Propaganda posters are an element of WWII culture which intrigue me. Consider that famous slogan from some of them: “Loose lips sink ships”. William Wright is a high-ranking government agent in 1945’s Escape in the Fog, yet he fails to heed that wisdom, loudly talking on the phone when the treacherous Ernie Adams is lurking around. In another moment, he fails to be aware a guy in the phone booth next to him can determine the number Wright has called by counting the clicks as he dials each digit. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, then bully for you.
Small wonder he will get later get abducted by underground Nazis Konstantin Shayne, Ivan Triesault and Noel Cravat before he can board a sub on a secret mission to Hong Kong to deliver critical documents. Something I find astonishing is how much Shayne is able to accomplish unnoticed when he has a thick German accent, and one of the countries the U.S. was at war with at that time was…wait a minute—it will come to me. The same goes with Triesault, who is able to convince others he is an American detective, but with a voice that has me thinking he will break out into “Der Komisar” at any moment.
Shayne was even able to plant a wire recorder in the grandfather clock of Otto Kruger, the mastermind behind Wright’s mission. It seems like Kruger and his staff would be suspicious of the German clock repairman having to make repeated visits but, once again, those propaganda posters everywhere at the time weren’t doing dick.
Fortunately for Wright, Nina Foch had a curiously prescient dream at the start of the picture. She was walking across the Golden Gate late at night in heavy fog when she a car screeches to a halt and three guys spill out of it. One is Wright and other is a guy ready to knife him. She screams in the dream and real-life, waking fellow guests where she’s staying, one of whom is Wright, though she has never seen him before now.
That footage will be reused roughly midway through the picture, burning off a few more minutes of runtime. But, this time around, we have a conclusion to the sequence, with a cop shooting Wright’s kidnappers dead. Foch is the middle of that firefight, and she just calmly leans out of the way. I find this interesting, as I would have at least been flat on the ground. I might have even leapt over the side of the bridge in panic.
In the chaos, an important bundle of papers that is this movie’s MacGuffin went over the side. One would assume that would sink to the bottom of the bay and that the movie would immediately end. But the protective packaging floats and is waterproof. And so, the film transitions to the effort to get the harbor patrol involved, and the guy there won’t talk about the experimental radio-controlled boat that passed under the bridge at that time and blah blah blah blah. Foch answers an ad placed in the want ads by somebody who found the package, and I’m not sure which I believe less: that she is stupid enough to fall for this or that the ad was somehow in the paper just hours after the bundle was lost. I guess papers published several editions each day back then and the presses had an astonishingly quick turnaround time.
The structure of the plot is odd, and it feels like it is about to wrap at least twice before it finally does. Then, when that finally happens, it feels anti-climatic.
In the meantime, there is some weirdness, such as the most romantic restaurant in town being one where live “gypsy” music is played. Then there’s our heroes getting rescued when they instigate a riot by projecting the message “HAIL JAPAN!” on a window. Although I watch a lot of cinema from this era, I never fail to be surprised by the anger towards the Japanese at the time, seemingly more so than the U.S. hated the other Axis powers, and presumably because of Pearl Harbor. Early in the runtime, Wright says being on leave is nice, though he believes “any place is nice where there aren’t any Japs around.”
Escape in the Fog is slightly sub-par noir, and might have been better if Wright had actually made it to the sub. None of the various plot threads ever feel like they truly advance. Instead, they’re like the movements of the actors, going from one place to another, only to basically end up where they started. In a way, that isn’t too different from that dream of Foch’s we see twice. By the end, I was surprised we don’t see it a third time.
Dir: Budd Boetticher
Starring Otto Kruger, Nina Foch, William Wright
Watched as part of Powerhouse/Indicator UK’s (region B) blu-ray set Columbia Noir #1