“‘No matter what you do, no matter where you turn, Fate sticks out its foot to trip you.' So cries Tom Neal, condemned to wander the dingy roads of a faceless America, in Detour, one of the masterworks of Edgar G. Ulmer....
“Detour... employs only three sets, plus a car driving interminably in front of an unceasing back-projection machine. The story is beneath trash: a musician is hitchhiking out to California to marry his girl, only to become inextricably entangled in a web of circumstance and fate. Detour is an exercise in sustained perversity, a consistent demonstration of the absence of free will. Tom Neal carries his five o'clock shadow with him as he worms his way from nightclub to beanery to barren motel room (Ulmer's Los Angeles consists of a single used-car lot), writhing desperately to free himself, only to ensnare himself still further. It is not even a question of fatalism any longer - the mechanisms of disaster have long overwhelmed any of our own intimations of mortality. Ann Savage gives a performance that defies conventional credibility: ugly, unpleasant, a shrill, unmodulated embodiment of Yeats's dictum that only the unexplained is irresistible.
“Detour follows the route of mad poetic tragedy. Its inevitability reminds one of F.W. Murnau's Tabu (1931): the lighting and the camera serve as instruments of the inexorable progression to disaster, tracking shots that signal the subtle passage from a state of passion to a state of pain, creating images that exist so strongly on the screen that each subsequent shot literally forces the previous one from its place on the screen.” --Myron Meisel, in “Kings of the Bs”