Steven MikulanExcept for one performance in a dozen-year acting career, she was as forgotten in Hollywood as a lost pawn-shop ticket. But in that single role of a hitchhiker in Edgar Ulmer's 1945 film noir classic, Detour, Ann Savage forever branded the character of Vera into the pop imagination. Detour was a B-movie made on half a shoestring but became an enduring fable in the mythology of sexual warfare, which is why Savage's death this past weekend at the age of 87 warrants more than a footnote.
Detour's narrative is an improbable domino fall of events that puts a hard-luck New Yorker named Al Roberts (played by Tom Neal) behind the wheel of a car — and in clothes — belonging to a dead man. Roberts is driving to the Coast to meet his sweetheart, but somewhere in the California desert he spots Vera thumbing a ride.
When her character is summoned by Roberts with a shout from his car, Savage tugs at her sweater almost imperceptibly, just enough to accent her figure for the sake of a potential benefactor. Her face remains as hard as granite.
“She looked like she had been thrown off the crummiest freight train in
the world,” Neal says in voice-over, as Roberts later gazes at a slumbering
Vera. “Yet in spite of that, I got the impression of beauty, not
the beauty of a movie actress, mind you, or the beauty you dream about
with your wife, but a natural beauty . . .”
Vera, in fact, is a roadside succubus thumbing her way from New Orleans
to wartime
Los Angeles for no apparent reason. She was every man's worst
individual
fear — a drifting strain of the clap, perhaps, or the threat of
personal obligations or, in Al Robert's case, a demon who sinks her
blackmailing claws into him and won't let go until she's shaken every
dime from his pockets. Nothing about Roberts placates Vera — neither
his logic nor his attempts to flatter or threaten her.
Years ago Janey Place, writing in Women in Film Noir,
observed that the genre “is a male fantasy, as is most of our art.”
Still, she wrote, film noir represented a break with film tradition by
portraying women who were not passive but who “are intelligent and
powerful, if destructively so, and derive power, not weakness, from
their sexuality.”
In Detour Ann Savage embodied all those
things, from the way she tugged at that sweater to the unbreakable
chokehold she had on a desperate fellow traveler. She was every man's
nightmare — and so, also, his most secret desire.
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