Rising up quickly in the period of one year, Bette Davis appeared in a string of B pictures that showed off her pop eyed versatility. She's involved with men involved in obvious criminal activity, and pays dearly for it, almost dragging her stepsister Margaret Lindsay down with her. Surrounded by a versatile cast of Warner Brothers contract players, top billed Bette gets a surprising exit, and this changes the focus of the story. Bette had played bad girls before, but here, she's as bad as she would be when she was at her worst. That being said, you can see that it was only a matter of time before she hit her stride, and that came the same year on a loan out and a cockney accent. This for the most part is standard Warners B fare, but Bette makes it a must.

I'm always amazed at how many plots and sub-plots writers were able to inject into films that lasted little more than an hour. FOG OVER FRISCO (the title always reminds me as suitable for a Charlie Chan flick), moves at a fast pace, has some well developed characters, and the plot about a missing society girl (BETTE DAVIS) and her half-sister (MARGARET LINDSAY) is involving from start to finish.*****POSSIBLE SPOILERS AHEAD***** Davis looks terrific at 25 (the same year she played her breakthrough role in OF HUMAN BONDAGE). She moves with all the skill of an actress sure of her authority as a bad girl on the screen. Unfortunately for the viewer, her character gets killed off midway through which leaves it up to Lindsay and bland DONALD COOK to carry the rest of the film.They do manage to keep the plot spinning along nicely toward a fast and furious conclusion involving the kidnapping of Lindsay and the rescue efforts of all concerned. ROBERT BARRAT is an interesting figure as an eavesdropping butler who turns out to be a Secret Service man on the trail of a gang of gangsters led by IRVING PICHEL. Pichel has an interesting screen presence and would later become a director.Neat little mystery/suspense film is directed in fine form by William Dieterle.Trivia note: This is my 3,000th review at IMDb! This will be a wrap for awhile now that I've reached that goal.

FOG OVER FRISCO is getting some interesting comparisons to the work of Alfred Hitchcock, most notably his film PSYCHO. While it can be said that there are some similarities with the sisters where one of them winds up on the wrong side of the tracks and the other gets the unwanted role of having to find out what happened to her, this is where similarities end. Hitchcock wanted to shock the audiences with his story and led us to believe that Janet Leigh, already an established star, would survive the story to the last reel. Yes, there was the element of money her character had taken, the same way Davis' character also gets involved in a plot to steal some securities (I think I have it right, I vaguely recall it being "money in stock form"), but in 1934 Davis was just one of many contract players wading through the mire of these quickies that Warner's was giving her. When her character meets her own fate in FOG OVER FRISCO, it's not a shock. It's actually closer to being expected: she's too crude during her short screen time and there is an uncomfortable scene at a dinner table that makes her character unlikeable.Concealing the identity of the murderer also seems to be another point of comparison in between this movie and Hitchcock's classic. Again -- I believe this is an assumption: being a taut crime drama with a good (if clumsy) note of suspense, the need to leave the audience hanging is an old a trick as time itself. I doubt Hitchcock would have even learned about this movie since his inspiration was the book itself which was a loose account of the Ed Gein murders. If he did see this film, no one will ever know, but I personally believe Hitchcock did not use FOG OVER FRISCO even as a vague point of reference. Perhaps the fact that the movie looks different from a cinematic point of view -- it seems to be experimenting with how to transition from one scene to the next, something that only film noir, Orson Welles, and Hitchcock would engage in during the 1940s onwards. At least, it gave Margaret Lindsay a chance to carry the movie on her own since she tended to play the supporting role and would be Davis' rival in JEZEBEL.

This film is so rapidly paced that some of the action flew by me too fast to fully understand, although some of the confusion was cleared up in the end. Director William Dieterle used fancy wipes rather than fade-outs and overlapping sound to speed the action along. I prefer a more leisurely pace to enable me to digest the material. Still, the ending was exciting with location shooting in San Francisco a big plus, and it's always enjoyable to watch Bette Davis, who had emerged as a big star by this time. Hugh Herbert provides very minimal comic relief as an inept photographer. I was reminded a bit by Hitchcock's film "Psycho (1960)," but you'll have to watch this film to see what I mean.