, feeling for the first time the noose drawing tighter and tighter around his neck."'
(Text from Wikipedia)

Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

• 'Film
• Noir'
• 'poverty
• row
• film'
• Detour
• 'Tom
• Neal'
• 'Martin
• Goldsmith'
• 1940's
• 'Edgar
• G.
• Ulmer'

[OfShadowandSubstance]

Thanks for the upload.

[LazyDancer1]

Thanks for the upload!