kapelusznik18 ***SPOILERS*** Foggy movie that has to do with seeing the future as well as a ring of Nazi spies in foggy San Francisco working for the Japanese Empire revolving around a clock shop run by one of them Mr.Schiller, Konstantin Shayne, in the Chinatown district. It's when Eilene Carr,Nina Foch, has this reoccurring nightmare about being trapped on the Golden Gate Bridge while someone is about to be stabbed to death that she's suddenly awakened from her dream by what turns out to be the man about to be murdered super secret US Government Agent Barry Malcolm, William Wright, and a fellow tenant who both brake into her hotel room.As we soon find out Agent Barry isn't there to see the sights of the city or have a sea food dinner but deliver to his fellow US undercover agents stationed in far off Japanese occupied Hong Kong a list of those, I guess themselves, who are working there so they won't get confused to who's who and not end up accidentally offing themselves. While Barry is about to be sent on his top secret mission he's kidnapped by the Nazi spies lead by master spy Paul Devon,Otto Kruger, from his taxi, driven by actress Shelly Winters,and forced to spill the beans as well as the secret papers, identifying the US Agents in Hong Kong,to them. This is where we first got in to this strange movie where the dream that Eilene had about Barry being kidnapped and soon to be killed comes to light in-for the second time-the movie! You just don't know what to make of all this is it about the supernatural or just a plain garden verity WWII spy movie with Eilene looking totally confused throughout the entire film. Eevn when she was kidnapped along with Barry-for a second time-after finding the secret memo, that Barry lost or threw away in the fog, by the Nazi spies who planned to murder the both of them by blowing them to bit in a gas explosion at Schiller's clock shop in Chinatown! It was Barry using his noodle-brain-who alerted a number of Chinese in the neighborhood to brake into the clock shop, by flashing with a combination flashlight and magnify glass "Hail Japan", who were anything but pro-Japanese.***SPOILERS****With now both Devon & Schiller's cover blown and on the run from the police as well as Barry they end up shooting themselves by accident in not being able to recognize each other in the thick pea soup like fog. Released in April 1945 with the wars in both the Pacific and Europe just about to come to an end in a German & Japanese defeat there was really nothing for the then American audience to get excited about since the Nazi spies and their Japanese allies were in no position to do us any harm. What was interesting was Eilene's dream of future events that after it was proved to be accurate and in fact saved Agent Barry's life it was never explained or as far as I know mentioned again in the movie!

Michael_Elliott Escape in the Fog (1945) ** (out of 4) Early film for director Boetticher has a former Army nurse (Nina Foch) dreaming about her walking through the fog when they witness two men trying to kill another. She screams in fear and wakes up from the dream only to have the man (William Wright) who was about to be killed enter her room. The two hit it off but what she doesn't know is that he's spy who might actually have people out to kill him. This is a pretty bland "B" movie that doesn't have too much going for it. It's certainly not a horrid movie and it might be a good way to kill 65-minutes if you enjoy watching this type of stuff in the early mornings on TCM but the director would certainly go onto much better movies. This is the type of movie that might keep you entertained while watching it but a couple minutes after the end credits you've pretty much forgotten everything you've seen. While there's nothing overly bad here, there's really nothing good either. Boetticher's direction is pretty hit and miss. He keeps the film moving at a good pace, which is a good thing but the movie goes for psychological thrills but never really grasps this. The use of premonitions play a big part in the film yet they never really come off eerie, creepy or overly realistic. Foch is easy to look at but her performance is also rather hit and miss. Wright brings some charm to his character but Otto Kruger is wasted in his role. The second half of the film deals with an important package that must be tracked down but it's just not very interesting. On a side note, the action takes place on the Golden Gate bridge with one character asking Noch's if she is thinking of killing herself. It's interesting to note that the 2006 documentary delt with suicides off this bridge so apparently they were well known back when this was filmed as well.

Alonzo Church 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.

bmacv 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.