Lejos de la niebla

What a treat! I just watched this movie, and apart from the ending which makes things come into place a little too neatly and quickly for my taste, I loved it. Not least the sense of style that Litvak and cameraman par excellence Wong Howe use to make this not very inspiring script come to life. The huge set, a provincial fishing village in Brooklyn, is wonderfully lit and photographed, only partly visible through the fog that weigh on young lusty Ida Lupino's mind as she dreams of better things, of Cuba and crystal-clear water, of glamorous, dangerous men who take what they want and make no excuses for themselves. At times the story is so downbeat that it takes a small miracle here and there to rise above it, but nearly all is ultimately forgiven. John Garfield is deliciously wicked as the racketeer who sets out to destroy everybody's lives in order to eke out his own beastly living, Thomas Mitchell and Anthony Qualen are brilliant in the real starring parts as the two old-timers who finally realize that they have to make a stand against the evil of this world. In a small, but significant part as a hilarious, bankrupt man in a sauna, George Tobias shines. If it ever comes your way, you should see it. It's the real thing.

'Out of the Fog' is director Anatole Litvak's excellent film version of the Irwin Shaw play, 'The Gentle People,' starring two of Warner Brothers greatest stars, John Garfield and Ida Lupino. Garfield plays a cruel, small-time racketeer who terrorizes two Brooklyn fishermen as the one's restless daughter (Lupino) falls in love with him. Both stars offer terrific performances, with Garfield especially good in a rare villainous role. Top honors, though, go to Thomas Mitchell and John Qualen, two of our very best character actors, who steal the film from the stars with their top-notch performances as the terrorized fishermen.

Highly recommended.

John Garfield must have felt right back home with this gritty and relevant social drama that was originally on Broadway in 1939 as a Group Theater production. He fits the lead of Goff who's a dirty little protection racket gangster, terrorizing the gentle people who inhabit the Sheepshead Bay area of Brooklyn.

What must have annoyed Garfield no end was the ethnic cleansing of the story, the uprooting of all the Jewishness from the original play to the film. Out Of The Fog was originally entitled The Gentle People which was written by Irwin Shaw and ran for 141 performances on Broadway in 1939. If Garfield had not been in Hollywood in 1939 he could easily have been in the lead on Broadway.

On Broadway the part was played by Franchot Tone. Garfield fits the role perfectly, but I certainly would love to have seen what Tone did with the part. The Gentle People was hardly the kind of property that his studio MGM would have bought. Over at Leo the Lion Franchot Tone was rarely out of his dinner clothes, it was later when freelanced that he showed he was capable of this kind of role on screen.

The parts played by the two older men who are among several of Garfield's 'clients' are John Qualen and Thomas Mitchell. On Broadway they had distinctly Jewish last names and were played by Lee J. Cobb and Sam Jaffe. Garfield approaches these two men who are partners in a fishing boat and offers them 'protection' for $5.00 a week, a special rate because he's liking Mitchell's daughter Ida Lupino.

Shaw's play is of course an anti-Nazi allegory, but Warner Brothers decided to take the ethnicity away from the victims. Still the message is comes through loud and clear as Qualen and Mitchell decide that when the law doesn't work, they have to take matters in their own hands.

As always the mark of a good play or film is the development of lesser characters like Aline McMahon who is the longstanding perpetually suffering mother with continual aches and pains. Also Eddie Albert who plays Ida's steady reliable beau who looks rather plain next to Garfield's flash.

Robert Homans as the Irish cop on the beat who delivers a final summation for the results of the story has some words to the wise. There are times when conventional law enforcement won't do the job.

In Brooklyn, fishing is the hobby of the workers Jonah Goodwin (Thomas Mitchell) and Olaf Johnson (John Qualen) and they use to fish every night in their old boat. Jonah's daughter is the twenty-one year-old telephone operator Stella Goodwin (Ida Lupino), who is an ambitious young woman that dreams on leaving her neighborhood. She is the sweetheart of the worker George Watkins (Eddie Albert), a simple man that dreams on marrying her.

When the smalltime gangster Harold Goff (John Garfield) arrives in Brooklyn, he extorts money from Jonah and Olaf to "protect" their boat from fire and dates Stella. Jonah tries to convince his daughter that Goff is a racketeer that takes money out of poor ordinary people but she does not care to her father since she sees Goff as her chance to have a comfortable life and visit new places. When she discloses to Goff that her father has savings, Goff demands the money to Jonah. Now the old man is convinced that the only chance to get rid off Goff is to fight back.

"Out of the Fog" is a good drama with John Garfield performing a cold racketeer and Ida Lupino kind of lost in a contradictory role of a silly young woman that seems to love her father but even after knowing that her boyfriend is extorting him, she continues to date the racketeer. Despite the bleak and amoral conclusion, "Out of the Fog" is a great classic. My vote is eight.

Title (Brazil): "Quando a Noite Cai" ("When the Night Falls")

In spite of the effort to "open up" what had originally been a play, this drama, like so many other adaptations, remains stagebound and static. Even with imaginative sets, camera work and lighting, the scenes are essentially conversations: two (sometimes three) people talking, each representing a viewpoint in the story's conflict among moralities - scenes that are all but devoid of physical action, unless you count lighting cigarettes as action.

As for the characters themselves, they are largely one-dimensional, and unconvincingly unworldly for big-city people of the late 1930s. I found the Ida Lupino character hardly credible in her inability to resist the lure of small-time thrills promised by a fling with Goff: she does in fact resist him initially, she is gently warned about his likes by her father, with whom she has an excellent relationship, and despite her yearning for something more than what she has, Goff is no different from scores like him that she would have seen come and go over the years.

Lupino and Garfield are cast as "types," resulting in neither having an opportunity to utilize their considerable talents. Eddie Albert, as he so often does, plays an ineffectual nice guy. Aline McMahon is a complaining wife, a role that seems to have no particular function in the story. The honors do indeed go to Thomas Mitchell and John Quaylen, who make the most of characters given an opportunity to weigh things in the balance, change their minds, and act according to their principles. Even so, the "comical" closing scene is out of keeping with the overall mood of the picture.