Edgar G. Ulmer: A Filmmaker at the Margins (Weimar and Now: German Cultural Criticism) by Isenberg Noah

Author:Isenberg, Noah [Isenberg, Noah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520235779
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2014-01-09T00:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 24. At the pawn shop: Al (Tom Neal) and Vera (Ann Savage) reveal their extreme codependence on capital in Detour (1945). Courtesy of the British Film Institute Stills Collection.

Ulmer had already explored at great length the strategic use of the fog machine, in the absence of other means, on his other low-budget productions at PRC. As Jimmy Lydon, the lead in Strange Illusion, told me in an interview of 2001, “He knew what you could get without exposing a set you didn’t have; he knew how to make a two-wall set look like a whole room.”35 Or, in Bogdanovich’s more rhapsodic summation, “What he could do with nothing . . . remains an object lesson for those directors, myself included, who complain about tight budgets and schedules” (B 558). When Sue finally announces, in front of a building we assume is her apartment, “Well, here we are,” an echo of the announcement made by the anonymous driver in the film’s prologue, it is clear that another journey has been cut short. Only in this case it’s a trip to the marriage altar that is rebuffed by Sue, who instead has her own plans (“I want to try my luck in Hollywood”), sans Al, mapped out for herself.

Even during a relatively cursory first viewing, and especially on closer inspection, the film is rife with basic flaws, breaks in continuity, and blemishes that were never excised or reshot. Take, for example, the scene of Roberts hitchhiking in the desert. We first see him walking along, on the right side of the road, as American traffic conventions would dictate. But then, in a twenty-second sequence, spliced in without any real recourse to continuity, we have Roberts on the left side, and traffic visibly passing as if the Mojave Desert suddenly belonged to the British Commonwealth. Ulmer presumably didn’t detect this until it was too late to correct, though it might merely be evidence of a director, so some have claimed, who was willing to allow himself the leeway to sneak in a small gag here and there, especially if it would help increase the chances of keeping his budget in the black.36 Ironically, during this same brief sequence, when the inverted negative has Roberts sticking out the wrong thumb, the voice-over, in one of its many sympathy-seeking utterances, addresses the viewer directly regarding the tortured predicament of the hitchhiker: “Ever done any hitchhiking? It’s not much fun, believe me. Oh yeah, I know all about how it’s an education, and how you get to meet a lot of people and all that. But me, from now on, I’ll take my education in college or in P.S. 62, or I’ll send a dollar ninety-eight in stamps for ten easy lessons.” As if synchronized with the image, the offscreen voice ends its discourse on hitchhiking at the precise moment that Roberts resumes his act of thumbing a ride in the proper direction.

A far less detectable imperfection comes later, when Al first discovers Vera hitchhiking in front of a gas station.

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