I followed up my viewing of Egar G. Ulmer's Detour with Noah Isenberg's BFI Film Classics volume on it, Detour (2008). It is an informative companion to the film. The first section, "An Unlikely Story" traces the beginnings of the film from a 1939 pulp novel by Martin Goldsmith who sold his rights to Producers Releasing Corporation (PRC) aka "Pretty Rotten Crap" according to Isenberg. The basic of casting and assembling the crew are recounted. Isenberg points out that in 1992 it was included in the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress. In the following section, he continues the story of production and recounts the story in "Pulp Fictions." In the section called "In Search of Meaning" he looks at three interesting critical theories concerning the film: the film as a male fantasy, the film as told from the point of view of an unreliable narrator, and the film as as an allegory of exile. The final section "Detour Redux" is fascinating as well as Isenbeg discusses several remakes or films based on the original including, oddly enough, an updated re-make from Ullmer himself called The Loser (1969). He suggests that the Coens brother's film The Man Who Wasn't There and David Lynch's Lost Highway were based on Detour. It is a well-researched and intriguing study of an American film noir classic.
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