Escape in the Fog

Not every person honored in TCM's Summer Under the Stars is a star. A good example is tomorrow's "star", Nina Foch. She's a good actress, and even got an Oscar nomination for her small role in Executive Suite (airing tomorrow at 6:00 PM), but I don't think you can really call her a star. She did have some leading roles early in her career in noirs, and among those, Escape in the Fog is airing at 7:15 AM.

Foch plays Eileen Carr, who at the start of the movie is walking across what looks to be the Golden Gate Bridge one foggy night. A policeman thinks she might be considering suicide, but no; what with a war on it's apparently not uncommon for people to walk across the bridge. A car pulls up and a couple of guys in it are trying to kill the other passenger! Eileen unsurprisingly screams....

But fortunately for her, it's all a bad dream. Well, not quite all. She's in bed in a room at Ye Rustic Dell Inn, where she's been sent to recover from her wartime experience as a nurse on a ship that got bombed and sank. When some of the other guests come in to check up on her, she finds that one of them is the same guy she saw in her dream that the other guys were trying to kill!

That guy is Barry Malcolm (William Wright). He's taking some time off between jobs, although his next job is about to begin, as we learn when he and Eileen go back to San Francisco together. Barry gets out for a quick meeting in one house, where he meets Paul (Otto Kruger). Paul is a spymaster, and Barry is working for US intelligence. His latest job is to get some critical documents to Hong Kong.

What Barry and Paul don't realize is the bad guys, led by Schiller (Konstantin Shayne), are onto them. Under the guise of a clock repairman, they've inserted a listening device into Paul's study where he and Barry met, and that enables the bad guys to find piece together a good idea of what's going on. This enables them to capture Barry.

Fortunately, they didn't also capture Eileen, who by now has been let in on Barry's secret, or at least that he's a spy, which always seems a bit odd in any spy movie. But Eileen remembers that dream, and wouldn't you know, as she's walking across the Golden Gate Bridge she sees... Barry about to be killed by the bad guys!

Of course, they don't kill Barry since Eileen and a cop are there, but the documents fall over the railing and into San Francisco Bay, to be carried away by the currents, you'd think. Except that the Navy was testing a secret radio-controlled ship that night, and the documents landed right on the ship. The second half of the movie is the rest of the race to get those documents.

Directed by Bud Boetticher when he was still going under his original name Oscar, this is a fun little B movie that's not quite a noir, although you can be forgiven for anybogy thinking it is. Sure there are plot holes, but you have to come to expect that in a B movie. For what it is, it's darn entertaining, and definitely worth a watch.

I picked it up on Blu-ray last year as part of the Noir Archive set. I think it also got a standalone release at some point.

The Horn Blows at Midnight

Another of the movies that I finally got around to watching in order to do a post on here is The Horn Blows at Midnight, another of those movies that's on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive collection.

Jack Benny plays the third trumpet in an orchestra that plays for the Paradise Coffee radio show. The shtick of this show is that it's bedtime music, with an announcer hypnotically droning that Paradise is the coffee that puts you to sleep. As you can probably guess, this idiotic announcer puts everybody in the orchestra to sleep, and our third trumpeter starts having a dream sequence.

He's now in heaven, where his real-life girlfriend down on Earth, Elizabeth (Alexis Smith) is a harp-playing angel. One of the functionaries in heaven, the "Chief" (Guy Kibbee) has been looking at earth with a jaundiced eye. The planet hasn't been doing so well, what with all the war and destruction going on (the movie was released in 1945, a week after Franklin Roosevelt died). So heaven has decided that earth is going to be destroyed, by way of a horn being blown at exactly midnight.

However, the two guys who were sent down to destroy it decided they'd rather be human. Elizabeth just knows that her boyfriend (named Athanael up in heaven) is up to the job and it would give him a boost in status in heaven. So he gets sent down to earth to do it.

Naturally, problems ensue. He gets involved in an attempted robbery which, through a series of circumstances, results in a woman named Fran (Dolores Moran) trying to commit suicide. Our angel tries to prevent this and is successful, but in doing so, midnight passes.

Worse, the two guys who were sent down the previous night, the first trumpeter Doremus (John Alexander) and second trumpeter Osidro (Allyn Joslyn) decided that they wanted to stay on earth instead of destroying the planet. They've learned of Athanael's presence, and are determined to stop it by getting a hold of that trumpet.

Up in heaven, they know everything that's going on, and that earth has not been destroyed. Elizabeth offers to go down and help Athanael, and further complications ensue. Of course, as we already know, this is an obvious dream sequence running almost the entire length of the movie, so we know that the earth isn't really going to be destroyed.

Apparently the movie bombed at the box office, leading Jack Benny to joke about it on his radio and TV shows, much the way Johnny Carson would make fun of Bedtime for Bonzo because his Tonight Show director, Fred de Cordova, directed the movie. Benny joked that it was a terrible movie. But in reality, it's not as bad as he made it out to be. Sure, it's a bit of an acquired taste, and I think Benny really needs to be more of a supporting star with stronger leads around him. But it's no worse than a lot of silly plots for 1940s movies.

For people not so familiar with Benny, I'd start off with To Be or Not to Be, and then maybe go on to George Washington Slept Here. But for fans of 1940s movies, certainly give The Horn Blows at Midnight a shot