Autopsies group member Jann Matlock talks about motels in film noir and B-movie thrillers in a special episode of Studio 360 on the 50th anniversary of Psycho, broadcast on Public Radio across America this weekend. Listen to her interview here, and the full programme on the Studio 360 website.
Image above: still frame from motel sequence in Alice in the Cities (dir. Wim Wenders, 1974).
Image below: motel in Without Warning (dir. Arnold Leven, 1952).
Edgar G. Ulmer's B-Film, Detour (1945) depicts an ever-growing nightmare of calamities that befall the man on the road. We never see the motel sign from the fateful highway, but the short stay Al Roberts makes in this ramshackle inn along the Arizona state highway gives him time to deliberate about his future. There he will prepare to take over the identity of Charles Haskell, Jr. whose classy car we see parked in front of the motel in the still above.
As Roberts's voice-over tells the story, Haskell has picked him hitchhiking, proceeded to have a heart attack while driving--and then "accidentally" hits his head on a rock. Money, car, suitcase, and even name thus accrue to the man alone on the highway--until he pulls out of the motel where he's slept off the shock (see the sstill for the seamy furnishings) and meets the "femme fatale," Vera who will blackmail him and then "accidentally" perish in her turn.
This film's account of the crisis for many Americans who had fought in WWII shows how much the aftermath of the war had jeopardized connections as well as identity. The aftermath of the war likewise created a crisis in having a place to belong, as these excursions through the seedy world of motels and--later in the film--short-term apartment rentals, will demonstrate.
Discussed in the Studio 360 interview above, this film moves through the kind of motels that will mushroom along American highways in the postwar era. Autopsies Group member Jann Matlock writes about this world in "Vacancies: Hotels, Reception Desks, and Identity in American Cinema, 1929-1964," in Moving Pictures/ Stopping Places: Hotels and Motels on Film, ed. David B. Clarke et al. (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 2009), pp. 73-142.
