|
The battlefield at home, a character has a term for it, "psychological warfare." Thick mist on the Golden Gate Bridge like a vast Turkish bath, a midnight stroll gives way to a sudden ambush and the heroine (Nina Foch) wakes up screaming. "Sounded as if you were being murdered in your sleep!" Oneiric premonitions courtesy of the military nurse recovering from a nervous breakdown, her fellow patient (William Wright) is a government agent and also the victim in her nightmare. His latest mission points to Hong Kong, lost classified papers and fascist spies keep him in San Francisco, where "the currents of the bay" come in handy for hiding bodies. "You never know what'll come out of the fog." Plenty of ingenuity in this Budd Boetticher thriller, above all a sense of déjà vu strikingly cultivated out of arcane dreams and newfangled mechanisms. (The girl reenacts her vision to rescue her captured beloved, a conversation is haltingly replayed in a recording device.) The attentive soundscape encompasses the gentle tick-tock cacophony of a Chinatown clock shop and the whistle of an unseen ship in the gloom, the German infiltrator (Konstantin Shayne) examines watches as a cover yet his magnifying glass flashes at the camera like a glaring monocle. "Well. You're a little out of character, aren't you?" A dash of shoestring Lang that appropriately builds to a sleight-of-hand memory of The Testament of Dr. Mabuse in a room quickly filling with gas. Happy endings mean striving to glimpse moonlight through the haze. With Otto Kruger, Noel Cravat, Ivan Triesault, Ernie Adams, and Shelley Winters. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |