Punching above its weight: how 1945’s ‘Detour’ changed independent cinema
A major concern in modern cinema is that the gap between the major studios and independent production companies is continuing to widen, with what was once a gulf fast becoming a chasm. It’s hardly a newfound point of contention, though, and 1945’s Detour is just one of many examples to showcase how creativity and class are an ample substitution for resources and heavyweight backing.
Furthering the belief that Hollywood truly is a cyclical place, the industry remains dominated by the biggest outfits in town. There’s a pantheon occupied by the ‘Big Five’ of Warner Bros, Disney, Paramount, Universal, and Sony, and then there’s everyone else. Netflix may have tried to muscle in on that turf in recent years, but being a streaming service means it’ll never be regarded as a genuine movie studio in the conventional sense.
That was pretty much the case during the ‘Golden Age’, too, during an era when Warner Bros, Universal, and Paramount were joined by MGM and RKO as the ‘Big Five’ of their time. Outside of that, there lay the companies on the fringes that found themselves branded rather derogatorily as ‘Poverty Row’.
The term encapsulates a number of short-lived and distinctly B-tier operations that sprang up with reckless abandon and regularly capitulated just as quickly, with Detour hailing from ‘Poverty Row’ stalwart Producers Releasing Corporation, which only existed between 1939 and 1946.
Directed by Edward G. Ulmer – best known for helming the first on-screen collaboration between Universal icons Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff in 1934’s Black Cat – his noir was cobbled together in a hasty and inexpensive fashion befitting its production company’s status as a non-mainstream concern.
Part of the film’s legend is that it was shot in six days for a cost of $20,000, but while that’s largely been debunked, making one of the greatest noirs of all time in two weeks for less than $100,000 hardly torpedoes Detour‘s legacy as one of the first major instances of an unheralded studio taking on the big boys at their own game and doing it better than almost all of them.
The story zeroes in on Tom Neal’s New York City piano player, Al Roberts, who is suffering from a bad case of heartbreak after his girlfriend heads off to seek fame and fortune under the bright lights of Hollywood. After coming into some money, he sets off on a cross-country hitchhike to join her, with Edmund MacDonald’s Charles Haskell offering to drive him on his trek in the name of unrequited love.
However, when his kind chauffeur is killed in a freak accident, Al assumes the dead man’s identity and runs headlong into trouble when Ann Savage’s femme fatale, Vera, sees right through the ruse. In terms of plot, budget, and visibility, Detour was definitely a B-movie in every sense. Still, the fact it became regarded as a classic – which included induction into the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry in 1992 – marked one of the first times a ‘Poverty Row’ production had been treated with the type of reverence typically earmarked exclusively for a feature hailing from a nameworthy studio.
It’s rough around the edges, featuring repeated technical errors, unconvincing rear projection techniques, and a solitary exterior location to represent the whole of Los Angeles. However, the style outweighed the substance to such an extent that Detour earned over a million dollars at the box office and ultimately became known as one of Hollywood’s greatest-ever noirs.
Following a restoration, Michael Pogorzelski, President of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Film Archive, referred to Detour as “one of the best and purest film noirs of all time” in conversation with Criterion. It’s an opinion that’s been echoed by scholars and cinephiles the world over.
It was never created with that goal in mind, but it nonetheless became a pivotal moment in independent cinema that underlined how the studios that existed on the fringes of Tinseltown were more than capable of creating greatness and exerting lasting influence on the medium at a fraction of the cost.
