(1910-1997)
Detour, the spare, delirious, haunting film noir released by the penurious studio PRC in 1945, has come to be regarded as one of the most remarkable achievements of golden age Hollywood, the ultimate triumph of no-budget filmmaking and subversive, against-all-odds artistry. Shot in less than a week, mostly on cheap posterboard sets no larger than a closet, with worn-out technical equipment and a cast of second-raters and unknowns, Detour told the story of a hapless man’s battering by the heavy hand of Fate, the waking-nightmare misadventure of a drifting loser who meets the wrong femme fatale on a desert highway. This dark, claustrophobic movie of murder, madness, and bad breaks ranks among the handful of quintessential classic noir films, and as the greatest work—along with The Black Cat (1934)—of the cult director Edgar Ulmer. Through the years, reams of paper have been devoted to Detour: writers have examined nearly every aspect of its existence, including its furiously compact storytelling, sordid characters, downbeat tone, dreamlike logic, and spookily deterministic philosophy. The amount of ink given to the film’s screenwriter and story source, Martin M. Goldsmith, however, could easily fit into a femme fatale’s purse with room left over for a smoking .38 and a spare telephone cord.
Ulmer’s contribution to the ultimate quality of the film is not in question, but the focus on Ulmer as “auteur” of the film in discussions of Detour is more a result of narrow-mindedness and ignorance among film buffs and critics than a true indication of the film’s actual authorship. The shunning of Detour’s screenwriter is all the more short-sighted because Goldsmith adapted his own published novel for the screen—a circumstance that was rare and generally considered undesirable by the studios—and thus was able to bring an uninterrupted continuity of vision from the original text to the cinematic version. More than this, Goldsmith’s 1938 pulp novel, though little known, can be seen to have been a strong and very early progenitor of the noir vision in popular culture, a full-blown expression of theme, motifs, settings, and character types that would not have their vogue in the American cinema until the mid-1940s. “Here you’ll find no happy ending,” wrote the New York Times reviewer of the topic, “nothing but defeat and frustration and complex confusion of double crossing among a set of characters who are as unsavory a lot of scum as ever drifted into the pages of a latter-day thriller.”
Goldsmith, whose first novel, Double Jeopardy (1938), was praised for its highly suspenseful story line and excellent characterization, took many of the elements in his second topic, Detour, from actual experience. Earlier, the young New York writer, unemployed and adrift on account of the Great Depression, wanted to try his luck in California. Goldsmith owned an aged sedan but didn’t have enough cash for gas and food to make the cross-country drive. To cover his expenses, he solicited a group of paying passengers to ride with him, mostly out-of-work Broadway actors hoping for jobs in Hollywood. The trip would prove highly dramatic and give Goldsmith the impetus for the novel published by Macaulay in 1938. The characters in Detour, he would later say, had their real-life counterparts in the front and back seats of his old Buick.
More expansive than the film version and more experimental in structure, Goldsmith’s Detour included two separate first-person narratives: that of Alex, a big-band musician hitchhiking west to find the fiancee who took off for Hollywood days before their wedding; and Sue, the erratic girlfriend herself, gone to seek stardom but finding mostly disappointment and depravity. Frustrating the conventional reader’s expectations, Sue and Alex never meet again. Goldsmith, who had spent several frustrating years in the movie colony by the time he wrote Detour, painted Hollywood as a sordid place populated exclusively by pimps and lechers and part-time hookers, a tangy element of the topic that the movie version ignored. Also left out of the film, to avoid censorship, were some of the other lurid ingredients in the nihilistic novel: loose women, attempted suicide, and marijuana.
At the time of the film’s release, Goldsmith’s contribution was hardly slighted. PRC’s publicity kit for Detour highlighted Goldsmith’s contribution as his motion picture debut: “For one week he read every good script he could get hold of. Then he started the screenplay on Detour. Without changing the theme of his novel or his characters, he turned in such an excellent script that PRC immediately signed him to a contract. Further, a Hollywood agent offered PRC $70,000 for the completed script!” The same publicity pages misspelled Ulmer’s name as “Edgar Elmer.” Goldsmith went on to a bumpy career in movies and television, providing the story lines for other notable noir films, including The Narrow Margin (1951) and Hell’s Island (1955). His later published work included Shadow at Noon (1943), a dreamy, speculative novel about a devastating air attack on New York City.
Works
- Detour (1938);
- Double Jeopardy (1938);
- Shadow at Noon (1943)
