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.

In short: I Love a Mystery (1945)

What caused San Francisco society man Jefferson Monk (George Macready) to lose his head in a freak accident? And whatever happened to his head? Private detectives Jack Packard (Jim Bannon) and Doc Long (Barton Yarborough) know the answer to at least one of these questions because they started working on the highly mysterious case of Mr Monk a few days earlier.

About a year before the detectives came into play, Monk, you see, was quite disturbed by a prophecy made by the high priest (Lester Matthews) of a Mysterious Oriental Cult™ saying he’d lose his head a year later. Oh, and might he be willing to sell it then, for Monk looks like the spitting image of the cult’s founder whose mummy is unfortunately starting to rot?

By the point Monk meets the detectives, he’s worked himself into quite a panic regarding the whole matter, particularly after a friendly letter from the cult leader prophecies his wife Ellen (Nina Foch) “becoming an invalid” and Ellen actually losing control of her legs just a few days later. Then there’s the fact that a mysterious guy with a peg leg carrying a valise “just the right size for a human head” keeps following Monk around. Clearly, Packard and Long have their work quite cut out for them.

I Love A Mystery is the first of three Columbia productions based on the eponymous popular radio show written by Carlton E. Morse, and going by what I’ve read about it the show – there’s horrifyingly little of it available to actually hear of it in old time radio fan circles – the film’s mixture of seemingly supernatural occurrences, preposterous yet also awesome and pretty clever plot twists and an all-around air of anything goes is quite typical of it; it’s also quite typical of things I describe as “awesome”.

And awesome Henry Levin’s film indeed is, at least if you like your mysteries weird and somewhat two-fisted, and aren’t too annoyed by the whole “Oriental Mysteries” business – though there’s a fun twist to that aspect of the film too, so we’re not talking Fu Manchu style yellow danger racism here. The film’s script is even clever enough to not annoy me despite explaining most of the potentially supernatural occurrences away. That might have something to do with the plain (and pleasantly preposterous in a good sense) weirdness of the whole tale even without prophecies and curses actually existing in its world, or with Levin’s fine sense of how to pace the telling of said tale. At the very least, there are neither dithering nor detours here, with every scene fulfilling an actually important function in the plot and at the same time also containing at least one element of clever pulpy fun.

Fun seems to have been the film’s watch word, even though the plot is, if you think about it, actually as dark as that of the darkest noir, and a very fun time I Love a Mystery turns out to be.

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