Film Noir 2019
Screening Dates
  • August 1, 2019 7:00
  • August 2, 2019 8:35
  • August 3, 2019 4:30
  • August 11, 2019 8:40
New Restoration

“A new and meticulous restoration … Detour is one of the few movies that can rightly be called Kafkaesque.”

Richard Brody, The New Yorker

Available for decades only in substandard public domain copies, Edgar G. Ulmer’s legendary no-budget noir, often cited as the greatest B‑movie ever made, has received its first major restoration! The film’s dark, doom-laden plot, told in flashbacks, has New York nightclub pianist Roberts (Tom Neal) hitchhiking to Hollywood in order to join his fiancée. Accepting a ride from amiable Haskell (Edmund MacDonald), our hapless hero soon discovers that fate—and a vicious femme fatale named Vera (Ann Savage)—has sent him on a deadly detour. Ulmer’s delirious picture, made quickly for Poverty Row studio PRC, truly is a triumph of inspiration over limited resources.

“Detour puts the noir in film noir … A film that must be seen to be (dis-)believed.”

James Monaco, The Movie Guide

“An embodiment of the guilty soul of film noir. No one who has seen it has easily forgotten it.”

Roger Ebert