Detour (1945)

Edgar G. Ulmer, Tom Neal, Ann Savage · 1945 · 68 min

The gold standard of poverty-row noir — 68 minutes of pure doom. Shot in days for nothing, and it plays like a nightmare you can't steer out of. Tom Neal's pianist gets tangled with a fatal hitch-hiker and a corpse, and every decision after that is worse than the last. Edgar Ulmer made something genuinely claustrophobic and bleak, a masterwork of constraint that proved you didn't need a major studio's resources to define a genre.

Chosen print (2026-08-22): Archive.org item Detour — 1.78 GB MPEG-2 · 67.6 min.

The research lead (Detour_1945) went dark at Archive.org, so this print was re-sourced on 2026-08-22: the highest-bitrate clean copy, uploaded 2007 and so predating any modern restoration.

Culled: a colourised derivative, two YTS BluRay x264 rips, an 18.8 GB BluRay REMUX (a commercial restoration transfer), an _ipod derivative, and several foreign-titled copies likely carrying burned-in subtitles.

Selected from our vetted candidate queue after the automated reject rules and a curation pass. The downloaded file was verified byte-for-byte against Archive.org's published size and MD5, and the torrent was generated from that exact file.

Watched end to end and confirmed on 2026-08-22 (owner eye-pass): runtime, intact titles, no watermarks or overlays, no colorization or crop, audio in sync.

Public domain in the United States by non-renewal. Published 1945 under the 1909 Act, which required a renewal registration in the 28th year; the scanned Catalog of Copyright Entries motion-picture volumes for 1972–74 contain no renewal of this film (checked 2026-08-17 against the Archive.org scans — method, matches and limits recorded in our verification notes). The check treats OCR absence as strong evidence corroborating the decades-long PD distribution consensus, not as sole proof; final sign-off re-reads the window at torrent-publish time.