Detour
The solution is pretty simple: Because we want to see a good story. Documentaries aside (which, by the way, I don’t really like anyways), watching a film is a lot like reading a book, both of which are primarily there to transport a story. Back in high school, we had to write an essay about that, and I suppose the “right” answer to the problem is that a good book has more than just a story. Nowadays, I am not so sure if that is true, and forget what I said in this posting. If a good story is not present, I may still be able to enjoy whatever I see, but more than anything else, I prefer a good story.
“Detour” is the kind of film where the story really isn’t all that great. Main character accidentally kills guy and gets mixed up with crazy woman who he accidentally kills as well. On top of that, the whole thing only takes an hour and both storytelling and cinematography are decent at best – it is certainly a cheap film after all. Roger Ebert, who seems to have loved the film, has this theory that the story has a double bottom, that not all is how it seems and a psychological twist on the main character whose skewed memory makes him believe of his innocence when he actually is just a petty criminal. That’s rather boring, huh?
Actually it’s the woman herself who makes the film interesting. When you have no budget and no story, the least a film noir can do is to present a good femme fatale. This one is quite symbolic for the entire film: She’s not bad (in fact the actress plays the bitch really well) but at the same time she is also not that interesting. All she does is complain, threaten and scream really. One can hardly call her a femme fatale, but being a strong woman with the je ne sais quoi make her qualify.
I have no idea why the film is amongst Ebert’s “Great Movies”, in the “1000 Greatest Films” from They Shoot Pictures and amongst their “250 Quintessential Noirs” as highly recommended. What do they all see in this movie? I thought it was a completely forgettable film and makes me wonder how many good film noir there really are out there
i thought this to be, on the contrary, a truly exhilarating and exemplary piece of D-grade filmmaking. everything, from the notoriously frequent and ostentatious rear projections to the canned script and somewhat disquieting presence of ann savage, ultimately feeds powerfully into this overall sense of dread and tightening of the noose around this poor fuck, al roberts. and the momentum of this unbudging downhill fall is only accelerated by the condensed nature of it all. to me, it packs no less a punch than such baroque noirs like Kiss Me Deadly, and is one of my favorite examples of such ultra-compact yet psychologically taut B-movie-type gems that go along with the many masterpieces made by Val Lewton’s clan.
Too much context XXXXD No, seriously, I have never seen “Kiss me deadly” and, in fact, I can probably count the number of actual noirs I have seen with my hands. However, the good ones (which, incidentally, means almost all of them) provided excitement and drama, which “Detour” lacked for me. From a distance I understand why you enjoyed its threatening atmosphere (it makes more sense to me than why Ebert liked the film!) and how you saw it as a psycho-thriller, but I totally didn’t feel it.