Maybe that’s why Detour insinuates itself so well—why audiences respond so strongly. The jumps and inconsistencies of the narrative are nightmare psychology; Al’s not telling a story, but scurrying through the raw materials, assembling an alibi. Consider the sequence where Al buries Haskell’s body and takes his identity. Immediately after, Al checks into a motel, goes to sleep, and dreams of the very same events: It’s a flashback side-by-side with the events it flashes back to, as if his dream mind is doing a quick rewrite.
Tom Neal makes Al flaccid, passive, and self-pitying. That’s perfect for the material. (In real life, Neal was as unlucky as Al; he was convicted of manslaughter in the death of his third wife.) Ann Savage’s work is extraordinary: There is not a single fleeting shred of tenderness or humanity in her performance as Vera, as she snaps out her pulp dialogue (What’d you do—kiss him with a wrench?). These are two pure types: the submissive man and the female hellion.
The movie’s low budget is obvious. During one early scene, Ulmer uses thick fog to substitute for New York streets. He shoots as many scenes as possible in the front seats of cars, with shabby rear-projection (the only meal Al and Vera have together is in a drive-in). For a flashback, he simply zooms in on Neal’s face, cuts the lights in the background, and shines a light in his eyes.
Sometimes you can see him stretching to make ends meet. When Al calls long distance to Sue, for example, Ulmer pads his running time by editing in stock footage of telephone wires and switchboard operators, but can’t spring for any footage of Sue actually speaking into the phone (Al does all the talking, and then Ulmer cuts to her lamely holding the receiver to her ear).
And it’s strange that the first vehicles to give lifts to the hitchhiking Al seem to have right-hand drives. He gets in on what would be the American driver’s side, and the cars drive off on the wrong side of the road. Was the movie shot in England? Not at all. My guess is that the negative was flipped. Ulmer possibly shot the scenes with the cars going from left to right, then reflected that for a journey from the East to the West Coasts, right to left would be more conventional film grammar. Placing style above common sense is completely consistent with Ulmer’s approach throughout the film.
Do these limitations and stylistic transgressions hurt the film? No. They are the film. Detour is an example of material finding the appropriate form. Two bottom feeders from the swamps of pulp swim through the murk of low-budget noir and are caught gasping in Ulmer’s net. They deserve each other. At the end, Al is still complaining: “Fate, for some mysterious force, can put the finger on you or me, for no good reason at all.” Oh, it has a reason.
Double Indemnity
NO MPAA RATING, 107 m., 1944
Fred MacMurray (Walter Neff), Barbara Stanwyck (Phyllis Dietrichson), Edward G. Robinson (Barton Keyes). Directed by Billy Wilder and produced by Joseph Sistrom. Screenplay by Wilder and Raymond Chandler, based on the novel by James M. Cain.
“No, I never loved you Walter—not you or anybody else. I’m rotten to the heart. I used you, just as you said. That’s all you ever meant to me. Until a minute ago, when I couldn’t fire that second shot.”
Is she kidding? Walter thinks so: “Sorry, baby. I’m not buying.” The puzzle of Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity, the enigma that keeps it new, is what these two people really think of each other. They strut through the routine of a noir murder plot, with the tough talk and the cold sex play. But they never seem to really like each other all that much, and they don’t seem that crazy about the money, either. What are they after?
Walter (Fred MacMurray) is Walter Neff (“two f’s—like in Philadelphia”). He’s an insurance salesman, successful but bored. The woman is Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck), a lazy blonde who met her current husband by nursing his wife—to death, according to her stepdaughter. Neff pays a call one day to renew her husband’s automobile insurance. He’s not at home, but she is, wrapped in a towel and standing at the top of a staircase. “I wanted to see her again,” Neff tells us. “Close, and without that silly staircase between us.”
The story was written in the 1930s by James M. Cain, the hard-boiled author of The Postman Always Rings Twice. A Postman screenplay kicked around Hollywood, but the Hays Office nixed it for “hardening audience attitudes toward crime.” By 1944, Wilder thought he could film it. Cain wasn’t available, so he hired Raymond Chandler to do the screenplay. Chandler, whose novel The Big Sleep Wilder loved, turned up drunk, smoked a smelly pipe, and didn’t know anything about screenplay construction, but he could put a nasty spin on dialogue.
Together they eliminated Cain’s complicated endgame and deepened the relationship between Neff and Keyes (Edward G. Robinson), the claims manager at the insurance company. They told the movie in flashback, narrated by Neff, who arrives at his office late at night, dripping blood, and recites into a Dictaphone. The voice-over worked so well that Wilder used it again in Sunset Boulevard (1950), which was narrated by a character who is already dead the first time he speaks. No problem; Double Indemnity originally ended with Neff in the gas chamber, but that scene was cut because an earlier one turned out to be the perfect way to close the film.
To describe the story is to miss the nuances that make it tantalizing. Phyllis wants Walter to sell her husband a $50,000 double indemnity policy, and then arrange the husband’s “accidental” death. Walter is willing, ostensibly because he’s fallen under her sexual spell. They perform a clever substitution. The husband, on crutches with a broken leg, is choked to death before a train ride. Taking his place, Neff gets on the train and jumps off. They leave the husband’s body on the tracks. Perfect. But later that night, going to the drugstore to establish an alibi, Neff remembers, “I couldn’t hear my own footsteps. It was the walk of a dead man.”
A clever crime. But why did they do it? Phyllis was bored and her husband had lost a lot of money in the oil business, so she had a motive. But it’s as if the idea of murder materialized only because Neff did—right there in her living room, talking about insurance. On their third meeting, after a lot of aggressive wordplay, they agree to kill the husband and collect the money. I guess they also make love; in 1944 movies you can’t be sure, but if they do, it’s only the once.
Why? Is Neff blinded by lust and greed? That’s the traditional reading of the film: weak man, strong woman. But he’s aloof, cold, hard, terse. He always calls her “baby,” as if she’s a brand, not a woman. His eyes are guarded and his posture reserved. He’s not moonstruck. And Phyllis? Cold, too. But later in the film she says she cares more about “them” than about the money. We can believe the husband died for money if they both seem driven by greed, but they’re not. We can believe he died because of their passion, but it seems more like a pretense, and fades away after the murder.
Standing back from the film and what it expects us to think, I see them engaged not in romance or theft, but in behavior. They’re intoxicated by their personal styles. Styles learned in the movies, and from radio and the detective magazines. It’s as if they were invented by Ben Hecht through his crime dialogue. Walter and Phyllis are pulp characters with little psychological depth, and that’s the way Billy Wilder wants it. His best films are sardonic comedies, and in this one, Phyllis and Walter play a bad joke on themselves.