silver nitrate notes

Detour and the Six Days That Were Fourteen

6 oct 2026

In August, in the post on People on Sunday, I wrote that Edgar G. Ulmer (1904-1972) shot Detour (1945) in six days. I should not have put it so flatly. Six days is the number Ulmer gave in an interview in 1972, the year he died, and it is the number nearly everyone has repeated since. The paperwork disagrees. In a 2004 documentary, his daughter Arianne held up the title page of the shooting script, which reads: "June 14, 1945-June 29. Camera days 14."

Ann Savage (1921-2008) remembered it differently again. She said the film took four six-day weeks, with another four days in the desert at Lancaster, California. Her contract with Producers Releasing Corporation had been written for three six-day weeks. The truth lies somewhere in that arithmetic, and it is not six days.

The cost has been misremembered in the same direction. The figure that circulated for decades was $20,000. Noah Isenberg, researching his book on the film, found that the final cost was nearer $100,000. That is still nothing, and it is still Poverty Row, and the picture runs a lean 68 minutes. But it is a different sort of nothing. A hundred thousand dollars buys a plan.

What the plan looks like on screen is a series of decisions made because there was no money to make any others. With reshoots out of the question, Ulmer put storytelling ahead of continuity. For some of the hitchhiking scenes he flipped the negative, so that Al Roberts's journey west would read right to left across the screen, and the price was that the cars appear to drive on the wrong side of the road and the hitchhiker climbs in through the driver's door. The convertible, a 1941 Lincoln Continental, is reportedly Ulmer's own, because he could not afford another. Benjamin H. Kline (1894-1974) photographed all of it, and the shadows do work the sets could not.

The ending is the other bargain. The Production Code did not let a murderer walk away, so Ulmer satisfied it with a police car that picks Al up at the very end of the picture, after he has told us for an hour that it is coming. It is the least convincing arrest in Hollywood and it was all the censors needed.

The part of the legend I like least is the one in which Detour was buried on release and rescued later. The trade paper Motion Picture Herald rated it only "fair" in November 1945, but its reviewer, Mandel Herbstman, singled out the structure and called it an "adroit, albeit unpretentious production." In May 1946 it played the 2,200-seat Orpheum in downtown Los Angeles, on a bill with a live stage show that featured the Slim Gaillard Trio and the Buddy Rich Orchestra. It went to television in the early 1950s, and by the 1980s the revival houses had found it. Savage spent two decades afterwards introducing it in person. The Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry in 1992, and the Academy Film Archive's 4K restoration was shown at the TCM festival in Los Angeles in April 2018.

I care about the correction because the six-day story makes Detour a stunt, a film so poor it fell into greatness. Fourteen camera days, a script cut down hard from a longer shoot, a full soundtrack with ambient backgrounds and a score by Leo Erdody that gives Vera a sympathetic theme, all of that makes it a film by someone who knew exactly what he was doing with very little. That is the better story and, as far as the record goes, the true one.

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sources
[1] Isenberg, Noah. Edgar G. Ulmer: A Filmmaker at the Margins. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014.
[2] Isenberg, Noah. Detour. BFI Film Classics. London: British Film Institute, 2008.
[3] Herbstman, Mandel. Review of Detour. Motion Picture Herald, November 1945.
[4] "National Film Registry: complete listing." Library of Congress, 1992 selections.