This Boetticher noir remains little known, despite its San Francisco setting, where a girl has a strange dream of murder, then encounters the victim in real life; and despite its virtues, which Dennis Jakob describes: "Escape in the Fog demonstrates clearly the kind of efficient visual storytelling completely absent from the screen today. Apart from a single scene (where the villains clumsily share a cab with the hero and heroine the better to keep track of them) the film is taut and tense throughout and completely without the usual padding. The dream which opens the film and is the portentous vision of things to come clearly makes it a part of the fog–shrouded B noir tradition-where a claustrophobic mood envelops the forward drive of a quickly paced, expertly executed thriller. The film clearly projects the virtues of a direct confrontation with dubious subject matter: it's a film of style, of convention, in a kind of misty dream world entirely owing to the director's inventiveness which bears not the slightest relation to the actual city of San Francisco as we know it."