Detour (USA, 1945)

Some films seem able to embody an emotion or state of mind: with Singin’ In The Rain it’s joy, with The Shawshank Redemption it’s hope, and with Detour it’s fatalism. Time magazine, which included Detour on its (admittedly idiosyncratic) list of ‘The 100 Top Movies of All TIME’, said ‘no film is noirer’ – and certainly it’s impossible to think of one that is. An inescapable pessimism flows from the script and infects every aspect of a production that – shot in six days for a cost, depending on who you believe, of either five- or twenty-thousand dollars – is in budgetary terms a featherweight of film, but that punches like the heavyweight champion of the world.

Deadbeat piano player Al Roberts (Tom Neal) hopes to walk down the aisle – or rather ‘make with the ring and the licence’ – with his curvy, nightclub singer girlfriend, Sue Harvey (Claudia Drake). She isn’t so keen and, convinced she can make it in Hollywood, moves to California, leaving him to hitchhike after her. Eventually an amiable, if unlikely, character called Charles Haskell Jr. (Edmund MacDonald) gives Roberts a ride and, for a while, things are going well. Then, suddenly, Haskell dies and, in trying to revive him, Roberts accidentally lets Haskell’s head fall heavily against a rock. Sure that anyone to whom he tries to explain these events will think him a murderer, he swaps clothes with the corpse, and steals not only Haskell’s wallet and car, but also his identity. Once he gets far enough away, he reasons, he can dump the car and clothes and revert to being Al Roberts. And perhaps he could have, had he not picked up a shapely and sarcastic passenger named Vera (and played by Ann Savage). Unfortunately for Al, she had met the original Haskell and understandably smells a sewer rodent. Immediately, Roberts finds himself ‘tusslin’ with the most dangerous animal in the world – a woman’, and, naturally for a noir character caught in such a contest, plummeting into a personal Hell of blackmail, betrayal, crime and killing.

Although, as Roger Ebert wrote, Neal is ‘a man who can only pout’ and Savage ‘a woman who can only snarl’ their interaction is as riveting as that of any of the great onscreen couples. While many noirs allow their characters to face their fates with someone they love, or at least lust after, Detour’s spirit is far too malign for that: here the two main characters are locked together only by enmity. They scratch and stab at each other in a hate-fuelled perversion of the kind of words Bogart and Bacall characters use to flirt, and the scenes they share are as unforgettably electric as any between Lauren and Humphrey.

By including Detour in this selection of often faultless films, I don’t mean to imply that, as some low-budget classics do, it manages to be miraculously unlimited by its restrictive funding and shooting schedule, and emerges every bit as good as it would have been had it been given a blockbuster budget. A sub-student-film shonkiness is evident in every scene and there are a dozen jarring moments – my favourite of which comes when Roberts is shown ‘playing’ piano and the hands on the keys are so obviously not Neal’s they might as well be black and have an extra three fingers on each hand – that would have been lethally laughable in a lesser film. In Detour, though, the false-seeming sets and awkward acting enhance the eerie unreality of the story they showcase – and this is central to our understanding of the film.

The circumstances of the first death in which Al Roberts is involved – and from which he profits – are unlikely but believable; those of the second, however, are so improbable they are difficult to accept. Watching them we begin to wonder, if we have not already, if Al isn’t telling us porky pies. Crucially, because the film unfolds in flashbacks narrated by Roberts, we are not shown events as we are sure they occurred, but as he tells us they did – and, the more he talks, the more we wonder if Detour’s story isn’t so much a plot as an alibi. It is, more than any other aspect of the film, our doubts about the validity of what we have witnessed that explain why Detour survives in the memory much longer than many more famous and expensive efforts. Days after watching the film, you’ll likely catch yourself still puzzling over whether Al Roberts is a liar, or just the unluckiest lunk in hitchhiking history.

Even if you’re in search of a black and white classic, Detour is easy to overlook. Despite its cult status and critical acclaim, its name still has little of the cache of those of other standouts in its genre. But, runt of the film noir litter though it is, Edgar Ulmer’s brilliantly bleak 68-minute thriller deserves just as much attention as its more robust brothers like The Maltese Falcon or Double Indemnity. Crammed with the kind of cynical 1940s dialogue that must have tasted sour to say, Detour is a dark little gem and, as those idiosyncratic critics at Time pointed out, unquestionably the noirest of noirs.

Brief Encounter (Great Britain, 1945)

A triumph of pristine photography, sensitive direction and, above all, Received Pronunciation, Brief Encounter is the British Casablanca and Noel Coward’s greatest contribution to cinema. Peter Ustinov said Kind Hearts and Coronets is the kind of film that makes you want to read the script. Brief Encounter is the kind of film that makes you want to learn it by heart and perform it as a party piece, like the sixth formers in The History Boys.

The brief encounter in question occurs in a railway station café one Thursday afternoon; Celia Johnson’s perky housewife has grit in her eye, and Trevor Howard’s handsome doctor removes it with his handkerchief. A week later lunch follows, and an afternoon at the cinema, and soon the pair have plunged headlong into a love neither can ignore or allow.

It’s rare for two actors to have such chemistry as Johnson and Howard, and rarer still for them to convince us that their characters, too, have the same connection, but their performances – Johnson with upper lip stiff, lower lip quivering, and huge, liquid eyes expressing every unspoken surge of desire and guilt; Howard at once honourable and adulterous – dovetail exquisitely. We want desperately for them to be together, but know from the first scene they cannot. That throughout the film we allow ourselves, illogically, to believe that love might still find a way is the greatest compliment that can be paid to its storytelling.

There are great films in which one quality – a magnificent central performance, say, or a white-hot script – cover up less successful aspects of the production. In Encounter everything is polished. The use of Rachmaninov’s second piano concerto – lush and emotive without ever over-sweetening the syrup – is a masterstroke. As is the choice to have Johnson’s character narrate the story in one long, warts and all confession to her husband that is heard only inside her own head. The inclusion of secondary characters of no real interest to the lovers is equally ingenious, and never allows us to forget that this is a cameo set in an infinite if mundane world in which, at any moment, a thousand other little dramas are playing out similarly unnoticed.

Perhaps no great film is quite as ripe for parody as Encounter – it takes place in an un-recapturable age of clipped accents, hysterical women and pre-war morals, all which are a little too close to laughable today – but these quirks, which would be full-blown faults in almost any other movie, are advantages here. They combine to deepen our affection for the whole production and reinforce the feeling, unavoidable with every viewing, that romance in the movies really was better when the picture was black and white and the sex unseen. You have to engage with a weepy, just as you do with a horror film. Engage with Brief Encounter, and you may just weep your eyeballs out.