Detour (1945 Film) - Critical Reaction

Critical Reaction

Detour was well received upon initial release with positive reviews in the Los Angeles Times, Variety and The Hollywood Reporter, among many others. It was released to television in the early 1950s, and ran in syndicated TV markets until the dawn of mass cable systems in the 1980s. TV reviewers casually recommended it in the 1960s and 1970s as a worthwhile "B" movie. During the 1970s, Detour began to be seen as a prime example of "Film Noir", and critics began to write about it at increasingly greater length. During the 1980s, revival houses, universities, and film festivals began to honor Edgar G. Ulmer with retrospective tributes to his work, and public interest in noir films and crime dramas increased with the rise of cable TV screenings and availability on VHS and Laserdisc in home video.

Edgar Ulmer died in 1972, well ahead of the full revival of Detour, and the critical re-evaluation of his career. Tom Neal also died in 1972. Ann Savage made live appearances with the film from 1985 to 2006, increasing public visibility as critical interest and analysis continued to grow.

Critical response to the film today is almost universally positive. Most reviewers contrast the technical shoddiness of the film with its successful atmospherics. Film critic Roger Ebert wrote:

"This movie from Hollywood's poverty row, shot in six days, filled with technical errors and ham-handed narrative, starring a man who can only pout and a woman who can only sneer, should have faded from sight soon after it was released in 1945. And yet it lives on, haunting and creepy, an embodiment of the guilty soul of film noir. No one who has seen it has easily forgotten it."

He also included it in his list of great films.

Sight and Sound reviewer Phillip Kemp would later write:

"Using unknown actors and filming with no more than three minimal sets, a sole exterior (a used-car lot) to represent Los Angeles, a few stock shots, and some shaky back-projection, Ulmer conjures up a black, paranoid vision, totally untainted by glamour, of shabby characters trapped in a spiral of irrational guilt."

Novelists Edward Gorman and Dow Mossman wrote:

"...Detour remains a masterpiece of its kind. There have been hundreds of better movies, but none with the feel for doom portrayed by ... Ulmer. The random universe Stephen Crane warned us about—the berserk cosmic impulse that causes earthquakes and famine and AIDS—is nowhere better depicted than in the scene where Tom Neal stands by the roadside, soaking in the midnight rain, feeling for the first time the noose drawing tighter and tighter around his neck."