Fleapit revisited:Detour.

"Fate, or some mysterious force, can put the finger on you or me. For no reason at all" - Al Roberts.

Somewhere in the middle of the desert a tired looking man in a ragged suit hitch-hikes a lift to a diner in Reno, Nevada. When he gets there he sits down and slowly drinks a cup of coffee. He's none too friendly when a stranger tries to engage him conversation and even less amenable when that stranger puts the song I Can't Believe That You're In Love With Me on the jukebox.

That man is Al Roberts (Tom Neal) and he is a man adrift in his own thoughts, a man haunted both by memories and jazz earworms. Edgar G. Ulmer's Detour (1945, Internet Archive) was the next stop in my ongoing journey into the world of film noir but that titular detour was not merely one in Roberts' road trip but one in his life.

When you drink to forget, coffee is not normally the beverage of choice. So, perhaps it's no wonder that, for Roberts, the memories continue to flood back. He reminisces about a seemingly happier time in New York City. He worked as a piano player in a nightclub, accompanying his singing girlfriend Sue (Claudia Drake). They played for tips and some nights they'd play until 4am.

It wasn't a bad job for the time but both Al and Sue had higher hopes for their musical careers. While Al dreamed of playing Carnegie Hall, Sue actually did something to follow her dreams. She upped sticks and headed off to Hollywood. A week before the couple were due to marry.

This is the background to Detour but the story only really begins when Al decides to join her in LA. Short of funds, he uses his thumb to cross the country and when he's picked up by the pill-popping bookie and dueller (!) Charles Haskell Jr (Edmund MacDonald) in a Lincoln Continental convertible he doesn't immediately realise that he has reached a pivot in his life.

Haskell's scratched hands and tall stories should be a warning sign but Al Roberts is only focused on reaching California and falling into his sweetheart's arms. Later in the journey, when Roberts has his own wheels, he repays the kindness drivers have shown him by picking up a young female hitch-hiker. Vera (Ann Savage) is young, early-mid twenties, she's intense, and she gives very little away in conversation about her own life yet seems smart beyond her years.

She knows stuff. Stuff that means Vera and Al will, in the short term at least, have to stick together. She smokes, she drinks, and she plays cards. Back in the 1940s that would have marked her out as a certain kind of woman. Al Roberts isn't totally sure what to make of her but he becomes as reliant on her as she is on him. You're never quite sure if he's going to kiss her or kill her.

As if to underline that this is an early noir, scenes are played out on foggy streets, desert roads flanked by cacti and gothic telegraph poles, and, of course, in the rain. Rain being as standard a noir feature as men in grey suits and hats. The dialogue is great too. Geese are cooked, a drunk person is described as being "as tight as a prima donna's corset", and a ten dollar note dismissed as "a piece of paper covered in germs".

When Al Roberts rings Vera to announce his plans to cross the great nation he tells her he'll make it even if he needs to travel by magic carpet or pogo stick. But does he make it and if/when he does what will happen to him? About halfway through the film what had been a fairly gentle story steps up a gear into a more disconcerting, even eerie, territory.

From which it never really returns. Leo Erdody's magisterial score knows when and how to push our buttons and both Neal and Savage are compelling presences at all time. When Detour was originally released the moral ambivalence of the film meant that it was, initially, refused a cinematic release under the Hays Code. Ulmer, I imagine grudgingly, made a small tweak to the film that satisfied the censors.

This tweak does affect the film but only very marginally. Without it, the film would have been braver and more powerful. But even with it, Detour is a fine addition to my ever growing list of much loved noir.