ESCAPE IN THE FOG (1945)
Article #919 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing date: 9-20-2003
Posting date: 2-17-2004
Directed by Budd Boetticher
Featuring Nina Foch, William Wright, Otto Kruger

A woman has a dream of a man being attacked on the Golden Gate bridge on a foggy night, and then meets the man who was in her dream when she awakes.

The fantastic element in the movie is that the dream comes true, and by saying that I don’t think I’m really giving too much away, as the dream comes true early enough in the proceedings that I don’t really feel I’m giving away the ending, and since the movie up to that point is clearly leading to the moment when the dream comes true, it doesn’t come as a surprise. Other than a possible minor science fiction element involving a recording mechanism hidden in a clock, that is the only fantastic element in this story, which is mainly a wartime espionage potboiler; in fact, the dream sequence seems more of a plot device to cause things to happen at a particular moment than anything else, and any themes of precognition in the movie are minor at best. The movie itself is sporadically entertaining, but not particularly memorable.