Directed by Anatole Litvak. Written by Robert Rossen, Jerry Wald, and Richard Macaulay
A morality play unfolding under the dense cover of fog, Anatole Litvak’s Out of the Fog is old to look at, but its characters seem to have walked right on set from present day, as unscrupulous racketeers extort the kind and meek and attract the materialistic and gormlessly dissatisfied.
Playing out mostly among the small fishing boats on the docks of New York, it stars John Garfield as societal scourge Harold Goff, a gangster who demands protection money from the fishers so their boats won’t spontaneously combust. He tells them as much. He doesn’t have a crew at his back or a shady organization lending him authority, he’s just one shameless guy.
That’s enough in this tiny world. Thomas Mitchell and John Qualen are Jonah and Olaf, the latest fishers to get Goff’s business proposal, and they’re nice, kind, men who don’t want no trouble. Jonah wants to stand up to Goff, but Olaf reminds him of what he can lose beyond the $5 Goff demands every week. So he relents.
At home, his daughter Stella (Ida Lupino) is tired of working and working for little. She wants to be extraordinary, above this mundane life, her thoughts keen on something more exciting and gilded. She catches Goff’s eyes, and the gifts he pours on her (lilacs that cost $3 each!) quickly gets her on his arm.
So Goff’s taking Jonah’s money, scaring his friends, and now he’s debasing his daughter too? Gah, where does it end?
Out of the Fog’s is a tidy little movie play with simplified characters and crystallized opinions. It’s straightforward stuff, speaking more to our sense of right and wrong than anything deeper, but thankfully a wicked fun performance by Garfield can keep the fires burning.
Goff’s just a thug, but Garfield’s bravado turns him into a ghoul, something almost supernatural and unbound by our society. His arrogance could power cities, but how that arrogance is powered by the lack of resistance he meets is mortifying
The eponymous fog is the main character, though. It’s both an atmospheric centerpiece, a theme, a narrative device, and a metaphorical gauntlet. In Litvak’s little microcosm, you can’t see beyond reaching distance, and those within range take on outsized importance. A predator becomes inescapable, but an ally can become your rock. Any help you need, you’ll need to yell for, and yell hard. As dangerous as this world is, Litvak underlines the need for community and unity within it.
Men like Goff will ride roughshod over everyone and anyone and stop at nothing. He’ll take, take, and take. He’ll rob you today and come calling tomorrow like nothing happened. A bullying child, whacking everyone’s fingers with a hammer because only he exists in his own mind. We know his kind. They become presidents sometimes.
Girls like Stella, with their want for material things, and want for simply more have become common. Social media watered the seed, the abundance of lifestyle influencers telling their audiences an average existence, whatever that means, is simply not worth living. Now, most kids want to be influencers, making nothing and selling consumerist daydreams.
For better or worse, the majority of us are Jonahs and Olafs. They don’t ask for much, they play by the rules, they treat others the way they want to be treated, and that’s well. In essence, they believe in the social contract and the fact you share this life with others.
The characters, drawn from Irvin Shaw’s play, are well-written distillations of the archetypes that make up society: the darkness and the light, the yin and yang, the opposing forces that blend and separate to form the constantly shifting social balance. Litvak’s treatment of the pier’s people is simplified and sermonizing, but it’s nice and tight and rings loud and clear.
Mikkel Frederiksen 