Let’s go to the drive-in and murder EVERYONE!
Sure thing, honey.
In the category of being an object lesson, Detour (1945) presents Al Roberts, a down on his luck pianist who’s trying to hitch a ride from New York to California in order to rejoin his fiancee, who has insisted that they get on their feet before they marry. She’s in California, trying to jump-start an acting career, while he keeps jabbing at the black & white keys.
But he’s really down on his luck. He’s in Arizona and thinking he’s finally found the last leg of his journey in the form of Charles Haskell and his big, big convertible, when Haskell has the poor taste to die while Al is driving – and Al doesn’t notice until he stops to close up the big car against the driving rain, and Charles falls out of the car on his head.
Al panics, because he doesn’t think the cops will believe his story. He ransacks the body, takes the money and ID, and dumps the body under some bushes and is soon, against his better judgment, back on the road.
And then his luck takes a turn for the worse. He offers a ride to Vera, a woman who just happens to have ridden with Haskell and recognizes the car, but not Roberts-faking-it-as-Haskell. She’s a veritable volcano of poor judgment and rotten ethics, and soon she’s threatened Roberts into giving her a cut of the dough and a ride into San Bernardino.
But her search of the glove compartment is the crowning achievement: a newspaper clipping indicating Haskell’s father is in Los Angeles, is rich, and is dying. Vera guesses Haskell, who ran away from home lo so many years ago, was running back to freshen his stash, as he claimed he was running a little low. She sees a chance to hit it big and forget all about the poverty in which she grew up.
By now, the audience has figured out that Roberts, for all his bluster, tends to blow with the wind, and we settle in to see how he’ll perform as a scammer, but he and Vera play a little game of virtual chicken with a phone, and, in a retro moment for the modern audience, he strangles her, inadvertently, with a phone cord.
Basically a good man, he’s in shock and finishes his narration, a study in self-pity, about how he never had a chance.
The cinematography is a little blurry, and if you object to his initial decision to not trust the cops when Haskell dies, you won’t really much care for this movie. But I do have to give the actress who plays Vera props, she really brought out the pathological side of what appeared to be someone damaged by poverty. It’s the sort of thing that makes you wonder about the applicability of morality to the truly desperate.
