This is a tender, generous movie that likes its characters and presents them as real people, full of flaws and strengths.

Not sure how, but this is easily one of the best movies all summer. Multiple levels of funny, never takes itself seriously, super colorful, and creative.

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

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

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.

Another wartime programmer that Hollywood was turning out by the hundreds. The only unusual angle is the mixing of espionage with psychic dreams, apparently an everyday occurrence in this scripted world. Except for the bland male lead (Wright), it's an excellent cast of stereotypes, including professional Hollywood Nazi, Ivan Triesault who made a career of these cruel types. There's also the incredibly smooth Otto Kruger playing a good guy, for once, but then who could do oily villains better than his smiling cobra. And what guy wouldn't like to partner-up with newcomer Nina Foch in an extended game of mixed doubles. With his penchant for cool blondes, I wonder why Hitchcock didn't enlist her obvious talents at some point. Anyway, cult director Boetticher helms in efficient style, the fog machine gets overtime, and a number of practiced players do their thing. (In passing, note how slickly Boetticher stages the shootout near movie's end—a foreshadowing of the classics to come. Note too, that Malcolm represents a generic federal agency and not the FBI by name. That way possible legal problems are avoided.) Nothing exceptional here, just a demonstration of how the studio assembly line turned out an entertaining product even under straitened wartime conditions.

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.