Detour
1945 · Crime · Drama · Film-Noir
Detour (1945), Edgar G. Ulmer's Poverty Row noir and the first B picture in the National Film Registry. Watch the full movie free, with no account needed.
Al Roberts hitchhikes west to meet his girl, takes a ride from the wrong man, and spends the rest of the film explaining to nobody in particular how none of it was his fault. Tom Neal narrates. Ann Savage turns up around the halfway mark and the temperature drops about twenty degrees.
Ulmer made it at PRC, the cheapest studio on Poverty Row. He later claimed six shooting days; the surviving paperwork says fourteen camera days and a budget closer to six figures, and nobody has ever settled it. It was made fast by a man given no time to be careful.
The Library of Congress took it into the National Film Registry in 1992, the first B movie to get there.
Free to watch via internet-archive.
More like this: Free film noir, Free thrillers and suspense films, Free mystery and crime films.