In short: Escape in the Fog (1945)

The final stretch of World War II. Having been honourably discharged from her duties as a nurse after suffering from what we’d today call PTSD, Eileen Carr (Nina Foch) spends time recuperating at an inn near San Francisco. She has a nightmare taking place on a fog-shrouded bridge where three men get out of a taxi, two of them attacking the last one. Things become rather curious when the (most impressive) scream she then lets off in her sleep brings other inhabitants of the inn to her room, among them Barry Malcolm (William Wright) who looks exactly like the man getting attacked. She hasn’t seen Barry before, mind you. Though now that they have encountered each other, they fall in love very quickly – it being wartime and a 62 minute film.

Alas, the whirlwind romance has to take a bit of a backseat, for Barry’s a spy and propaganda expert, and he’s being ordered to bring some very important papers to Hong Kong. Which would be dangerous enough, but his boss’s OPSEC is terrible, so there are a trio of German agents after the documents Barry carries, and whose actions quickly lead to the scene Eileen has dreamed about. Fortunately, Eileen’s a rather quick-witted new girlfriend to have for a spy.

Usually, the films like this one the great Budd Boetticher (then still working under the moniker of Oscar Boetticher, Jr.) made very early in his career for Columbia aren’t treated as major parts of his filmography, and the director himself apparently never was terribly proud of them either. However, as far as little (late) war time programmers with a hint of noir and a whiff of the fantastic go, Escape in the Fog isn’t half bad.

Even this early in his career, Boetticher was a sure hand with pacing, so unlike with other films made for the b slot in a matinee, Escape’s 62 minutes zip along with great economy and already demonstrate the director’s interest for veracity in genre movies. So the handful of scenes that root the film in war time reality, namely some historically interesting business about how taxis work in a war time economy (plus the taxi’s driven by a young Shelley Winters), or the matter of fact way the protagonists discuss their PTSD early on, really already make this feel like a Boetticher film and also do quite a bit to sell the more preposterous parts of the script.

Even though it is slight, the characterisation is actually rather well done, too, bringing enough detail to the characters to keep up audience interest in their travails; that Foch is also particularly charming and a bit gutsy in this one certainly doesn’t hurt the film either.


All in all, Escape in the Fog is still a surprisingly fast and fun little movie more than seventy years after it was made, certainly an achievement for a something made quickly for a short cinematic run without any thought for posterity or longevity.