Detour

Saw Detour, a strange, pokey old film from 1945.  It's a fairly dismal story of a man who is hitchhiking to visit his girlfriend.  Along the way he runs into Vera, a controlling woman who gains leverage over him and holds him captive.  This happens halfway through the film, but the real meat of the film is this power struggle between Vera and the protagonist.  The film shows it age a bit but has the tight, miserable, gripping pace of a good noir.

The film is strange in many ways.  I postulate that it was first a radio play.  A lot of the film happens in narration and voice-over and via stagey one-sided phone calls.  The characters perform their roles well, but almost in short-hand, like their emotions never really reach their eyes.  The characters are also very un-nuanced.  The main character is Good and Hapless but that's all.  The film is ultimately a sort of fable about the struggles of this man so his blankness kind of plays to the films' favor.

The one exception to all of this is Vera, which is very unusual in a film this old, for a woman to have such a meaty role.  She is calculating and violent and a bit vulnerable and excellent.  She makes half-hopeful passes at the main character in one moment and then sourly threatens him in the next.  Their relationship is driven by her and she drives it right off a cliff.  She's a baddie but she's still powerful and a force of self-destruction to be reckoned with.  Indeed, such a powerful, dominant woman probably only got by the censors because she was a baddie.

Speaking of the censors, they are the cause of the ending which is so utterly implausible, I took it to be a dream sequence.  This film shows its age in a couple of ways (one of them being the Hayes code meddling of the censors) and also in regards the weird, formal acting, but it also contains some magnificently strange expressions (egs: "I didn't have a car, so it was me for the thumb." "... why he must have scads of dough!" I was totally tickled.)

The film is sort of dusty in a few ways but holds up well.  It's unrelentingly miserable but mesmerizingly so.  It's not just a wallow however. It works to build sympathy for the hapless main character and even for Vera in parts.  She's a bad egg, but once perhaps she wasn't so hard-boiled.