Detour

Following the screening, biographer, essayist, and critic Robert Polito (Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson) will participate in a Q&A with film essayist, collector, and curator Robert M. Rubin. The Q&A will be followed by a toast and book signing of Polito’s 2026 book After the Flood: Inside Bob Dylan’s Memory Palace in the Summer Noir exhibit on the Cinema’s third floor.

From Poverty Row came a movie that, perhaps more than any other, epitomizes the dark fatalism at the heart of film noir. As he hitchhikes his way from New York to Los Angeles, a down-on-his-luck nightclub pianist (Tom Neal) finds himself with a dead body on his hands and nowhere to run—a waking nightmare that goes from bad to worse when he picks up the most vicious femme fatale in cinema history, Ann Savage’s snarling, monstrously conniving drifter Vera. Working with no-name stars on a bargain-basement budget, B auteur Edgar G. Ulmer turned threadbare production values and seedy, low-rent atmosphere into indelible pulp poetry. Long unavailable in a format in which its hard-boiled beauty could be fully appreciated, Detour haunts anew in its first major restoration.

About Robert Polito: 
Robert Polito’s most recent books include After the Flood: Inside Bob Dylan’s Memory Palace (2026) and Jim Thompson: Five Noir Novels of the 1950s and 1960s(2026). Later this year, in collaboration with Sophie Brown and Robert Rubin, he will also publish The Gray World: Barbara Loden’s Wanda. He received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Savage Art, his biography of novelist Jim Thompson. Polito founded the Graduate Creative Writing Program at the New School, and served as President of the Poetry Foundation (2013-2015). Other books include collections of poems (Doubles; Hollywood & God), and anthologies for the Library of America — American Noir: Classic Crime Novels of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s; The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber; and David Goodis: Five Noir Novels of the 1940s and 1950s.