By Sarah Baty

Detour was filmed in 1945 in just 14 days on a very minimal budget, but that’s how director Edgar G. Ulmer thrived. After being exiled from major Hollywood studios he went on to making B movies at Poverty Row production houses where he found a niche making melodramas on tiny budgets and with often unpromising scripts and actors.

Detour started with Tom Neal as Ale Roberts narrating about his time in New York and how he ended in up in a diner in Reno, Nevada. I grew up very close to Reno so it was really cool to see the town in an old movie. Roberts narrates throughout the film. While narrating he often refers to fate, so when he stumbles into situations and bad things happen, he chalks it up to it just being how things are supposed to be. According to our reading, Detour by Andrew Britton, Roberts “insists that a malicious destiny is responsible for all his troubles.” This is connected to the fact that Ulmer himself consistently attached a great idea to the importance of fate throughout majority of his films. Ulmer’s characters often exercise “little to not control over their destinies.” This is exemplified to me, when Roberts and Vera were in the apartment together.

Roberts and Vera return to the apartment after not selling Haskell’s car and Roberts is irritated to say the very least. Vera got very drunk and in the middle of their argument threw herself into the bedroom with the telephone and she locked the door. Some of the chord was still outside the bedroom with Roberts. As Vera drunkenly danced around the room wrapping the chord all around her, Roberts became angry and started tugging on the telephone chord. After he gets the door opened and it is revealed that Vera is dead, he narrates about how this must be how things are supposed to end up. It’s obvious he didn’t mean to kill Vera, it is just how things happened and I feel as though he does make you believe that it really is just fate doing its work.

At the end of the movie Roberts is back at the Nevada diner. As he walks out contemplating everything that happened, he is stopped by a police officer. Chalk that up to fate coming full circle, Roberts being unable to get away with his crimes that he didn’t really mean to do. During some extra reading I found that at the time, The Hollywood Protection Code did not let murderers get away with their crimes; therefore, to still abide by this rule and still leave a bit of intrigue at the end of the movie, Ulmer has the police car pick up Roberts. Alluring to the thought that he does indeed get indicted for his crimes. This was an interesting tid bit to find because it changes the way the movie could have ended. Without this rule to follow, would Ulmer have made the ending different? Or would Roberts have indeed been given the same fate because the whole point of the movie was about destiny right? I guess we’ll never know and there’s some delight to be found in that I think!