Well, tonight at the home movies was a bust. Despite the starring presence of Ida Lupino, John Garfield, and Thomas Mitchell and the misty, salty cinematography of James Wong Howe, I cannot recommend Anatole Litvak's Out of the Fog (1941) except as a salient object lesson in what's left of an anti-fascist allegory once it's gone through the strainer of the Production Code.
The original play The Gentle People was written by Irwin Shaw for New York City's Group Theatre in 1939 and performed by actors like Sam Jaffe, Sylvia Sidney, and Franchot Tone; subtitled A Brooklyn Fable, it is the story of two old fishing pals, both immigrants, one Russian-Jewish and the other Greek, whose small, cherished, working-class dream of buying a schooner and fishing the warm blue waters of the Caribbean is sharply smashed by the arrival of Harold Goff, an all-American capitalist-fascist gangster who institutes a protection racket on the waterfront, demanding and eventually beating five dollars a week out of the gentle pair like some New York Arturo Ui—but when the self-styled superman's attentions widen to include the aspiring, impressionable daughter of one of them, Jonah Goodman and his dear friend Philip Anagnos draw the line and fight back, resulting in the death of Goff and happy endings all round. Any similarities to persons living or dead, in America or in Europe, is fully intended and should have occurred to the audience as far back as Act I. Punching Nazis is all very well and good, but sometimes you might as well just clock them with a lead pipe and dump them into Sheepshead Bay.
I understand the attraction of this material for Warner Brothers, which in the same year as The Gentle People had produced the first anti-Nazi film of any major Hollywood studio, Confessions of a Nazi Spy. I understand assigning it to Litvak, Spy's director, and I even understand casting the key role of Goff with studio star John Garfield, a veteran of the Group Theatre and a terrifically tough actor whose sexual impact could be felt from the far side of the screen; he could have made something repellently compelling of the racketeer who boasts of the "education" he received "on the brake rods and the breadlines and the pool rooms and the beer parlors of the big cities . . . I got rocks inside me, baby," a casually possessive endearment for a girl whose father he's about to take a rubber hose to: "Purely for business reasons, you understand." I have to use the contrafactual because in the version of The Gentle People that made it through Breen's sieve, Goff is just another fast-talking thug, nastier than your average Cagney but political only in the sense that when he invokes "business" to justify his greed and violence, he's embodying the familiar dark side of the entrepreneurial American dream. Gone are his authoritarian allusions, extremely gone is his approving equation of American manifest destiny with Nazi Lebensraum. Except for the startling but easily missed moment where he throws a mocking, straight-armed salute to the two fishermen he's tightening the screws on, there is nothing in his manner or ideology to link him to the war now well underway in Europe, which in any case the screenplay by Robert Rossen, Jerry Wald, and Richard Macaulay does not mention. Perhaps it was deemed irrelevant, since there are no longer any Jewish characters in the script to be threatened by not-so-micro-aggressions like "There are superior people and there are inferior people. No harm meant, Goodman." Out of the Fog's Jonah Goodwin may be a Brooklyn tailor blinking warily through steel-rimmed spectacles, but he's a soundly Irish one played by Thomas Mitchell; his partner in fishing and crime is now John Qualen's Olaf Johnson, a timid short-order cook whose increasingly frantic efforts to ward off his romantically determined employer are played purely for comedy now that she's no longer an equally ardent admirer of Mussolini. Stella Goodman—sorry, Goodwin—has the authentic restlessness of Ida Lupino, but her sense of marginalization is strictly class-based and the boyfriend she drops for Goff is WASPily boring, played by Eddie Albert in a far cry from Elia Kazan. I must correct myself; George Tobias' Propotkin is Jewish and his narrative purpose is to be fleeced comically by a local cardsharp ("A jack I need? A doctor I need! Why don't you give me decent cards?") and to complain his way obliviously through a serious conversation in a steam room, Jonah and Olaf conspiring in the foreground while Propotkin in the background laments his misfortunes, no longer a relatable casualty of the Depression like his stage counterpart but a simple shlemiel who will never get wise ("Modern man is a size twelve foot with a size eight shoe! Massage the spine, please"). I have considered and cannot tell how Goff is meant to be interpreted, ethnically, stripped of his fascist rhetoric but not his predatory capitalism and portrayed by the gorgeously Jewish Garfield. I worry it may be a dumpster fire either way.
