Critics reviews

In recent years Chicago's Edgar G. Ulmer cultists have made exuberant claims for this chameleon auteur's late career efforts, such as THE CAVERN and THE AMAZING TRANSPARENT MAN. Without discounting those works, it's DETOUR that remains Ulmer's classic, with its total congruence between aesthetic means and thematic ends...

Glauber Rocha has nothing on Edgar G. Ulmer’s aesthetics of hunger. . . . Ulmer’s threadbare bondage-noir masterpiece grinds Double Indemnity into powdered milk, moving from one magnificently decomposing shot to another until its circular roadside desert becomes the stuff of nightmares.

Savage is explosive. A feral synthesis of every negative quality imaginable, her Vera is gloriously intolerable. Neal seems to hurt his own face with his epic frowning, but it’s the only rational response to his pathetically trapped existence, the hell of obsession.

The film-noir B-movie classic “Detour,” from 1945, is an object lesson in low-budget Hollywood artistry and one of the few movies that can rightly be called Kafkaesque.

I love Detour. It’s the model for Memento, Secret Window, and every other film that tries to make viewers believe it’s something it’s not, and may even succeed whether we want it to or not.

Trampy 'bad girl' Vera exudes a kind of malevolent, misanthropic energy that's startling to encounter in a 60-year-old movie, barrelling the picture along to its rug-pulling conclusion which it wouldn't be fair to reveal here.

Detour is the masterpiece of this type of film. More shots cut into 15 pieces, 283 cuts in 69 minutes, or 47 cuts a day, doubtless derived from 25 filmed shots. This film, conceived to the PRC rule, has amazingly survived the oblivion for which it was designed. So we have a cult-film released in France forty-eight years after its making – that's a record – which captivates all true filmmakers: a model of rigour, a Greek tragedy that transcends its banal material.

What can you say about a 69-minute grade-Z production from 1945 starring a catatonic unknown (Tom Neal) and the most metaphysically distressing actress ever to grace an American film (Ann Savage) that takes place mainly in front of a rear projection screen . . . —except that it's one of the most daring and thoroughly perverse works of art ever to come out of Hollywood?