Product: Detour [VHS] (1945)
Rating: 3.0
A victim of circumstances
Tom Neal plays talented but struggling nightclub pianist Al Roberts in the so-so low budget Edgar Ulmer directed, film noir flick "Detour". While the black and white film has all the earmarks of this genre including tough unforgiving broad Vera played by the acerbic Ann Savage, it fails to pull you in.Neal's girlfriend Sue Harvey played by Claudia Drake a nightclub singer in the same dive he works in forsakes his marriage proposal for the bright lights of Hollywood. Neal realizes that he can't live without her and plans to hitchhike his way out to California.His tale is told in flashback fashion while he sits unshaven and disheveled in a roadside diner ruminating over a cup of java.He gets picked up by bookie Charles Haskell played by Edmund MacDonald in a fancy convertible. They get chummy and MacDonald stakes the penniless Neal to a meal. With Neal taking over the wheel MacDonald catches 40 winks. Soon thereafter Neal realizes that MacDonald has actually expired in his sleep. Fearing being apprehended for killing him, he hides the body along the roadside and takes his car, money and clothes and assumes his identity.Continuing on his way he pick up the hitching Savage who is the weakest plot twist turns out to be a previous passenger of the bookie Haskell. Realizing that Neal isn't who he says he is, she threatens him with revealing his supposed crime to police. In this way she holds him a vertible prisoner with this threat of extortion while she plays angles necessary to bilk Haskell's possessions.The fatalistic ending while expected was nonetheless a conclusion befitting the plot.