Life is always hard on the gentle people. The poor people. The people who just want to have a moment’s respite at the end of the day to wash away the drudgery. So it is for Jonah (Thomas Mitchell) and Olaf (John Qualen), two working stiffs living in a poverty-stricken section of Brooklyn near an old wharf. Jonah makes a meager living as a tanner and comes home every night to a nagging wife. Olaf works as a cook in a restaurant owned by a woman who is constantly coming on to him. He has to feign enough interest to keep her from firing him but make constant excuses to keep himself from being ensnared.
Buy Out of the FogThey find a little peace and happiness a few nights a week when they can slip away into the sea on their tiny boat and do a little fishing. They dream of buying a bigger boat one day (and have scrimped and saved just a little for that) and sailing to the Caribbean, where they’ll catch hundred-pound fish with “spears in their noses.”
They might accomplish that someday, too, but in comes Harold Goff (John Garfield), a wannabe wiseguy with dreams of his own. He demands our heroes pay him $5 a week as an insurance policy – to keep away the pirates. We know he is serious because the film begins with him lighting someone else’s boat on fire. Olaf wants to pay. He’s a simple man and doesn’t want to rock the boat. But Jonah has had enough. He’s been stretched to the limit and can’t take it anymore.
His daughter, Stella (Ida Lupino), feels a similar strain. She’s tired of her ordinary life. Her ordinary job at the telephone company. Her ordinary, boring boyfriend, George (Eddie Albert.) She longs for something more, something different. She finds it in Goff. He exudes confidence. His fancy clothes and fancy talk make him seem extraordinary to Stella. His ideas about taking what you want no matter who it hurts appeal to her. She even sticks with him after she learns he’s making her father pay him $5 per week.
There is an underlying anti-fascist theme to Out of the Fog. You can see the appeal of someone like Goff to someone like Stella. He lavishes her with nice gifts, takes her to nice places. In a world full of nice people just scraping by, it is exciting to see someone rising above, even if that means taking advantage of a few poor folks. It is a dog-eat-dog world out there, and it’s better to do the eating than to be eaten.
The play upon which the film is based, The Gentle People by Irwin Shaw, held communist sympathies, which were mostly excised by the Production Code. What’s left is an exultation of the ordinary. At one point, Olaf tells Stella that he’s just an ordinary man and she’s just an ordinary woman, but then he notes, “There’s one thing ordinary people can do just as well as anybody: They can love each other like – like millionaires or poets. That’s why it’s not such a terrible thing to be an ordinary person, Stella.”
It is a fascinating sentiment from today’s perspective. In a world where we are constantly telling our children that they are extraordinary, that they can do or be anything they want, watching a film extol the virtues of the ordinary is fascinating.
Naturally, Goff (or fascism) loses in the end. It might be exciting to follow someone who takes what he wants, but in the end it is a losing game for everyone.
John Garfield and Ida Lupino get the top billings, and they are both wonderful. Garfield plays it full of swagger and attitude. Lupino gives Stella nuance. She struggles to balance the excitement that Goff provides against knowing he is hurting people she loves. But it is Thomas Mitchell and John Qualen who are the aching, beating heart of the movie. There is such warmth between those two characters. It is a friendship well lived in, so beautifully rendered it makes me ache.
The direction by Anatole Litvak is fine, but he never finds a way to break the film out from its stagey origins. The large sets are magnificent. They built an entire small neighborhood in the studio, and it is full of little details that make it feel real and lived in. Cinematographer James Wong Howe fills the exteriors with fog and bounces the lights off of it to incredible effect.
The studio-mandated happy ending softens the effect of what comes before a little bit, but that is a minor complaint. Out of the Fog is a wonderful little film full of life and beauty. Something every gentle person can enjoy.
Warner Archive presents Out of the Fog with a gorgeous looking transfer. Extras include the films trailer plus two short animated films: The Heckling Hare and Hollywood Steps Out.
