Out of the Fog (1941)

Best movie of this year hands down!

It is not only a funny movie, but it allows a great amount of joy for anyone who watches it.

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

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.

Having never seen this before I recorded it off TCM more out of curiosity than expectation. Boy, was I wrong! This one really is a gem.The hugely talented Mitchell and Qualen dominate - as has already been noted by previous reviewers. Garfield is suitably nasty, but not too nasty. Lupino is believably hormonally confused between her "steady Eddie" boyfriend George (appropriately played by Eddie "Green Acres" Albert) and Garfield's devil-may-care petty gangster.Overall, it's a fairly slight story, but extremely well directed, staged and photographed. The satisfying ending merely adds the finishing touch. Terrific atmosphere somewhere between "To Have and Have Not" and some darker Capra moments, terrific acting and a great way to spend 80 minutes or so.Had this starred Bogart or Edward G Robinson, it would have been more widely recognised today for the minor classic that it undoubtedly is.

(Some Spoilers) Petty shake-down artist Howard Goff, John Garfield, has everyone on the Sheepshead Bay docks terrorized in paying him protection money to keep their boats from having an unfortunate accident, like Goff setting them on fire. Getting old man Johnah Goodwin, Thomas Mitchell, and his partner Olaf Johnson, John Qualen, to pay him a $5.00 in weekly protection fee wasn't enough for the arrogant and greedy Goff. He also wanted Jonah's pretty daughter Stella, Ida Lupino, as well to be his woman and that got under the skin of Stella's long time boyfriend George, Eddie Albert, who's been waiting for years, until he saved up enough money as a fish auctioneer,to marry her.Stella for her part kind of liked the "I take whatever I want" attitude of Goff as well as his taking her out to fancy night-clubs to dance and dink the night away with him. She completely overlooked that he was shaking down her father and even worked him over with a rubber hose when he dared to go to the police for help. Goff has both Jonah and his wimpy friend and partner Olaf over a barrel in having them sign a $1,000 loan, that Goff never loaned them, to cover his weekly shakedowns of them them. The two come to the one and only conclusion that they could come up with in getting Goff out of their lives. That's to do to him what he's always threatening to do to them. Rub out the thieving good for nothing swine and do it in a way that it looks accidental!Based on the Irwin Shaw play "The Gentle People" the movie shows what was meant by the biblical saying that "The meek shall inherit the earth". Where in this case it's their fishing boats on the Sheepshead Bay docks. Goff a one man protection racket took what he wanted and feared no one not even the cops. Who in the movie was a 63 year-old arthritic looking officer Magruder, Robert Homans. Magruder in the movie is seen having trouble running, as well as walking, and was in danger of slipping on the already slippery docks.It's when both Jonah and Olaf went to the police for help and all they got for it was laughs from the judge Jonah & Olaf came to the bitter conclusion that they'll have to take the law into heir own hands to put an end to Goff's reign of terror against them and their fellow fishermen. Fortunately for them it was fate that intervened in their favor and took care of Goff, in a very unusual way, that kept Jonah & Olaf lifelong law abiding citizens from breaking the law to do it.Stella who was playing her deeply in love with her and not that bright boyfriend George for a sucker didn't at all come out smelling like a rose, or violet, in the movie. Even though George always forgave her every time that she screwed, figuratively not literally, him in two-timing George for Goff. The ending got me a little wheezy in George taking Stella back and at the same time George being such a jerk that he as much didn't feel that he was at all betrayed. In that Stella who already screwed him once would screw him a second or third or forth time as well!

"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.