Rockstar Newswire

Detour (1945; Dir. Edgar G. Ulmer)

(Embedded via archive.org)

Over the coming months, you’ll be seeing and hearing a lot from us about the dark and gritty days of Los Angeles in 1947 – thanks to our forthcoming detective crime thriller inspired in great part by the storied era of cinema known as film noir. Femme fatales, hardboiled detectives, gritty desperation, tortured internal monologues, and fatal betrayals around every corner – not to mention, that unmistakably stark and contrasty lighting characteristic of noir.

Via our Rockstar Recommends series here at the Newswire, we’ll be helping you get primed for the experience with some of our personal favorites from the genre. While there are of course the obvious classics like “The Maltese Falcon”, “Double Indemnity”, “The Big Sleep” and every other Chandler, Hammett and Cain adaptation new and old – we’ll be digging just a bit deeper to give you a few that may be overlooked, some gems that specifically are set in the city of angels showing the underside of L.A., and some great ‘neo-noir’ films of more recent years.

To start things off, we present a film regarded by many noir fans as an all-time great – and thankfully now in the public domain and watchable here in its entirety: 1945’s “Detour”. Starring Tom Neal as a desperate man hitchhiking from New York to Los Angeles to be with his fiancée, and Ann Savage as perhaps one of the most conniving, manipulative and altogether evil femme fatales in the history of cinema – when that downward spiral starts, it doesn’t stop until the final gut wrenching conclusion.

Watch it above in its entirety or at Archive.org’s site: http://www.archive.org/details/Detour