A seldom-seen faoundational film of American noir: Detour

Edgar G. Ulmer's 1945 film, Detour, which for many years was unavailable to contemporary viewers and is now available in a good print streaming on Criterion, is rightly regarded as a foundational film among American noir. It begins w/ a man in an all-night roadside diner (the Nevada Diner), a venue now more or less vanished from the American landscape, quietly drinking coffee and staring ahead like a zombie and rudely brushing off a truck driver trying to offer him a lift. This guy is troubled, but we don't know, and the movie tells his story. The first 1/3 of the film is fairly conventional - the man is a nightclub piano-player in NYC with dreams of performing as a classical artist; he and the lead chanteuse are a couple, and she - after a really cool long walk through foggy NY predawn streets - tells his she's going to Hollywood to make it as a star. Eventually he follows her, and here the story begins: he hitches a series of rides, finally w/ a strange, somewhat threatening man in a big convertible. The piano player takes up some of the driving as the car owner falls asleep; when the driver stops in a rainstorm to put up the top, the car owner falls out of the front street, hits head on a rock, and (probably) dies from the impact. Here's where the film strains credibility, as the piano guy, afraid of being accused of killing the car owner for his $, drags the body off the road and continues driving toward LA, but assuming the dead man's ID. (It's really hard to believe he wouldn't try to flag down some help right away - if he did, why would anyone accuse him of murder? But we're on our way.) The movie jumps up a notch as he picks up a woman hitchhiker who turns out to be a near-psychotic harpy and criminal schemer, who persuades him to continue posing as the dead man and to sell the car when they get to LA. Tey fight and threaten each other constantly, and the piano player feels stuck, imprisoned, in this developing scheme. The movie is full of dark and threatening moments and w/ many glimpses of a world that's now almost a century away: Hollywood Blvd teeming w/ car dealership, all-night diners, crummy one-bedroom apartments that are easy to rent by the week, hitchhikers everywhere - a culture much more mobile, transient, and trusting than anything we know of today. There are some surprising plot twists, especially toward the end, but throughout Ulmer et al - his actors are and were entirely unknown, at least to most people - maintains the mood of darkness, loss, and endless wandering.