Detour is a 1945 American independent[2][3] film noir directed by Edgar G. Ulmer, and starring Tom Neal and Ann Savage.

[6] In 1992, Detour was selected for the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

After his girlfriend Sue Harvey, the nightclub's lead singer, quits her job and leaves New York to seek fame in Hollywood, Al becomes depressed.

In Arizona, bookie Charles Haskell Jr. gives Al a ride in his convertible and tells him that he is in luck; for he is driving to Los Angeles to place a bet on a horse.

[12] While popular belief long held that Detour was shot for about $20,000,[13] Noah Isenberg, in conducting research for his book on the film, discovered that the production's final cost was closer to $100,000.

Billy Halop was tested for the role of Al Roberts, was selected for the part, but was replaced by Tom Neal just three days before filming began.

[12] The final picture was tightly cut down from a much longer shooting script, which had been shot with more extended dialogue sequences that are not in the released print.

Erdody took extra pains to underscore Vera's introduction with a sympathetic theme, giving the character a light musical shading in contrast to her razor-sharp dialogue and its ferocious delivery by Savage.

Clearly, Detour was a higher priority to PRC, and the release was well promoted in theaters with a full array of color print support, including six-sheet posters, standees, hand drawn portraits of the actors, and a jukebox tie-in record with Bing Crosby singing "I Can't Believe That You're in Love with Me" (1926).

[16] The Motion Picture Production Code did not allow murderers to get away with their crimes, so Ulmer satisfied the censors by having Al picked up by a police car at the very end of the film after foreseeing his arrest in the earlier narration.

[citation needed] Detour was generally well received on its initial release, with positive reviews in the Los Angeles Times, The Hollywood Reporter, Variety in other major newspapers and trade publications.

For example, in downtown Los Angeles in May 1946, it played at the 2,200-seat Orpheum in combination with a live stage show featuring the hit Slim Gaillard Trio and the Buddy Rich Orchestra.

[17] Shortly after the film's release in November 1945, Mandel Herbstman, the reviewer for the trade journal Motion Picture Herald, rated the production as only "fair".

"Venturing far from the familiar melodramatic pattern", he wrote, "director Edgar G. Ulmer has turned out an adroit, albeit unpretentious production about a man who stumbles into a series of circumstances which seals his doom.

[19] More current reviewers contrast the technical shoddiness of the film with its successful atmospherics as film critic Roger Ebert wrote in his essay for The Great Movies, "This movie from Hollywood's poverty row, shot in six days, filled with technical errors and ham-handed narrative, starring a man who can only pout and a woman who can only sneer, should have faded from sight soon after it was released in 1945.

"[20] Sight and Sound reviewer Philip Kemp later wrote, "Using unknown actors and filming with no more than three minimal sets, a sole exterior (a used-car lot) to represent Los Angeles, a few stock shots and some shaky back-projection, Ulmer conjures up a black, paranoid vision, totally untainted by glamour, of shabby characters trapped in a spiral of irrational guilt.

Picked up on a trip out west by a man (Tom Neal) fleeing from a death scene, she instantly and spectacularly gets on his and the audience's nerves.

When she's not playing the domestic harridan ("Stop makin’ noises like a husband"), she's threatening to send him to the gas chamber ("sniffin' that perfume Arizona hands out free to murderers").