Edgar G. UlmerDetour (1945)

"Man is involved in two freakish accidents that make him look like a murderer. Poverty row masterwork that is the most precise elucidation of the noir theme of explicit fatalism." - noir expert Spencer Selby |

Cast: Tom Neal, Ann Savage, Claudia Drake, Edmund MacDonald. |
A B-movie, it was shot in six days. The film, budgeted for $89,000 and ended up costing $117,000 to make.

This item is part of the collection: Film Noir

Director: Edgar G. Ulmer
Production Company: PRC Pictures Inc.
Audio/Visual: sound, black & white
Keywords: Crime; Drama; Film-Noir; Mystery; Thriller
Contact Information: www.k-otic.com

Creative Commons license: Public Domain

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Reviewer: jimelena - - June 6, 2007
Subject: Good flick

Pretty entertaining after you get by the first 15 minutes of back story.

Reviewer: robcat2075 - - February 12, 2007
Subject: not a B, a B+

Of all the opportune coincidences in this movie, the saxophone player in the next room is the best.

A first class B movie, and really, a $100,000 budget was pretty solid back then.

Reviewer: fubunics - - February 9, 2007
Subject: Don't waste your time and ours if you're going to encode at 640x480

The MPEG2 file is encoded at 640x480, in other words whoever encoded it is defeating the purpose of even encoding it at MPEG2 and it has to be re-encoded to be DVD-compliant. Really a waste of time to even encode at MPEG2 if you're not going to use a standard resolution, and a waste of time for the downloaders as well. Picture looks decent otherwise. Sorry to be so harsh, but some common sense needs to be used if this much effort is going to be put into encoding and uploading these films.

Reviewer: LordOfTheExacto - - January 26, 2007
Subject: Stark and scary

This noir is more frightening than gritty in its domino-like series of events. The protagonist Al, played by Tom Neal, starts out as kind of a hard-bitten wannabe - he'd like to think he's tough and callous, but he still has a soft spot for his singer/lover Sue (Claudia Drake). When a grifter who picked him up hitchhiking dies unexpectedly, Al's only-partly-affected cynicism convinces him that he would be presumed guilty of the man's murder. From there, it's a slow descent into fear, blackmail and coercion, prodded along by Ann Savage's slightly over-hardened femme fatale. By the time the end arrives, it's hard to see how things could have unfolded any differently.

This is the sort of movie best watched alone, at three in the morning, with a dark house and a full bottle of vodka. And all the sharp objects safely locked away.