Out of the Fog (1941)

Thomas Mitchell and John Qualen stolen the show....Ida Lupino and John Garfield are top billing but the the fishermen are the heart of this movie,they are good and funny....the noir atmosphere is fantastic....the plot is well paved by these magnificent actors and became a movie to discover for those who really love and enjoy a good picture!!!Resume:First watch: 2017 / How many: 1 / Source: DVD / Rating: 8

Wow this one was waaaaaay over the top. Talk about a ridiculous script. John Garfield's part is one of the most nasty characters on record. He's just about got Cody Jarrett beat.Tell me the believability of a situation where your daughter decides that she's bored being good and being normal so she's gonna go with this scumbag of a guy who extorts money from her own father? "Yeah dad, that's the way of the world now"..lol...how ridiculous.This little runt of a guy decides he's a gangster who extorts protection money from people who dock boats on the pier. This coincides with the Ida Lupino character being bored with her "normal" life and also that her father is paying this waste of space extortion money. Then he finds out through her that her father has some money saved up so he wants to steal that from him also. He gets beat temporarily by them finally telling the police. He gets to court and gets off laughingly and then the real heat gets put on. He beats her father with a hose. In the end he gets it though. I can't understand how this one got released. There's no positive anything in it. Doesn't surprise me that it only got released recently on DVD. I'm guessin it wasn't a smash hit back in the day.Folks...only watch this one to complete your Ida Lupino or John Garfield movie catalog. Anything else other than that is a complete 90 minutes of "yeah right" moments.

I found this movie painful to watch. Jack Warner should have been ashamed to release it quite frankly. I love John Garfield, Ida Lupino and the others as actors but Anatole Litvak, the director, went seriously off the rails with this one. He really should have reigned in John Garfield a little.Indeed, John Garfield's character of Goff is so one-dimensionally nasty that you can't but cheer when he gets his come-uppance (as the movie code would have demanded). Ida Lupino was so stupidly infatuated with him, even knowing the racketeer was harassing her father, that one can only hold her in contempt. Qualen is so spineless and MacMahon is so loud and off-putting (her character yes, but over the top!) that I could barely stand it. And the cops and judge...no wonder people make jokes about them! The only lights I could find in this movie were Thomas Mitchell's character of Jonah and to a lesser extent Eddie Albert's character of George. They save the movie from total disaster.I wanted to love this movie because I love the actors. Sadly, I can only say I got through it.

"Out of the Fog." The classic title for a noir, which this is not. Instead it's basically a stagy story of two quiet elderly men (John Qualen and Thomas Mitchell) who enjoy taking their outboard motor boat out of Sheepshead Bay for night-time fishing. Mitchell has a nagging wife (Aline McMahon) and a bored, impatient daughter (Ida Lupino) who works for the phone company. Both men have dreams of getting away from it all, buying a large boat and getting out into the Gulf stream, where it's always daylight. (Here, it's always night, and always foggy.) Enter the small-time extortionist, John Garfield, who hits the two guys up for five dollars a week for "protection" of their small boat. Garfield also begins squiring around Ida Lupino, throwing his money around, bringing her orchids ("five dollars for flowers that don't smell") and alienating her from her honest boyfriend, Eddie Albert. Garfield learns from Lupino that Mitchell has saved up $190 towards that big fishing boat, and he extorts that too.Mitchell and Quaylen plot Garfield's death in a Russian spritz bad in Brooklyn, while Kropotkin, George Tobias, carries on cheerfully and endlessly in the background about how he's just become "a bankrupt." In the end, neither Mitchell nor Qualen can murder the guy, who falls overboard and dies accidentally, conveniently leaving behind his wallet full of ill-gotten dough.The play was written by Irwin Shaw, who has left a legacy of some neat short stories and novels. (Read "The Girls in Their Summer Dresses" at once.) Many of the cast and crew came from the Group Theater, a fashionable leftist organization at the time, but if anyone can sniff out a hint of communism here he must be a bloodhound or a paranoid. In the play, the two old guys managed to actually murder the thoroughly obnoxious Garfield but in the film the code wouldn't permit it.Nobody will win any medals for this production but it's tightly written and professionally acted. Or -- let's put it this way -- if you liked Sidney Kingsley's "Dead End," you ought to enjoy this one. It even has one of the Dead End Kids in it, playing a waiter.Particularly enjoyable is the brief scene in the Russian bath, with George Tobias, whose monologue is really pretty funny, and its boisterous comedy is refreshing in this rather quiet, low-key tale of crime and adaptation.