Movie Time: Out of the Fog

It's....Movie Time! 

Today's post is about a little film from 1941 I saw sometime last year, a film noir directed by Anatole Litvak called Out of the Fog starring John Garfield and Ida Lupino.

Litvak directed the 1948 mental hospital expose The Snake Pit which I posted about in 2023.   

Today's film is about a couple of old dudes who just wanna fish. If only a certain damn gangster would leave them alone.   

Goodwin and Johnson are just a couple of old guys in Brooklyn NY who like to spend their spare time fishing. They have their eye on a sweet new fishing boat but it's hard to save up the dough. 

A gangster by the name of Harold Goff keeps hitting them up for protection money for their Brooklyn pier.  

And just to tighten the screws in Goodwin's gut a bit more, Goff is romancing his daughter, Stella.   And dang if she isn't falling in love with the conniving crooked bastard.  

Even though Goff is just using Stella to score  a little nest egg Goodwin saved up for his daughter. 

It's not like Goff is the only guy in town.  There's good ol' George, affable, amiable dock worker who keeps trying to pitch some good hearted woo in Stella's direction.  

• George wants to guide Stella down the path of righteousness.
• Goff wants to lead her down the path that rocks!

SCORE! Emperor's New Groove reference! 

Worried that Stella is being led astray by a smarmy creep who keeps squeezing every body in the neighborhood for protection money, Goodwin and Johnson come to a conclusion: Harold Goff needs to die.

These two guys are a couple of harmless, kind hearted schmucks who wouldn't hurt a fly but nonetheless, they proceed to craft a plan to lure Goff into a boat out into the harbor and kill him.  

SPOILER: things do not go exactly as planned.

BUT... Goff will get what a creep like him deserves while Goodwin and Johnson recover the money he extorted. 

The "It's That Guy Who Was In That Thing" Dept.

George is played by Eddie Albert who plays the peddler in Oklahoma! and will go on to play Oliver Douglas in the TV series Green Acres.  

Ida Lupino & John Garfield 

• John Garfield plays the completely amoral racketeer, Harold Goff, whose extortion schemes finally go too far, leaving his victims to take matters into their own hands. 
• Ida Lupino is the woman who loves him despite his criminal activity.

In 1941,  Out of the Fog was a bit ahead of it's time as a dark and gritty film noir. The source material for this movie was a play called The Gentle People by Irwin Shaw.  The play is even more pessimistic than the movie with Goff not answering for his crimes.  

Which is something the Motion Picture Production Code aka the Hays Office would not allow.  Whether it was the conniving gangster or the two old men who plot his death. 

So Goodwin and Johnson do lure Goff into their old fishing boat to kill him but it's Goff's own arrogance and temper that ultimately does him in.  

Out of the Fog has an unrelenting dark tone that sets the template for future film noirs like Double Indemnity (1944) and The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946).

Humphrey Bogart lost out on the role of Harold Goff to John Garfield because the studio thought Garfield was a much bigger name.  Which left Bogart free to make a couple of movies you may have heard of,  The Maltese Falcon (1941) and Casablanca (1942).

Out of the Fog is an unrelentingly dark and grim film so I can't say I recommend this as a fun movie time. But it is well made for it does, elevated by stylish direction of Anatole Litvak, making this a lost Hollywood gem and a prototype of film noir.