Ann Savage Dead at 87

“Say who do you think you’re talking to – a hick? Listen Mister, I been around,
and I know a wrong guy when I see one. What’d you do, kiss him with a wrench? “

Ann Savage, who played the dark dame, Vera, in Edgar G. Ulmer’s cult noir Detour (1945), has died aged 87.

Her Hollywood career had largely been over since the mid-1950s, but she had a resurgence over the past year with a starring role in Canadian cult filmmaker Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg. Starting with her 1943 debut in the crime story One Dangerous Night, Savage made more than 30 films through the 1950s, including the Westerns Saddles and Sagebrush and Satan’s Cradle, musicals  such as Dancing in Manhattan and Ever Since Venus, and wartime stories like Passport to Suez (AAP).

When announcing her passing,  Savage’s manager, Kent Adamson said of her performance in Detour:

It’s actually a showcase role… [Tom] Neal and Savage really reversed the traditional male-female roles of the time. She’s vicious and predatory. She’s been called a harpy from hell, and in the film, too, she’s very sexually aggressive, and he’s very, very passive. It’s very unusual for a 40s film to have a woman come on that strong.

The Time Out Film Guide says of Detour:

Neither pure thriller nor pure melodrama (though it has its true complement of doomed lovers, dead bodies, and a cruel sexual undertow), on an emotional level it most resembles the wonderful purple-pulp fiction of David Goodis. Passion joins with folly to produce termite art par excellence.

Detour is in the public domain, and can be viewed below.

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