Storm Warning (Warner Bros., 1949, released 1951)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Vertigo Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” came on for a film that is actually only tangentially film noir: Storm Warning, shot in 1949 but not released until 1951 and essentially a throwback to Jack Warner’s “ripped from the headlines!” dramas from the 1930’s. It takes place in the fictitious Southern town of “Rockport” and deals with model Marsha Mitchell (Ginger Rogers), who on a trip to a fashion show in Baltimore stops over in Rockport to visit her married sister, Lucy Rice (Doris Day). When she arrives she finds that the bus station and the diner close well before they’re supposed to, and the town’s one cabdriver announces that he’s not picking up any passengers. Marsha is forced to walk to the recreation center where Lucy works, and along the way she sees a lynch mob of people in full Ku Klux Klan regalia, including white robes and hoods, drag a prisoner out of the town jail and kill him on the spot. Though most of the Klansmen are hooded, one isn’t, and later when Marsha meets Lucy and her husband Hank (Steve Cochran), she recognizes him as the non-hooded Klansman who actually killed the victim. The case falls to the local prosecutor, Burt Rainey (Ronald Reagan, whose presence in this movie as an apostle of racial justice and civil rights practically defines “irony” in light of his later political career), who is determined to break the Klan’s stranglehold over Rockport once and for all.

The victim was a reporter named Walter Adams (Dale Van Sickel), who had come to Rockport to do an exposé on the Klan, and when the local Klan boss, Charlie Barr (Hugh Sanders) – who also runs a fertilizer business for which Hank Rice works as a truck driver – makes the predictable speech about how Rockport doesn’t need “northern agitators” coming down to stir trouble, Rainey points out that Adams was actually from Birmingham, Alabama. Rainey thinks he has the witness he needs when Marsha turns up, but at the coroner’s inquest she lies and says she saw nothing because she wants to protect her sister against being exposed as the wife of a cold-blooded killer. Storm Warning was directed by Stuart Heisler (a decent Hollywood hack) from a script by Daniel Fuchs and Richard Brooks, and it’s mostly a good movie except for a finale that goes way over the top. Hank Rice gets plastered at the local bar following the verdict of the inquest that Walter Adams met his death at the hands of “person or persons unknown,” and he comes back to the home where he lives with his wife and Marsha is staying. Drunk out of his gills and certain that Lucy is at work all night and won’t be coming home soon, he threatens to rape Marsha – a scene which led Eddie Muller to compare the film to A Streetcar Named Desire, also a story about a woman who comes to visit her sister in a Southern town and finds the sister married to a macho boor who tries to rape her. Muller even suggested Steve Cochran would have been good casting for Stanley Kowalski if Warner Bros. hadn’t been able to get Marlon Brando.

The revelation that her husband is a killer leads Lucy to decide to leave him, and she and Marsha plan to leave town together – only the Klan gets wind of this and, realizing that once Hank and Lucy break up Marsha no longer has an incentive to protect them, they determine to kidnap Marsha. At best they intend to terrorize her into submission and at worst they plan to kill her, and in a truly kinky scene they actually whip her with five lashes before Rainey shows up with one police car. Rather than overpower him as they could easily have done, the Klansmen doff their white robes and hoods and flee like the panicked cowards they are, and Hank goes totally off the rails and shoots Lucy. At first I thought the filmmakers were going to leave it uncertain as to whether Lucy lived or died, but as the film fades out it’s clear that Lucy is dead – Marsha’s lie to protect her sister literally got her killed, ah the irony! – and Muller noted in his outro that in Doris Day’s long film career this was the only time her character died. Muller also compared this film to the 1937 Black Legion, about a real-life bunch of wanna-be Klansters which he said sparked a lawsuit from the Klan alleging that Warner Bros. was defaming them (though if the Ku Klux Klan had sued anybody over Black Legion it should have been the real Black Legion for copyright and/or trademark infringement!). Sorry, but though Storm Warning is a good movie Black Legion is an even better one, partly because it’s far better cast – the star is Humphrey Bogart – and frankly I was hoping Storm Warning would have ended like Black Legion, with Cochran on Bogart’s character arc of a basically decent man who got hoodwinked into joining an evil organization and killing someone, then turning state’s evidence against them. And I certainly would have wanted Doris Day to live at the end instead of going the route of Bette Davis’s innocent sister in Marked Woman and getting killed just for being a decent and totally law-abiding person literally caught up in a reign of terror!