4.1 The Thumb-Route
Detour (1945), far and away the most acclaimed and enduring of all 179 feature films produced at PRC between 1939 and 1947, and certainly the only one to make it into the National Library of Congress’s Film Registry, was produced (including reshoots) over a period of around fourteen days and on a relatively lavish budget of $117,000 (around $1,640,000 adjusted). Exaggerations, fostered and encouraged by Ulmer himself, persist about the film’s production, that it cost $30,000 ($420,000 adjusted) and/or that it was shot in six days. Though much of the mythos of this iconic production rides on these well-intentioned distortions, the actual verifiable statistics of Detour’s production on their own are truly impressive. As Noah Isenberg notes in his excellent biography of Ulmer, one scene in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944), the “death-house” sequence that was actually cut from the final release of the picture itself, “reportedly cost more than all of Detour.”
- Christopher Small, "The Thumb-Route: Dispatches from Poverty Row" - Link
Wartime Production and the Rise of Film Noir as Oppositional Film-making
The rise of film noir was connected with the destabilization of this smoothly running system, initially by the exigencies of wartime production. Robert Sklar argues that not only did material restrictions imposed on the film industry - a 25% reduction in the allocation of raw film stock to studios came into force in 1943, together with restrictions on the amount that could be spent on set design and decor - result in a general shift towards black and white thrillers that could be produced quite cheaply, but also promoted an ideological shift that embraced more 'difficult' and controversial issues (Sklar, 1978, pp. 525-3). As Paul Kerr argues, these constraints spurred the production of film noirs starting with 'B' features whose personnel were adept at disguising indifferent or minimal sets through shooting from unusual angles or with low-level lighting. Noir's striking contrast of light and shade partly stemmed from the night-for-night shooting of exterior scenes practised by the 'B' units which worked through he night after the 'A' units had gone home (Kerr, 1996, pp. 107-27). Although these conditions of production imposed severe restrictions of time and money, they offered a marked degree of creative freedom, subject to very litter intervention from the front office, provided they were on time and within budget (Flynn and McCarthy, 1975, pp. 13-43). Some talented directors relished the scope this allowed them, notably Edgar Ulmer, who deliberately chose to work in these conditions, often acting as his own producer (Meisel, 1975, pp. 147-52). Ulmer had worked as a set designer for both Max Reinhardt and F.W. Murnau and as an art director for MGM. He directed a number of low-budget films in the 1930s before moving to Producers Releasing Corporation in 1942. PRC, formed in 1940, was one rung down from Republic and Monogram, producing the same mixture of comedies, musicals, westerns and crime thrillers. Ulmer made a number of films at PRC, including the noirish Strange Illusion (1945), a rather static murder mystery, but Detour (1945), shot in six days, has now assumed legendary status as one of noir's masterpieces.
. . . the minimalism of the setting (in Detour) invests (the final scene) with almost overwhelming force as Al intones grimly: 'No matter what you do, no matter where you turn, Fate sticks out its foot to trip you.' Detour finds a highly expressive visual register that compensates for its 'deficiencies' in conventional production values and its short running time, 68 minutes. Its grim, 'unAmerican' fatalism was characteristic of the emerging cycle of film noir that, Kerr suggests, used the exigencies of wartime production to develop an oppositional mode of film-making which challenges mainstream practices.
- Andrew Spicer, Film Noir pgs. 30-31
Comments
Post a Comment