“Your philosophy stinks, pal”
In the middle of nowhere, in the dark, a guy trudges along the road trying to thumb a ride. His face is crumpled with defeat. He’s wearing a dead man’s suit. Al Roberts in Detour is the apotheosis of the noir shlump, in the shlumpiest film noir—a grungy, down-at-heels little flick released just three months after V-J Day, puncturing the nation’s triumphant mood like the shard of a beer bottle in a white-wall tire. Who would want Detour to look better than it does? Everything about it is definitive: the muddy lighting and grainy image; the creased, hangdog face of Tom Neal as Roberts; the raw performance of Anne Savage as Vera, a woman with the manners and morals of a rabid alley cat; the scenery of crummy diners, used-car lots, drive-ins, cheap hotel rooms and endless highways running through the desert night.
Like all shlumps, Al Roberts is convinced he’s destined for greatness—if only Fate wouldn’t keep sticking out a foot to trip him. He was once a nightclub pianist in New York with a beautiful blonde fiancée, but she refused to marry him and resign herself to a life of penny-pinching mediocrity. When she left to try her luck in Hollywood—chasing the same old dream of fame and success—he set out after her, hitching across country with barely enough money to eat.
Hitch-hiking is a barometer of trust. The Depression fostered a sense that everyone was in the same boat and Americans were obligated to help each other out, but after WWII, Hollywood produced a series of sour warnings against picking up strangers. The chronically dyspeptic Roberts hates hitching even before things go wrong. He’s humiliated by the inferior position it places him in, the way it advertises his failure to achieve even the most basic symbol of American success: a car. When he’s picked up by a free-spending blowhard named Haskell, Al pays his way by listening to his host’s bombastic monologue. He’s a morose yes-man, both obsequious and resentful. As Greil Marcus beautifully wrote, “There is nothing in his face but sweat, stubble, shame and anger. All the shared gestures of the Great Depression are present in the way Tom Neal sits in the car.”
When Haskell unexpectedly dies of natural causes, Roberts is convinced that no one will believe the truth. This panicky pessimism springs from his conviction that fate is against him—or is that just a convenient excuse? Al’s narration is one long, self-serving whine of grievance. The way he keeps accusing us, the audience, of not believing him—defensively imagining the laughter on our smug faces as we give him that “who are you kidding?” look—hardly inspires confidence as he drives off with a fat wallet and another man’s car. (That Tom Neal would later serve six years for “accidentally” shooting his wife, and die of heart failure shortly after his release, proves that truth is more noir than fiction.)
It isn’t fate that puts the finger on Al, it’s Vera, the “tomato” he picks up outside a filling station, who suddenly fixes him with a gorgon glare and demands, in a voice that sounds like a paint-scraper, “Okay, whadja do with his body?” Al and Vera are a sick noir twist on the screwball couple. They’re meant for each other: the limp, self-pitying shlemiel and the bossy, sharp-clawed harpy. They snipe at each other, but with the rhythm of snappy banter. They seem more like a couple than Al and his bland fiancée, albeit a sado-masochistic one. Vera’s ceaseless stream of vituperation and acrid invective is gleeful, almost flirtatious. “Shut up! You’re making noises like a husband,” she sneers when he’s impatient.
Al never tries to escape from Vera. When he sarcastically says, “My favorite sport is being kept prisoner,” he’s really telling the truth. His weakness and need to believe himself ill-used are both fulfilled by Vera’s gloating control; her aggression perfectly moulds to his passivity. She berates him for his gloomy fatalism (“Your philosophy stinks, pal”), declaring that in this life you have to swing at anything that comes your way. She has a kind of cockeyed optimism, even as she’s aware that she is dying of TB, a knowledge that makes her reckless. She may look “like she’d been thrown off the crummiest freight train in the world,” but at heart she’s no shlump. Her demonic energy and unbridled avarice make her a tarnished version of the pre-Code dame who’ll do anything to get ahead.
The Code requires Al to pay for his crimes, accidental though they may have been, so the highway patrol pulls up at the last moment to arrest him. The film should have ended with him wandering the empty, blackened country, unable ever to return home or reach the woman he loves, fading into the great American night like Paul Muni in I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang. His greasy face, an inverted V of anxious despair, is a roadside icon. It belongs on the Mount Rushmore of Shlumps.
by Imogen Sara Smith