Detour by Noah Isenberg (review)

Just before the double bill program began to wane in the mid-1940s, Producers Releasing Corporation joined the ranks of Monogram and Republic as an independent B-film studio operating on Poverty Row. From 1940-1946, PRC supplied low-budget genre films including westerns, crime films, and melodramas to fill out the double bill program. Even among the Poverty Row studios, PRC was regarded as the cheapest of the cheap, a view reflected in contemporary nicknames for the company, such as “Pretty Rotten Crap.” Low production values were a result of the company’s thriftiness. Films were rarely budgeted at over $100,000 and shooting schedules often lasted little longer than a week. As a result, PRC films in general received little coverage in contemporary trade journals and popular press. Nevertheless, PRC films have drawn retrospective fan appreciation and scholarly analysis. This is particularly the case for those films directed by Viennese immigré Edgar G. Ulmer, the self-described “Frank Capra of PRC.” Ulmer was given liberal artistic control over the 11 features he directed at PRC but remained a minor figure in Hollywood during his four years at the B studio. Only decades later did auteur critics at Cahiers du cinémaand, later, Andrew Sarris champion Ulmer’s artistic economy, inaugurating a newfound appreciation for his films, above all 1945’s Detour.

Noah Isenberg’s book for the BFI series explores the best known and arguably most loved of Ulmer’s films at PRC, the gritty and lean Detour(1945), which, as Isenberg details, has enjoyed an exceptional afterlife in film retrospectives and now in DVD release. Within the book’s slim 100 pages, Isenberg carefully explores the film’s formal and stylistic properties, history of production, and myriad reception contexts, drawing on an extensive range of secondary sources. In addition, Isenberg deftly employs archival and primary sources, including first-hand accounts from actress Ann Savage. Isenberg positions Ulmer as Detour’s auteur and frames the director as a craftsman who failed to receive the artistic recognition he sought and deserved. In the final analysis, Isenberg attributes Detour’s longstanding appeal to Ulmer’s ability to thrive within the financial constraints imposed on him at PRC. Indeed, Isenberg’s Detoursuggests that the director not only expressed his aesthetic know-how in the making of Detourbut couched his personal and professional frustrations with Hollywood in the narrative itself.

The first half of the book is devoted to contextualizing Detour’s production, highlighting Ulmer’s manipulation of the film’s source material, Martin Goldsmith’s 1939 pulp novel, Detour, as well as the director’s cost-saving strategies. The first chapter, also the book’s introduction, presents a focused overview of Detour’s production and a summary of Ulmer’s film career in Germany and in Hollywood. In the second chapter, Isenberg compares Goldsmith’s novel with the film, elucidating the changes that were made, presumably by Ulmer and PRC producer Martin Mooney, in adapting the novel to a 70-minute, $117,000 film. Isenberg notes that Ulmer condensed characters and eliminated the novel’s chapter-by-chapter shifts in narration. This resulted in the viewer’s unwavering alignment with the Al Roberts character through the subjective voice-over narration. Political and institutional factors also impinged on the film’s final form: Isenberg observes that Ulmer’s adaptation minimized the significantly Jewish milieu of the novel’s setting. Ulmer was also unable to replicate the novel’s sexually explicit scenes, though he refused to whitewash Vera’s character despite urging by the Production Code Administration. Despite many changes by Ulmer, Isenberg is careful to attribute the “snappy, hard-boiled dialogue” to Goldsmith’s novel. In chapter 3, Isenberg describes Ulmer’s working methods and cost-saving techniques such as his aversion to retakes and the use of fog to both strengthen mood and obscure cheap sets. Notably, Isenberg observes that consequences of this fly-by-night mode of production, like discontinuities in mise-en-scene and mismatched editing, often lent the film an oneiric quality that...