Out of the Fog (Warner Bros., 1941)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, September 16) my husband Charles and I watched an unusual film on Turner Classic Movies: Out of the Fog (1941), produced by Hal B. Wallis and Henry Blanke at Warner Bros. and based on a 1939 Group Theatre play called The Gentle People by Irwin Shaw. TCM was showing it as part of Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” program even though it’s only tangentially film noir – Muller called it “proto-noir,” which is a term I’d apply to movies made quite a bit earlier than this one, like William Wellman’s Safe in Hell (1931), Charles Vidor’s Sensation Hunters (1933) and Boris Ingster’s Stranger on the Third Floor (1940). The original Broadway production of The Gentle People flopped at the box office despite the presence of a bona fide movie star, Franchot Tone, in the lead role of gangster Harold Goff, who attempts to set up a classic “protection” racket on the Brooklyn waterfront by charging local fishermen $5 per week and burning their fishing boats if they don’t pay up. Like most of the Group Theatre productions, it was Left-wing in its political orientation; Shaw and the people who put on the play intended it as an anti-isolationist warning that sooner or later the U.S. would have to arm itself and go to war with the forces of fascism. Despite the commercial failure of Shaw’s play on Broadway, there was a bidding war for the movie rights which Warner Bros. won – though the film was also a commercial disappointment.

It was directed by Anatole Litvak (a Jewish refugee from Ukraine) from a script by Robert Rossen, Jerry Wald and Richard Macaulay based on Shaw’s play, and the stars were Ida Lupino as Stella Goodwin, daughter of Jonah Goodwin (Thomas Mitchell), one of the local fishermen from whom Goff is trying to extort “protection” money; and John Garfield as Goff. Charles and I watched this film many years before on a VHS tape I’d recorded off TCM back when I used to record stuff from them by the yard, and at the time I’d reflected that Garfield was the first Method actor to become a major movie star. (I hadn’t realized that Franchot Tone had beaten him to that status by at least five years.) The thing that most impressed me about this movie then was that Garfield, as a Method actor, gave a quiet, understated performance rather than snarling through the role the way Warners’ previous generation of gangster stars – Edward G. Robinson, James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart – would have. Thanks to Garfield’s relative subtlety, the character actually became more sinister and frightening than he would have been in a more bravura rendering of the part. In his introduction, Eddie Muller said that Bogart was actually offered the role of Harold Goff but Ida Lupino, who’d previously worked with Bogart on They Drive by Night and High Sierra, absolutely refused to make another film with him. In their biography of Bogart, Ann Sperber and Eric Lax said this hurt Bogart’s feelings for the rest of his life; as far as he knew, he and Lupino had got along well enough and he never figured out just what he’d done that had ticked her off so much. (Lupino’s refusal to work with Bogart cost her the female lead in The Maltese Falcon, which is a pity; I’ve long felt Mary Astor was the weak link in that cast, and it’s fascinating to imagine The Maltese Falcon with Bogart and Lupino – though to my mind that’s one more movie from classic Hollywood that should have had Barbara Stanwyck in it, especially since that would have been a lot better than the one film Bogart and Stanwyck actually did make together, the dreadful The Two Mrs. Carrolls.)

The plot takes place at a Brooklyn waterfront café whose owner, Caroline Pomponette (Odette Myrtil), wants to marry “regular” Olaf Johnson (John Qualen), Jonah Goodwin’s partner in his fishing business and fellow target of Goff’s extortion. Stella dreams of going to Cuba some day and Goff offers her a trip there, and to her dad’s horror she actually accepts. Jonah and Olaf try to swear out a complaint against Goff, but Goff in court is able to produce a phony contract saying that he lent them $1,000 and they’re trying to welch out of paying him back. Goff’s victims admit to signing the contract but claim they never received the money and only signed because Goff was holding a gun to their heads – literally. With no legal recourse against Goff, Jonah and Olaf lure him onto their fishing boat with the intent of killing him at sea, though in the end they can’t do it and Goff dies accidentally when he falls off the boat and is unable to swim to safety because he never learned to swim. That was the main change the Production Code Administration forced Warner Bros. and the film’s writers to make; in Shaw’s play the two old men actually murder Goff, which would have been a far better ending than the Code-enforced compromise. The filmmakers also changed Jonah’s and Olaf’s ethnicities from Jewish and Greek to Irish and Norwegian, respectively, which Eddie Muller thought was especially ironic given that the film was made at a studio owned by four Jewish brothers and the director, two of the writers (Rossen and Wald) and John Garfield (né Julius Garfinkel) were all Jews. Out of the Fog is a quirky movie in which the 1930’s gangster tropes, the political subtext and the intimations of film noir are somewhat at odds with each other, and yet the action is effectively staged by Litvak and brilliantly photographed by James Wong Howe. Eddie Muller argued that Out of the Fog looks more like a film noir than The Maltese Falcon, even if The Maltese Falcon is far closer to noir thematically, and it’s hard to square Thomas Mitchell’s performance with the noir world. Though he’s at the opposite end of the socioeconomic scale than he was as Scarlett O’Hara’s father in Gone With the Wind, he’s essentially playing the same part: the dad of a spoiled-brat woman who alienates her father by falling in love with a scapegrace man.