In 1992, Edgar G. Ulmer's 1945 Detour became the first example of sub-B moviemaking to win a place on the Library of Congress' Nation Film Registry; tomorrow it becomes the first of its kind to win a spot in the Charles Theatre's Saturday revival series.
Ulmer, a gifted German craftsman, fled the Nazis in the early '30s. He created one big-studio horror classic (The Black Cat) and several fondly remembered Yiddish films (including The Light Ahead) before becoming an expert in no-budget genre movies on Hollywood's "Poverty Row."
Detour is essence-of-noir: a piano player (Tom Neal) hitches cross-country to be with his true love. A driver picks him up in Arizona and dies of a heart attack. Neal gives a ride to a furious dame (Ann Savage) who knows the deceased - and once they arrive in Los Angeles, she cooks up a plan to defraud the dead man's dying dad.
To Roger Ebert and other fans, the scrappy narrative and filmmaking and pounded-out, one-note characterizations are true to "a nightmare psychology"; in this interpretation, Neal, who narrates, "is not telling a story, but scurrying through the raw materials, assembling an alibi."
The less analytical may just strap themselves in for a 69-minute ride and enjoy it as camp, complete with lines like "[Money is] just some paper with a lot of germs on it." It unspools at the Charles at noon; admission is $5.
'Juvenile Justice'
On Tuesday, June 25, the Heritage Cinema House will serve as host for a screening and discussion program, Juvenile Justice, containing three short films that deplore conditions facing convicted youths across the country.
These brief nonfiction films include the Youth Law Center's Out of Control, culled from hundreds of videos of the South Dakota Training School; Ashley Hunt's New Orleans Jazz Funeral, chronicling a parent's protest against Louisiana's juvenile prisons; and Mark Landsman's Books Not Bars, a centerpiece of the campaign of the same name to end the over-sentencing of youth.
The evening starts at 6:30 p.m. at 19-21 E. North Ave. (between Charles and St. Paul).
'The Lost Weekend'
The Billy Wilder retrospective continues at the Johns Hopkins medical campus on Wednesday, June 26, with his landmark film about alcoholism, The Lost Weekend. It's a rare opportunity to see and hear Ray Milland (in his Oscar-winning role) come at you from the big screen with boozy declarations such as, "Most men lead lives of quiet desperation. I can't take quiet desperation!"
The film (which also won Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director) begins at 7:15 p.m. at the Johns Hopkins Hospital Preclinical Teaching Building, Wolfe and E. Monument streets. Admission is free.