Detour

“One of the most daring and thoroughly perverse works of art ever to come out of Hollywood.” – Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader

“It lives on, haunting and creepy, an embodiment of the guilty soul of film noir. No one who has seen it has easily forgotten it.” – Roger Ebert, Great Movies

From the gutters of Poverty Row came a movie that, perhaps more than any other, epitomizes the dark fatalism at the heart of film noir. As he hitchhikes his way from New York to Los Angeles, a down-on-his-luck nightclub pianist (Tom Neal) finds himself with a dead body on his hands and nowhere to run - a waking nightmare that goes from bad to worse when he picks up the most vicious femme fatale in cinema history, Anne Savage’s snarling, monstrously conniving drifter Vera. Working with no-name stars on a bargain-basement budget, B auteur Edgar G. Ulmer turned threadbare production values and seedy low-rent atmosphere into indelible pulp poetry. Long available only in substandard public domain prints, Detour haunts anew in its first major restoration. 4K restoration

The screening will be introduced by Michael Patrick Gillespie, a Professor of English at Florida International University, who will also lead a post-screening Q&A. His latest book, Film Appreciation through Genres, was published in January.

In addition to our new releases, be sure to join us for these special limited, or one-time-only, screenings.

Check out the rest of our Special Presentations program!