Product: Detour [VHS] (1945)
Rating: 4.0
Five stars for the film, zero stars for the DVD transfer
One of the most famous of all films noir, DETOUR was made for less that $60K in less than a week's time, and features excellent camerawork, an incredibly doomy plot, a fine performance by the hunky Tom Neal as a hapless drifter and an even better one by Ann Savage as Vera, one of the angriest and most malignant characters ever to appear in a film. (Though her time on the screen is brief, her performance is what most people remember about this film even though the rest of it would be memorable in its own right.) Unfortunately, neither of the two prints available of this film on DVD as of this writing is any good: in both cases the film stock is at some points distorted and even jumps, and there is no supplemntal information whatsoever on this version from Image. Wait until the film is released in a fully restored form untiul you buy it on DVD.