DETOUR

Al Roberts (Tom Neal), a pianist in a New York nightclub, is looking to join his girlfriend, Sue (Claudia Drake), who lives in Los Angeles. He chooses to join her by hitchhiking. He is picked up by Haskell (Edmund MacDonald), a man with money, who tells him that the previous hitchhiker, a young woman, scratched his face after he made a pass at her. After replacing Haskell who had fallen asleep, Al realizes while trying to wake him up that the man is dead. After hiding the corpse, Al meets a young woman, Vera (Ann Savage), in a motel, unaware that the previous day Haskell had also put her in his car. Vera, on the other hand, knows the whole story and tries to blackmail him, but she accidentally dies while Al continues to flee. A chilling, Kafkaesque film, told in flashback through the eyes of the protagonist, it is an absolute masterpiece in the B-movie genre, a ‘hallucinatory apologue about the absurd and about chance’. The film has been the subject of numerous studies and is praised by the greatest filmmakers, including Martin Scorsese. It was shot in six days in only two different locations. Detour is considered the masterpiece of Edgar G. Ulmer, formerly an assistant to Friedrich Murnau, who, inspired by German expressionism, makes a slow, inexorable descent into hell with a film that is halfway between European film noir and American crime film, using mainly unknown actors.