Hacker Cinema
Detour
1945 · Film · 68 min
Directed by Edgar G. Ulmer
The life of Al Roberts, a pianist in a New York nightclub, turns into a nightmare when he decides to hitchhike to Los Angeles to visit his girlfriend.
2 positive1 neutralfrom 3 commenters
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3 comments on Hacker News
Thats the most part - and to be honest, in my opinion, most of the best Film Noir was probably produced by Poverty Row - even Poverty Row's output post 1939 became much more relevant for modern audiences - like on average even a Poverty Row picture in the post war era had better production values (on whole) than an A picture from a major in 1933 - simply because the state of the art had moved so dramatically forward.
Incidentally one of my favorite Noir's is He Walked by Night featuring a very very young Jack Webb. I'll check out Detour though.
Noir: my favorite genre. Here's some color noirs I don't think have lost anything for not being in B&W: Leave Her to Heaven; Black Widow (1954); Blood Simple; Le Samouraï; Chinatown; Body Heat; Femme Fatale (2002); The Last Seduction; Thief (1981); Basic Instinct; After Dark, My Sweet.
My favorite noir however is indeed B&W: Detour (1945). To me it is the quintessential noir film.
It's interesting how in filmed stories there are the 2 main types - movie and tv series, where the shorter movie seems the more serious/central/important/prestigious etc form, the opposite of the situation with short story/novella vs novel. That's just from the historical accident of people seeing movies in cinemas, and series on TV, I guess.
70min movies can work fine - the 68 min Detour (1945), one of the first noirs, doesn't seem too short at all. Rick and Morty at 22 or so minutes does more than most 1 hour tv shows - an hour at that pace might be too much. Also, it seems that in the first decades or 50 years of cinema, plenty of 10 and 70 minute stories were shown, but recently you get the 'main feature' and nothing else.