Storm Fear (Theodora Productions, United Artists, 1955)

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

Afterwards I watched a TCM “Noir Alley” telecast of a film that was only a bit better than Bruce Lee Secret: Storm Fear, a sort-of noir made by actor Cornel Wilde, who not only starred but produced and directed as well. The title made me think of two far more famous movies, Storm Warning and Cape Fear. Storm Fear began as a novel by Clinton Seeley, who didn’t publish any other full-length book, and the screenplay was by Horton Foote, who was far more famous for the adaptation of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (also based on a novel by a writer who didn’t publish another book-length tale in her lifetime). It takes place in a deserted mountain cabin near the U.S.-Canadian border where aspiring writer Fred Blake (Dan Duryea, this time cast as a good guy for a change; one of Wilde’s purposes in making this movie was to show he could play roles other than stalwart heroes, so he cast himself as the villain and Duryea as a sympathetic but ineffectual good guy) lives with his wife Elizabeth (who had just become Mrs. Cornel Wilde for real after they’d both been in unhappy previous marriages, though judging from her performance in Douglas Sirk’s Shockproof the previous Mrs. Wilde, Patricia Knight, was a considerably better actress) and their son David (David Stollery). Their home is invaded in the middle of a snowstorm by a gang of bank robbers including David’s brother Charlie (Cornel Wilde) and his accomplice Benjie (Steven Hill, who decades later would appear as the first district attorney on Dick Wolf’s policier series Law and Order) along with Benjie’s girlfriend Edna Rogers (Lee Grant, who’d been blacklisted for alleged Left-wing sympathies after her breakthrough performance in William Wyler’s 1951 film Detective Story; Wilde insisted on casting her, and it was a good thing he did). With the police using snow plows to close in on them and the mountain roads so clogged with snow drifts they’re impassable, Fred, Elizabeth and David are stuck with their unwelcome visitors seemingly indefinitely.

Charlie was wounded in the leg during the robbery, and not surprisingly the wound has become infected and Elizabeth volunteers to remove the bullet – which she has to do al fresco because of that pesky legal requirement that any doctor who treats a bullet wound has to report it to the police. Fred has a wracking cough that makes one wonder (it made me wonder, anyway) why anyone thought it would be a good idea to live in the mountains and have to deal with super-cold winters instead of moving to a warmer, more temperate clime. We gradually learn that Elizabeth had an affair with Charlie before she married Fred, and David is in fact Charlie’s biological son, not Fred’s. Fred agreed to marry Elizabeth so the boy would have an official father and she wouldn’t have to suffer the stigma of an out-of-wedlock child in the censorious 1950’s, but the two never loved each other and we get the distinct impression that they’ve never had sex with each other, either. There’s also a hired man on the Blakes’ farm, Hank (Dennis Weaver at his twitchiest), who’s got the hots for Elizabeth and makes a crude pass at her in one scene. The fact that Storm Fear’s title is a mashup of two considerably better films (though it was made seven years before Cape Fear) gives a premonition of what the story would be like. Wilde and Foote blatantly copied the scene in John Huston’s Key Largo in which the failed nightclub singer (Claire Trevor in Key Largo, Lee Grant here) is forced to sing one of her old songs, though in this movie it’s the swing version of “Loch Lomond” instead of “Moanin’ Low” and Grant had a better voice (or a better voice double). They also took the relationship between the boy David and his “uncle Charlie” straight out of Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, though in that case the child impressed by the out-of-town relative who turns out to be a serial killer is a teenage daughter instead of an 11-year-old boy. David even ends up killing Benjie in self-defense the way Teresa Wright’s character killed Joseph Cotten’s in Shadow of a Doubt, though here David shoots him instead of pushing him off a train.

After the film Eddie Muller delivered an outro in which he said he didn’t particularly like it and thought Horton Foote’s dialogue was overly stagy and explained the characters and situations to death. He also thought that Foote and Wilde should have shot the whole film from the perspective of boy David and given it the aspect of a coming-of-age tale the way Foote’s script for To Kill a Mockingbird did. Even as the film stands, though, David is quite clearly the film’s most interesting character by a long shot – and also its most morally ambiguous one. He’s basically a decent kid but he forms an intense emotional bond with Charlie – though he ends the film with nobody telling him that Charlie is his biological dad, he seems to have realized it by the end because Charlie has bonded with him in a way Fred never did – and at the end David agrees to lead Charlie, Benjie and Edna out of the mountains over a secret pass after Fred sneaks out of the house to fetch the police. The trek ends disastrously, not surprisingly, as Edna finds she can’t walk through the snow wearing her mink coat (a symbol of affluence that itself dates this movie badly!) and ultimately she falls into a ravine. Instead of going down there and helping her as any decent person would, Charlie throws her a packet of the stolen money from the bank job and tells her it’s her share. To nobody’s surprise, Edna ultimately dies in the snow – and so does Benjie after David shoots him in self-defense. Hank the hired man picks off Charlie with a long rifle with a telescopic sight – we know that because we see a brief point-of-view shot through crosshairs as he aims it – and we assume Charlie is going to die, too. But at the end Charlie is in a hospital bed (where, praise be, no one is smoking: a far cry from Not As a Stranger, in which hospital personnel, patients and visitors were all shown puffing away big-time in the hospital’s sacred precincts!), telling David that he’s a no-good crook and the boy shouldn’t admire him (shades of Dead End and Angels with Dirty Faces!) before he’s presumably taken into police custody and arrested.

One thing Charlie doesn’t tell David is that he’s David’s real father – Fred, in the meantime, has been found dead of snow and exposure in the big storm, and there’s a hint Elizabeth and hired man Hank are going to get together and Hank is going to be David’s new stepdad. One thing that particularly bothered me about Storm Fear is that, for all the ferocity we’re told with which the storm has hit, we don’t see any of it: no winds, no snow drifts and no shots of actors’ breaths steaming in the cold. You’ll remember the last was a big deal to Frank Capra, who shot key scenes in Lost Horizon, Meet John Doe and It’s a Wonderful Life in a literal icehouse to get the shots of actors’ breaths steaming the way they would in a real snowstorm, but Wilde either couldn’t or wouldn’t be bothered to seek that level of realism, especially in an independent production (the film was made by Theodora, a company Wilde and Wallace co-founded, and released by United Artists) on a limited budget.