Escape in the Fog (1945) Reviews

• quintessential Columbia B

  goblinhairedguy2003-10-02

  A woman dreams of a man being murdered, and later she experiences the scene in real life. Before he made his name with the Ranown series of Westerns, Boetticher churned out a skein of low-budget programmers for Columbia and Monogram, many of them well above average. This mystery, while no masterpiece, nicely illustrates what Andrew Sarris called "the beatitude of the Bs". With typical B movie non-logic, the intriguing dream-coming-true angle is taken at face value and never explained. There are a couple of clever escape scenes, and the stylish 40s wardrobe (wide lapels, pin-striped suits, floppy hats) rivals the sartorial splendor of a Hawks movie. Second-string stalwart Nina Foch, more alluring than usual, gives another intelligent performance despite the plot holes. An even finer second-feature from the same director, Behind Locked Doors, has recently received mainstream video release.

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• A Slog In The Fog

  alonzoiii-12007-04-24

  A tedious effort from not-yet great director Budd Boetticher and pretty but not-yet un-bland actress Nina Foch, this movie is, as one of the other reviewers notes, is the quintessence of a certain kind of B movie. It's just not the good kind. And a promising premise and an overactive fog machine is wasted. Basic plot -- Nina, a nurse on leave from wartime duties on account of her nerves, has a nightmare. She meets a dashing fellow at the resort where she's giving her nerves a breather, and realizes he's in the dream, even though she's never met him before. Meanwhile, it turns out our dashing guy is working as a spy, and is about to go on an-extra secret, hush-hush mission that must not fail. Of course, there are Nazis. And plot holes. And smart people acting in a fashion most likely to get them into entirely unnecessary scrapes, so that the running time can be spun out past an hour. At the end, the movie becomes a contest between which group of spies can act more foolishly. If the FBI and OSS had acted like this crew, we'd have lost the war in '42. The movie itself is rather flatly shot (despite the best efforts of the fog machine) and the acting -- as it seems to be in many of the Columbia Bs TCM has been showing lately -- is curiously unengaged. It's less stylized than what one might find from a similarly budgeted Warner Bros movie, but also less fun to watch. Boetticher's strength, of course, is a rather matter of fact style which allows the strong stories and acting in his Randolph Scott westerns to come to the fore. Maybe the problem here is that such a style is not going to work when the script is lousy and the actors tired from their five film a year schedule.

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• A little atmosphere goes a long way

  gerdeen-12015-04-25

  Fog was a frequently used device in the "B" thrillers of the 1930s and '40s. It was a way to disguise the cheap sets while adding an element of menace. In this low-budget tale of enemy agents on the dark, glistening streets of San Francisco, the fog is almost one of the stars. Nina Foch plays a World War II military nurse whose dream about a murder allows her to anticipate the real-life actions of the bad guys. It was just a single dream -- never really explained -- and otherwise she has no psychic powers. (She can't detect a spy hiding a few feet from her.) She's also not particularly smart, though no dumber than the federal agents she helps. The heroine's love interest, as well as the subject of her dream, is a a kind of G-Man played by William Wright. He and his boss, portrayed by Otto Kruger, are at work on a plan to boost the war effort against Japan. Unfortunately, Nazi agents have compromised U.S. security and are on the verge of foiling the plan and committing some mayhem. The dreamer comes in handy. In some ways, this movie is less "patriotic" than you might expect. Unintentionally, it makes American home-front security in World War II look amateurish. Everybody seems awfully naive. Wright's character gets a lot of mileage out of the little badge he flashes to local authorities, but it looks like a prize out of a cereal box. Most people would probably ask for more ID, considering that the fate of the nation hangs on his being legit. "Escape in the Fog" has its corny and improbable elements, like most such movies. But it's entertaining, and the cast is more than adequate. Foch is more vulnerable and appealing than in her later roles. Wright, who got his best breaks during the war years but died too young to make much of a career, does fine in a rather routine role. And it's nice to see Kruger, who often played icy Nazi sympathizers, as one of the good guys. This movie came out very late in the war, when the Nazis were already done for and the Japanese were only weeks from defeat. It does seem odd that Germans instead of Japanese are shown working as spies for Tokyo. My wild guess is that Asian actors, many of whom were still getting parts in films about the Pacific War, were not available for the average inexpensive "B" mystery. In this picture, even "Chinatown" has very few non-Caucasians, which actually prompts a subtle quip from one of the villains.

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• I'm not ill and I'm not insane. And I'm certainly not the victim of hallucinations.

  Spikeopath2013-10-19

  Escape in the Fog is directed by Oscar "Budd" Boetticher and written by Aubrey Wisberg. It stars Nina Foch, William Wright, Otto Kruger and Konstantin Shayne. Foch plays nurse Eileen Carr who dreams of a man being murdered only to wake and meet the man in real life... Solid programmer out of Columbia, Escape in the Fog runs at just over an hour and gets by on its nifty spy like premise and a good sense of atmosphere. Boetticher himself would say that this early period in his career was all about a learning curve, and he shows some nice economical touches to mask the low budget nature of the production. Film is at its best when Frisco is fog bound, while the war time shenanigans amount to race against time espionage intrigue. Noir darling Foch is good value and Wright decent hero/romantic foil, and the skulduggery dealing villains are a fun product of the time. 6/10

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• Clever, economical wartime espionage thriller set in foggy Frisco

  bmacv2004-08-05

  In 1945, Dutch-born actress Nina Foch had the good fortune to star in a pair of economical, satisfying thrillers. She was a damsel in distress in Joseph H. Lewis' My Name Is Julia Ross, an updated Gothic set in England. In Budd (then ‘Oscar') Boettischer's wartime espionage drama Escape In The Fog, she's a dame in distress in the city by the bay. It opens in a nightmare she's having. Walking one fog-bound night on the Golden Gate Bridge, she sees three men piling out of a taxi trying to kill a fourth. She screams – and the screams bring to her room in Ye Rustic Dell Inn other guests running to her aid. One of them is the intended victim in her dream (William Wright), whom she's never before laid eyes on. They hit it off, though, and he persuades her to join him for a few days in San Francisco. Their fling seems destined to be a short one, however, as Wright's a government agent who receives orders from his operator Otto Kruger to courier top-secret documents to Hong Kong. But he's waylaid by agents of the Axis powers, led by Konstantin Shayne. Luckily, Foch believes that her nightmare was in fact a premonition, and rushes off to the Golden Gate Bridge, this time for real.... It's not an especially memorable movie, but it's clever and atmospheric. If its ingenuity at times seems a bit stretched, it's stretched in the (pop)corny way of Saturday matinee serials of the era. There's of course the obligatory dose of wartime rhetoric, with much derision of `Japs,' while the Germans all speak in the most guttural tones they can reach without doing irreparable damage to the larynxes. Still, Boettischer keeps those fog machines churning, and there's plenty of skullduggery in Chinatown at Midnight. Not a bad way to while away an hour-plus.

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