Detour
Short description
Al Roberts plays piano in a New York nightclub, and when his girlfriend Sue leaves for California to try her luck as an actress, he decides to follow her. Without a car or the money for a train ticket, he hitchhikes west. A stranger named Charles Haskell offers him a ride and lets him take the wheel; Roberts later finds the man dead, hides the body and continues in the car as if it were his own. At a gas station he meets Vera, who sees through him and uses what she knows to push him into a tightening corner.
Edgar G. Ulmer directed this low-budget production for PRC, working from a screenplay by Martin Goldsmith, with Leon Fromkess producing. It followed Ulmer's Bluebeard and preceded Ruthless and Hannibal in a filmography that also includes The Black Cat and Isle of Forgotten Sins. Tom Neal plays Roberts, Ann Savage plays Vera, Claudia Drake is Sue Harvey, and Edmund MacDonald appears as Charles Haskell Jr., with Tim Ryan and Esther Howard in supporting roles. The film runs 68 minutes.
Made cheaply and released in November 1945, the film has since drawn a substantial audience: on IMDb it holds a 7.3 rating from around 22,000 votes and on TMDB a 7.2 from over 400 votes. A critics' rating of 8.3 from 42 reviews places it higher than those viewer scores, indicating stronger regard among reviewers than among the general audience.
What's left behind the scenes
- According to Anne Savage (1921-2008), who played Vera, she and Tom Neal (1914-1972), the actor portraying Al, did not get along on set. Once, he embarrassed her by licking her ear in front of everyone. She responded by slapping him in the face. After that, they only spoke to each other through their characters' lines.
- The script did not originally include the arrest of Tom Neal's character. He was arrested only at the insistence of censor Joseph Breen (1888-1965), as rules of the period stipulated that films could not depict a criminal escaping deserved punishment, and a scene of the arrest was inserted.
- In this film, Tom Neal plays a man who accidentally kills two people. Neal himself was later arrested and sentenced to six years in prison for the involuntary manslaughter of his wife, Gail Bennett.
- According to later testimonies from Ulmer and Savage, the film was shot in six days. In a 2004 documentary, Ulmer’s daughter, Arianna, shows the title page of the director’s script, which has a note: “June 14, 1945 – June 29. 14 shooting days.”
- Since reshoots were out of the question with such a low budget, Ulmer, who prioritized the overall plot over coherence, printed some hitchhiking scenes from a flipped negative. Thus, while showing a journey west from New York to Los Angeles, the cars move from right to left, but not in their “correct” lane; the hitchhiker also gets into the car on the driver’s side.
Auditions in India
Casting calls in USA
Castingi w Polsce
Кастинги в Україні
