Savage Love

So last Friday I found myself immersed, to paraphrase Tom Wolfe, in the great comforting warm bubblebath that is the New York Times Arts Section -- more specifically, reading A.O. Scott's review of My Winnipeg, the latest hallucinatory phantasmagoria from visionary filmaker Guy Maddin a/k/a the David Lynch of Canada. At which point, the following snippet of info, dropped quite casually and without further explication, completely took me aback.

His [Maddin's] Winnipeg is a place where ghosts commingle with regular citizens and may in fact be the true native spirits. Among those specters are Mr. Maddin’s mother, played in marvelously melodramatic re-enactments by Ann Savage.

The name rang a bell of course, but the photo clinched it -- Scott, walking encyclopedia of all things cinematic that he is, seemed nonetheless unaware that he was referring to Ann Savage(!) fer crying out loud. Which is to say Ann Savage -- the ultimate, deeply terrifying film noir femme fatale from Detour, the 1945 quickie that just may be the most noirish film noir of them all. < Savage had apparently mostly retired from the business years ago -- a Wiki search revealed that she had appeared a few times on Saved By the Bell, if you can believe it (the idea of her and Elizabeth Berkley going head to head is almost too much to contemplate). In any case, one can only assume that Maddin really knew what he was doing by casting such an iconic cult figure. If you haven't seen it, of course, Detour is beyond remarkable. Masterminded by prolific genius Z-movie auteur Edgar G. Ulmer, it's a bizarre farrago of claustrophic fatalism and plot twists that would have boggled James M. Cain; Roger Ebert pretty much got it right when he wrote "This movie from Hollywood's poverty row, shot in six days, filled with technical errors and ham-handed narrative, starring a man who can only pout and a woman who can only sneer, should have faded from sight soon after it was released in 1945. And yet it lives on, haunting and creepy, an embodiment of the guilty soul of film noir. No one who has seen it has easily forgotten it." Savage, meanwhile, is astonishing -- a cigar smoking hard-as-nails predatory dame who comes to a sudden shattering and unexpected bad end, but not before taking down the poor doomed chump hero played by Tom Neal with her. I can't wait to see how Maddin uses her in his latest, but in the meantime, you really should get over here and glom the DVD of Detour pronto. BTW, the film is public domain, so most of the video versions circulating are pretty crappy: the Image Entertainment disc at the link is far and away the best I've ever seen, with a generally crisp, blemish-free picture and more than serviceable sound.