Waste of time

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

I'm surprised this film hasn't received a higher rating. Maybe old folks need to think back to when they were kids and rode their bikes downtown on Saturday afternoon to watch a string of second run "B" pictures at the cheap theater.Or perhaps some caught this in later decades when these old films were shown on TV late night on weekends. In any event, enjoy this for what it is. Don't expect Shakespeare and you won't be disappointed. As a typical WWII film this one will keep you entertained. As a bonus, Nina Foch has never looked lovelier.My son and I have never called these WWII Spy Thrillers, Propaganda Films, or whatever. To us they've always been and always will be, "Nazi Scum" Movies. We've amassed a large collection. This is one of them ... and one of our favorites. It reeks of the surrealistic cheapie back lot films that seem both unreal and real simultaneously.

On a foggy San Francisco night, dreamy Nina Foch (as Eileen Carr) takes a melancholy walk on the Golden Gate Bridge. The beautiful young woman is suddenly witness to a terrifying confrontation. Apparently, it ends with a murder, but Ms. Foch wakes up just before the deadly knife takes its final plunge. Fortunately, it was only a dream. Unfortunately, it begins to come true. Foch's wakening scream draws the attention of a man in the inn where she is staying. He looks exactly like the victim, William Wright (as Barry Malcolm), from her dream. Foch has never met the man before he appeared in her nightmare. He's a spy for the US, soon to receive a summons from agent Otto Kruger (as Paul Devon). After showing a romantic interest in Foch, Mr. Wright must deliver a top secret packet to Hong Kong...With a skillfully conceived story by Aubrey Wisberg, "Escape in the Fog" is an entertaining spy thriller. Director Budd Boetticher gets attention with the nightmarish opening and Foch delivers a fine characterization. On the downside, her romance with Mr. Wright is not initially believable; perhaps, if the actors had more quality time, the coupling would click. Most interesting is the fact that Foch's character has a supernatural power (seeing future events in her dreams). The explanation appears to be post-traumatic stress suffered during her stint as a nurse in World War II. Although this aspect of Foch's character is dispensed with early, she maintains interest. Watch for young starlet Shelley Winters as a hotel taxi driver and veteran D.W. Griffith player and "Tarzan" portrayer Elmo Lincoln as a lawman.****** Escape in the Fog (1945/04/05) Budd Boetticher ~ Nina Foch, William Wright, Otto Kruger, Konstantin Shayne

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.

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.