Ann Savage in Detour, U.S., 1945
I'll bet no one connected with this Poverty Row masterpiece had read Jean-Paul Sartre's No Exit (produced a year earlier), but in Detour no-budget auteur Edgar G. Ulmer proved that Hell truly is other people — if the person is Vera. Picked up on a trip out west by a man (Tom Neal) fleeing from a death scene, she instantly and spectacularly gets on his and the audience's nerves. When she's not playing the domestic harridan ("Stop makin' noises like a husband"), she's threatening to send him to the gas chamber ("sniffin' that perfume Arizona hands out free to murderers"). With a final fatal phone call, Vera leads her poor prey to his motel-room doom. Even in death, she makes the survivor the sucker.