Tied for the best movie I have ever seen

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

***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!

We've all got to start somewhere, it was in films like Escape In The Fog that somebody like Budd Boetticher could learn his trade before turning out good films. In fact the film was dated before it even hit the movie going public on June 25, 1945.The war on Europe was over for almost two months, of course not even Harry Cohn could control the events of history. So I'm wondering why even back then the public didn't question why a Nazi spy ring was helping out the Japanese. Another very bad historical inaccuracy was that the FBI had nothing to do with the Pacific or Asian theater. The cloak and dagger stuff was the territory of the OSS in that part of the world.When you're an FBI man like William Wright it sure good to have a psychic girl friend like Nina Foch. He's about to go on a mission to the Orient to deliver the names of key underground leaders to start a general uprising in China against the Japanese occupation. Germans who've been bugging Otto Kruger's house learn of this and the whole movie is spent with these guys who've already lost the war trying to help their allies. Who, by the way, they refer to as 'Japs'. When Foch is sideswiped by a speeding car and knocked unconscious she dreams about Wright's danger and sees what is about to happen to him on the Golden Gate Bridge. She goes there and foils the plot. All the stuff you'd expect from a nice noir film is there, the foggy atmosphere of San Francisco, the dimly lit sets, Budd Boetticher tried his best as did the cast. But they just weren't convincing, probably because they didn't believe this claptrap themselves.It's possible, but not likely that Nina Foch's dream and its psychic consequences might have been more developed and the developments were left on the cutting room floor. I think it was just a lousy screenplay. And Budd and Harry Cohn at Columbia Pictures had the fast moving events of history going against them here.

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.

This wartime thriller follows conventional plot directions, but the framing of its story in a dream of murder makes it pretty interesting. Foch is excellent and very sexy. The suspense lags after the dream occurs in real time, and we have to see Foch tied up as Kruger (excellent as always) tries to find a missing envelope. Nicely photographed and directed; if only more thought had gone into its conception.