Out of the Fog

Anatole Litvak's 1941 film adapts Irwin Shaw's play and is set on the Brooklyn waterfront. A racketeer forces boat owners to pay protection money, and two fed-up fishermen decide to eliminate him themselves rather than go to the police. At the same time the racketeer takes up with the daughter of one of them. The gangster played by John Garfield is the kind whose charm cannot be separated from his menace; Stella, played by Ida Lupino, sees the man as a chance of escape, and the film does not judge her for it. It belongs to the socially minded vein at Warner Bros. at the time and frames the desire to escape as a question of class. The ending differs from the play because of the Hays Code, which weakens the story's logic. Who it's for: viewers interested in classic Hollywood crime drama and the work of Ida Lupino and John Garfield. Who it's not for: anyone who will find the Code-altered ending forced, or the melodrama excessive.