Perhaps even more damning than the deracination, the Code's insistence that murder must never be glorified or even go unpunished means that Jonah and Olaf cannot successfully rid themselves of Goff; having both tried and failed to summon the brutality to kill him, they can only breathe in wide-eyed relief, "We didn't have to do it," when the recoil of the racketeer's own violent actions causes him to topple off their boat mid-fight and drown. Even the mild irreverence of the prayer they offer as soon as they realize what's happened ("Thanks, God, for stepping in!") cannot redeem the scene for me. It is perfectly of its time; it's isolationist. But I know, and I suspect quite a lot of people in mid-1941 knew, that waiting nicely and meekly to be spared the moral low ground of fighting back against one's oppressors never actually stopped anyone from being oppressed, and in light of The Gentle People's explicit and active Jewishness it is a particularly unpleasant message. It's an obvious Code-mandated cop-out even if you don't know the source material. It just worsens exponentially if you do.
I see a lot of classic Hollywood movies where I am pleasantly surprised by the ability of writers, directors, and even individual actors to slide nuance and subversion past the nose of the PCA—or to thumb their own noses so blatantly that I have no explanation, only gratitude, for their work. Out of the Fog is not one of these. Honestly it's the opposite. I watched it because it looked like a potential early noir with a nice cast; I left it disappointed and shortly incensed. Garfield's firecracker way with dialogue and his confident chemistry with Lupino cannot save it. The unassuming sweetness of Mitchell and Qualen cannot save it. Aline MacMahon being a hypochondriac for half a scene cannot save it. After the censors got through defanging the political, racial, and socioeconomic angles of the film, there just wasn't much left onscreen except piers, nets, and Garfield looking sharp in a trenchcoat as black as a hat, the curl of his open mouth as he tosses a lighted match into a fisherman's boat, like a kid just playing with fire until he burns the orphanage down. And then lines like "And the Lord shall cause thine enemies that rise up against thee to be smitten before thy face." Whatever the filmmakers' best intentions, I can't help feeling that even if God smote Harold Goff, this time the fascists still won. This business brought to you by my gentle backers at Patreon.
The original play The Gentle People was written by Irwin Shaw for New York City's Group Theatre in 1939 and performed by actors like Sam Jaffe, Sylvia Sidney, and Franchot Tone; subtitled A Brooklyn Fable, it is the story of two old fishing pals, both immigrants, one Russian-Jewish and the other Greek, whose small, cherished, working-class dream of buying a schooner and fishing the warm blue waters of the Caribbean is sharply smashed by the arrival of Harold Goff, an all-American capitalist-fascist gangster who institutes a protection racket on the waterfront, demanding and eventually beating five dollars a week out of the gentle pair like some New York Arturo Ui—but when the self-styled superman's attentions widen to include the aspiring, impressionable daughter of one of them, Jonah Goodman and his dear friend Philip Anagnos draw the line and fight back, resulting in the death of Goff and happy endings all round. Any similarities to persons living or dead, in America or in Europe, is fully intended and should have occurred to the audience as far back as Act I. Punching Nazis is all very well and good, but sometimes you might as well just clock them with a lead pipe and dump them into Sheepshead Bay.
I understand the attraction of this material for Warner Brothers, which in the same year as The Gentle People had produced the first anti-Nazi film of any major Hollywood studio, Confessions of a Nazi Spy. I understand assigning it to Litvak, Spy's director, and I even understand casting the key role of Goff with studio star John Garfield, a veteran of the Group Theatre and a terrifically tough actor whose sexual impact could be felt from the far side of the screen; he could have made something repellently compelling of the racketeer who boasts of the "education" he received "on the brake rods and the breadlines and the pool rooms and the beer parlors of the big cities . . . I got rocks inside me, baby," a casually possessive endearment for a girl whose father he's about to take a rubber hose to: "Purely for business reasons, you understand." I have to use the contrafactual because in the version of The Gentle People that made it through Breen's sieve, Goff is just another fast-talking thug, nastier than your average Cagney but political only in the sense that when he invokes "business" to justify his greed and violence, he's embodying the familiar dark side of the entrepreneurial American dream. Gone are his authoritarian allusions, extremely gone is his approving equation of American manifest destiny with Nazi Lebensraum. Except for the startling but easily missed moment where he throws a mocking, straight-armed salute to the two fishermen he's tightening the screws on, there is nothing in his manner or ideology to link him to the war now well underway in Europe, which in any case the screenplay by Robert Rossen, Jerry Wald, and Richard Macaulay does not mention. Perhaps it was deemed irrelevant, since there are no longer any Jewish characters in the script to be threatened by not-so-micro-aggressions like "There are superior people and there are inferior people. No harm meant, Goodman." Out of the Fog's Jonah Goodwin may be a Brooklyn tailor blinking warily through steel-rimmed spectacles, but he's a soundly Irish one played by Thomas Mitchell; his partner in fishing and crime is now John Qualen's Olaf Johnson, a timid short-order cook whose increasingly frantic efforts to ward off his romantically determined employer are played purely for comedy now that she's no longer an equally ardent admirer of Mussolini. Stella Goodman—sorry, Goodwin—has the authentic restlessness of Ida Lupino, but her sense of marginalization is strictly class-based and the boyfriend she drops for Goff is WASPily boring, played by Eddie Albert in a far cry from Elia Kazan. I must correct myself; George Tobias' Propotkin is Jewish and his narrative purpose is to be fleeced comically by a local cardsharp ("A jack I need? A doctor I need! Why don't you give me decent cards?") and to complain his way obliviously through a serious conversation in a steam room, Jonah and Olaf conspiring in the foreground while Propotkin in the background laments his misfortunes, no longer a relatable casualty of the Depression like his stage counterpart but a simple shlemiel who will never get wise ("Modern man is a size twelve foot with a size eight shoe! Massage the spine, please"). I have considered and cannot tell how Goff is meant to be interpreted, ethnically, stripped of his fascist rhetoric but not his predatory capitalism and portrayed by the gorgeously Jewish Garfield. I worry it may be a dumpster fire either way.
Perhaps even more damning than the deracination, the Code's insistence that murder must never be glorified or even go unpunished means that Jonah and Olaf cannot successfully rid themselves of Goff; having both tried and failed to summon the brutality to kill him, they can only breathe in wide-eyed relief, "We didn't have to do it," when the recoil of the racketeer's own violent actions causes him to topple off their boat mid-fight and drown. Even the mild irreverence of the prayer they offer as soon as they realize what's happened ("Thanks, God, for stepping in!") cannot redeem the scene for me. It is perfectly of its time; it's isolationist. But I know, and I suspect quite a lot of people in mid-1941 knew, that waiting nicely and meekly to be spared the moral low ground of fighting back against one's oppressors never actually stopped anyone from being oppressed, and in light of The Gentle People's explicit and active Jewishness it is a particularly unpleasant message. It's an obvious Code-mandated cop-out even if you don't know the source material. It just worsens exponentially if you do.
I see a lot of classic Hollywood movies where I am pleasantly surprised by the ability of writers, directors, and even individual actors to slide nuance and subversion past the nose of the PCA—or to thumb their own noses so blatantly that I have no explanation, only gratitude, for their work. Out of the Fog is not one of these. Honestly it's the opposite. I watched it because it looked like a potential early noir with a nice cast; I left it disappointed and shortly incensed. Garfield's firecracker way with dialogue and his confident chemistry with Lupino cannot save it. The unassuming sweetness of Mitchell and Qualen cannot save it. Aline MacMahon being a hypochondriac for half a scene cannot save it. After the censors got through defanging the political, racial, and socioeconomic angles of the film, there just wasn't much left onscreen except piers, nets, and Garfield looking sharp in a trenchcoat as black as a hat, the curl of his open mouth as he tosses a lighted match into a fisherman's boat, like a kid just playing with fire until he burns the orphanage down. And then lines like "And the Lord shall cause thine enemies that rise up against thee to be smitten before thy face." Whatever the filmmakers' best intentions, I can't help feeling that even if God smote Harold Goff, this time the fascists still won. This business brought to you by my gentle backers at Patreon.
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