Storm Warning

"Storm Warning " is a very interesting movie.Few movies dealt with the KKK at the time and ,of course,we are far from "Birth Of A Nation"( where they were the good guys(!!!) who saved the Cameron family attacked by the villains (the black men!)).

"Storm Warning" gives a strong depiction of that sinister secret society."Without your hood,you are cowards!" one character says .Quite rightly so.Without their hoods,when they beat the retreat ,they are the guys -next -door ;they even bring their children to the meeting.

The action is tight ,everything happens in 24 hours .There are many suspenseful scenes ,particularly the first one in Lucy's house when Marsha discovers that her brother-in-law is part of them.Of course Tennessee Williams' shadow hangs over the threesome Marsha/Lucy/Hank who reminds everyone of Blanche/Stella/Stanley ;besides Doris Day resembles Kim Hunter.But it does not get in the way.On the contrary ,it gives Hank's character substance ,and Steve Cochran rises to the occasion.Ronald Reagan's part is less interesting,but fortunately,the script writers spared us a love affair between him and Ginger Rogers.

There's an almost Tennessee Williams quality to the storyline. A woman (Ginger Rogers) travels south to visit her sister (Doris Day) but enroute witnesses a murder by the KKK. Arriving at the sister's house, she discovers her married to one of the Klansmen (Steve Cochran), her crude brother-in-law. Tension builds when Rogers reports the incident to the young DA (Ronald Reagan)and the film builds to an interesting climax. Somewhat like watching Blanche du Bois visit her sister in a southern town and finding herself threatened by her earthy brother-in-law in 'Streetcar Named Desire'. All of the leads are excellent--Ginger Rogers, Doris Day, Ronald Reagan and Steve Cochran in this unusually strong melodrama, gritty and realistic with surprisingly good work from Doris Day who had only been in films a short time. Definitely a film that deserves more recognition and relatively unknown by today's film fans.

This film had a near-perfect lead cast...This was a terrific concept and storyline that begged to be executed to its fullest potential. The two weakest factors here are the screenplay (Richard Brooks notwithstanding) and the direction; the Fuchs/Brooks treatment should have been credited as Story, while a definite re-write was in order. Stuart Heisler, as good as he was, fell flat here. This film needed either King Vidor, Howard Hawks, or William Wellman at the directorial helm. Dalton Trumbo should have done the screenplay ... Or if he could have been persuaded, the one and only John Steinbeck (who scripted 'Viva Zapata' 1952)... Ginger Rogers was perfectly cast, as was the girl next door, Doris Day. Reagan was good but Fred MacMurray would have been better and edgier (a la 'Double Indemnity'). This film could have been a cinema masterpiece. There was at least one scene in which Reagan actually says "well..." Of all the superstar actresses of the Golden Age of Hollywood, Ginger Rogers had to be the most luscious and delectable...Simply because she didn't try to be. She just was...

Warner Brothers got back to its muckraking roots in this somber drama about an "outsider" who witnesses a Klan murder in a small town and is persuaded to keep quiet about it because her sister's scummy husband is involved in it. One of the aspects of this film that I appreciated was that the Klansmen aren't pawned off as buffoonish, mouth-breathing cretins as they often are in films like this (although Steve Cochran as Doris Day's white-trash husband comes close), which tends to trivialize them and make them seem a bit less dangerous than they really are. The film shows the people who run the Klan to be fairly prominent local citizens--which is, unfortunately, often the case in real life with organizations like the Klan--which actually makes them far more dangerous than if they were just a semi-literate bunch of backwoods hillbillies. Doris Day gives a bravura performance in her first dramatic role; she tends to just skirt the edge of "going over the top" on a few occasions, but director Stuart Heisler skillfully brings her, and the rest of the picture, under control, and it does have the gritty, noir-ish look reminiscent of the great Warners films of the '30s and '40s. Ginger Rogers is very good as Day's visiting sister who realizes the type of dilemma her sibling is caught in, and Ronald Reagan turns in one of his best performances as the local District Attorney who knows that Rogers saw the murder and needs her to testify in order to bring down the local Klan organization, which he is determined to do.

At a time when the government was far more interested in ferreting out "Communists"--who it was convinced were the driving forces behind the burgeoning civil rights movement--than it was in eliminating far more dangerous menaces like the Klan, it took guts for Warners to come out with a film like this. The movie actually was condemned as "Communist propaganda" by various right-wing groups, a charge Warners was used to by this time, and the studio courageously stood behind the film.

Day, Rogers, Reagan, even Steve Cochran are at the top of their form here. A previous poster has called this a "forgotten gem", and he hit the nail right on the head. This is a first-rate film that isn't as well known as it should be, and is most definitely worth a look.

This punchy, noirish thriller, superbly shot by Carl Gutherie, has all but disappeared despite its Grade-A cast that includes Ginger Rogers and Doris Day, both cast very much against type, as sisters in a small town where the Klu Klux Klan have the upper hand. Rogers is the sister who witnesses a Klan killing only to discover sister Doris is married to the killer, Steve Cochran. Ronald Regan is the investigating District Attorney. It's a simplistic little story, closer in tone to the social-conscience movies Warners turned out in the thirties than to the studio pictures of the period with a fine Richard Brooks/Daniel Fuchs screenplay and both Day and Rogers are surprisingly good with nary a song between them. It might have a B-Movie sensibility and it may bang its drum a little too loudly but at least it's honest and well-intentioned, if unusually violent for the time, and is well worth seeing.