It’s almost “un-American” to be honest about the nightmare side of life when you cannot “walk on the sunny side of the street” and operate under all those facile Americanisms about “I’ve got the world on a string…” in all the songs and movie lines.
Film noir is supposed to be an antidote to this “false sunniness” and there’s one classic example that exemplifies this undiscussable nightmare side of life, namely, Detour (1945), directed by Edgar Ulmer.
Edgar Georg Ulmer was a Jewish–Moravian, Austrian–American film director who mainly worked on Hollywood B movies and other low-budget productions, eventually earning the epithet “The King of PRC,” due to his extremely prolific output on the said Poverty Row studio.
Wikipedia
As a refugee/expat, he understood that life isn’t always “a bowl of cherries” and set out to show this in his films.
In this underrated Ulmer masterpiece, Tom Neal plays a musician, Al Roberts, who gets into a labyrinthian mess via bad luck and some mindless impulsiveness combined. Detour is a kind of “road movie” in hell. With life and the world a kind of hellish school, the protagonist Al Roberts captures the enforced money-madness in everything:
“Money. You know what that is, the stuff you never have enough of. Little green things with George Washington’s picture that men slave for, commit crimes for, die for. It’s the stuff that has caused more trouble in the world than anything else we ever invented, simply because there’s too little of it.”
To this nightmarishness, there’s to be added the irrationality of fate or destiny or karma or luck:
“That’s life. Whichever way you turn, Fate sticks out a foot to trip you.”
— Al Roberts, Detour
He adds:
“But one thing I don’t have to wonder about, I know. Someday a car will stop to pick me up that I never thumbed. Yes. Fate, or some mysterious force, can put the finger on you or me for no good reason at all.”
[as narrator] “Until then I had done things my way, but from then on something stepped in and shunted me off to a different destination than the one I’d picked for myself.”
Vera comments:
“Life’s like a ball game. You gotta take a swing at whatever comes along before you find it’s the ninth inning.”
Hitchhiking, say, is often hellish and not romantic and usually not a Jack Kerouac On the Road poetic or rhapsodic adventure at all, as Al Roberts explains:
“Ever done any hitchhiking? It’s not much fun, believe me. Oh yeah, I know all about how it’s an education, and how you get to meet a lot of people, and all that. But me, from now on I’ll take my education in college, or in PS-62, or I’ll send $1.98 in stamps for ten easy lessons.”
Nightclubs too are not always heavenly escapes:
[voiceover] “It wasn’t much of a club, really. You know the kind. A joint where you could have a sandwich and a few drinks and run interference for your girl on the dance floor.”
— Al Roberts, Detour
Women might not be the salvation you were told to expect in songs like “Some Enchanted Evening” from South Pacific.
“Vera was just as rotten in the morning as she’d been the night before.”
— Al Roberts, Detour
There’s a genre of American films called “lowlife stories” such as The Hustler with Paul Newman.
Ulmer’s Detour is not exactly a “lowlife movie” but rather an undiscussed dark side to life movie, nor is it “stylishly pessimistic” (like the French “poetical pessimism” movies) but rather a truth-telling exercise that shows stability and permanence and happiness as “living” on thin ice. American “cock-eyed optimism” isn’t always appropriate.
In that sense, Detour is a part of remedial education.