A tough family reunion in the small Southern town of Rock Point for sophisticated dress model Marsha Mitchell, in the 1951 thriller "Storm Warning." Before even joining her younger sister for the first time in two years, and meeting her new brother-in-law, Marsha witnesses the beating and shooting murder of an investigative reporter at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan. And later, she realizes that her sister Lucy's husband, Hank Rice, was one of the members at that KKK lynching! What's the poor gal to do...especially when nice-guy county prosecutor Burt Rainey is pressing her to play witness at the indictment? Anyway, that's the setup for what turns out to be a surprisingly tough and gritty suspenser, bolstered by a quartet of excellent performances by the film's stars: Ginger Rogers as Marsha, Doris Day and Steve Cochran as her family, and Ronald Reagan as the crusading prosecutor. At the time "Storm Warning" was made, films depicting the activities of the Ku Klux Klan were not exactly common. "The Birth of a Nation" (1915) had shown the group in a notoriously favorable light, while the 1936 picture "Black Legion," starring Humphrey Bogart, had fudged the issue a bit by calling the hooded vigilantes the Black Legion, despite presenting them as thugs. "Storm Warning" pulls no punches, and to its great credit presents us with a KKK comprised of bigoted average Joes; cowards and blustering bullies hiding behind their cowls and sheets. The film was directed by veteran Stuart Heisler, who had previously worked on such marvelous entertainments as the Susan Hayward vehicles "Smash-up" and "Tulsa" and the minor Bogey films "Tokyo Joe" and "Chain Lightning," as well as with Bette Davis on "The Star." Heisler keeps this picture moving nicely, and fills his screen with constant motion while adding almost noirish elements to his thriller (witness Ginger's nighttime walk right before the lynching; truly, the essence of noir!).
As for those previously mentioned performances, Doris is just fine in this early dramatic role (indeed, the story goes that her thesping here paved the way for her to appear in Hitchcock's 1956 classic "The Man Who Knew Too Much"); Cochran (so memorable a few years earlier in "White Heat") offers a perfect portrayal of a truly dangerous dimwit (just note how silkily but stupidly threatening he appears when he says to Marsha, "...a girl's figure's her fortune; you sure got your money invested in the right places!"); and Reagan, here in one of his finest hours, and shortly before appearing in the unjustly maligned "Bedtime for Bonzo," is very likable and appealing, despite what you might feel about his performance as U.S. president three decades later. And Ginger? She is just outstanding, in what might be her grimmest and nastiest moments on film. Viewers may be somewhat aghast as they watch the beloved singer/dancer/comedienne get brutally raped, punched in the face, kidnapped, and subjected to a flogging at a KKK midnight convocation, in the shadow, of course, of a huge burning cross. No moonlit waltzing here, that's for sure; more like a moonlit whipping! Turns out that Ginger could get noirish with the best of them; later that decade, she would appear with Edward G. Robinson in another noirish picture, "Tight Spot," in which she would again face the conundrum: to testify or not to testify. Very much the moral glue that holds the picture together, her character goes from big-city girl, to stunned outsider, to sacrificing sister, to abused victim, to steely avenger, all in the course of 93 minutes. She may not get to do The Picolino in this film, but she sure does manage to get herself into quite a pickle!
As for those previously mentioned performances, Doris is just fine in this early dramatic role (indeed, the story goes that her thesping here paved the way for her to appear in Hitchcock's 1956 classic "The Man Who Knew Too Much"); Cochran (so memorable a few years earlier in "White Heat") offers a perfect portrayal of a truly dangerous dimwit (just note how silkily but stupidly threatening he appears when he says to Marsha, "...a girl's figure's her fortune; you sure got your money invested in the right places!"); and Reagan, here in one of his finest hours, and shortly before appearing in the unjustly maligned "Bedtime for Bonzo," is very likable and appealing, despite what you might feel about his performance as U.S. president three decades later. And Ginger? She is just outstanding, in what might be her grimmest and nastiest moments on film. Viewers may be somewhat aghast as they watch the beloved singer/dancer/comedienne get brutally raped, punched in the face, kidnapped, and subjected to a flogging at a KKK midnight convocation, in the shadow, of course, of a huge burning cross. No moonlit waltzing here, that's for sure; more like a moonlit whipping! Turns out that Ginger could get noirish with the best of them; later that decade, she would appear with Edward G. Robinson in another noirish picture, "Tight Spot," in which she would again face the conundrum: to testify or not to testify. Very much the moral glue that holds the picture together, her character goes from big-city girl, to stunned outsider, to sacrificing sister, to abused victim, to steely avenger, all in the course of 93 minutes. She may not get to do The Picolino in this film, but she sure does manage to get herself into quite a pickle!