MOVIETONE NEW8 . - Parallax View Annex

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But if Detour can reward the receptive filmgoer, it
does, by its very nature, demand a little more than
the ordinary film. After all, there is no denying that a
film shot in a very short time (rumored to have been
four days, more likely five or six), on a budget of-it
almost seems-something in the neighborhood of 45
cents, may lack some of the slickness and polish we
ordinarily expect. But if we focus on what the film
offers rather than what it lacks, we can begin to
appreciate what is, on reflection, an extraordinary
piece of filmmaking .
. To understand Detour's wry perversity ,it may be
necessary to know something of the man who made
it, Edgar G. Ulmer: an extraordinarily gifted German
who began his career working with people like Lang
and Murnau, and himself made films in Hollywood
for over 30 years. Yet the biggest "star" he ever
directed was Zachary Scott and his longest shooting
schedule was 12 days, with most of his films made
even more quickly. He deliberately refused to work
for any major studio, preferring the complete creative
freedom and low budgets of Poverty Row. The
"freedom" he found there enabled him to direct
Yiddish-language pictures, a Ukrainian musical, a
Harlem movie, and a prison film called Women in
Chains. Ulmer may have been able to make such films
exactly as he wanted, but with such dubious projects,
with budgets so small many scenes were done in one
take, his freedom often must have seemed as illusory
as that of Detour's hitchhiker.
On the surface, the film is fairly simple: a man
hitchhiking across the country, inadvertently involved
in an accidental death, becomes involved also in a
murder. Initially, his traveling suggests the exercise of
free will, but as the road begins to seem endless this
freedom is revealed as complete entrapment. The
reversal extends even to the ways we perceive the
visual imagery. As he sets out, full of faith and
optimism, riding down the highway in an open
convertible seems like an expansive, liberating experience.
But when later he, as driver of the car, picks
up a hitchhiker himself, all the space "out there"
beyond the car ceases to matter as his circumstances
constrict his existence to the narrow dimensions of
the car's interior. The sequence in question has a
heightened effect precisely because that expansive,
open world is so prominent visually, its physical
proximity so evident yet so increasingly irrelevant to
his existence as the alternatives it offers are increasingly
closed to him. •
This notion of contrast, often extended beyond all
rationality, is central to Ulmer's method. Grim,
sordid, bizarre events take place in the most banal
surroundings, and, because of those events, the
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meaning of the surroundings themselves is somehow
altered, our responses to them changed. The first
death in the film is an accident so farfetched it seems
surreal, but the second death-a grisly murder by
longdistance telephone-seems to exist beyond all
laws of plausibility. But it is the very implausibility of
the action, juxtaposed with the ordinariness of the
milieu-a nightclub, an apartment, a used car lot, and,
of course,. the road-that gives the film much of its
force. Ulmer is actually taking several American
fantasies ("going west", looking to Hollywood for
success and happiness, finding freedom and happiness
on the open road-cf. Capra's It Happened One
Night) and performing unnatural acts on them, with
devastating effects. If, for example, we think of the
hitchhiker in terms of an Horatio Alger character, we
see that he meets with just the opposite of an
unbroken string of good luck and success; each
ridiculous plot twist narrows his alternatives, increases
his victimization, further emphasizes his lack
of free will. In fact, the closest thing to a moment of
freedom in the movie (though the character doesn't
perceive it as such) comes in the extraordinary'
sequence in which, working in the nightclub he
professes to despise, he plays a brilliant, disjointed
piano improvisation, shown largely through closeups
of his crazily moving fingers.
At the heart of the film, then, is its belief in the
existence of fate: irrational, relentless, malevolent.
Fate seems almost a palpable thing, shaping the
action with a malicious perversity beyond reason,
beyond resistance. But Detour is so perverse it upsets
even our sense of inevitability. From the introduction
we know that the film's flashbacks will gradually
reveal the chain of circumstances that have brought
the character to his present state of desperation. But
we are not really prepared for anything more, for a
final injustice presented in a casual longshot so
indifferent it's practically a throwaway. In retrospect,
this shot perfectly extends the. logic of the main body
of the film by denying that final myth of mobility
and freedom, of the doomed outcast bound to
wander forever.
When we discuss the conditions of Ulmer's career,
the necessity for choosing between "selling out" to a
major studio or working on Poverty Row, we can
easily see how he might have felt a personal affinity
for a project like Detour. It is no accident that the
hitchhiker's intended destination should be Hollywood
where he will find success and happiness.
(There is even one shot in which two characters are
framed in a window that looks for all the world
exactly like a movie screen.) After a decade of Jive
Junctions and Women in Chains, of limited options