I just finished watching 1951’s Storm Warning, and I’m feeling a little punch drunk.
Ginger Rogers plays a fashion model. In a deceptively benign opening scene, she’s on a bus with her travelling companion, a co-worker who has a crush on her. There’s a cute exchange between them, and an exposition dump where we learn she is getting off at the next stop to drop in on her sister she hasn’t seen in a long time.
It’s late at night when she disembarks. She immediately encounters hostile locals, such as a cab driver sitting at the counter of the hamburger stand who won’t take her fare. She runs back to the bus station as it turns off its lights. Behind her, the lights of the hamburger stand go out. Soon, she is walking down the street as other businesses start turning off their signs. I’m not sure if this is noir or horror. Noirror, maybe?
At the end of the block, she is about to cross in front of the police station when its lights go out. Fortunately, she pauses at the corner just as there is a commotion. A group of Klan members rush out from the side of the station, beating and shoving a prisoner. When he tries to run off, one of the Klansmen shoots him in the back twice. In shock, some of the hooded figures unmask themselves, revealing one of them to be Steve Cochran.
Rogers retreats into a doorway while the killers ensure their victim is dead. When they depart, she delicately steps into the light, only for the lights to come back on in the station as an officer opens a window and looks outside. In a panic, Rogers runs across the street and down an alleyway in a silhouette so perfect as to be worthy of the side-street shots in The Third Man.
She catches up to her sister (Doris Day) while she is at work, serving drinks at the bowling alley. It is strange to see Day so young. Rogers looks like she could be her mother. This made me realize how awesome it is a movie of that era has a woman of her age as the lead.
Rogers owns this movie and is especially strong in the scene where Day brings her back to her home…where it is revealed Cochran is the husband, of course. Not realizing Rogers saw him kill a man, Coogan is confused by her speechless, seething hatred towards him. I thought the rest of the runtime would be a cat-and-mouse game between the two, but she accuses him of murder within minutes of him showing up.
Instead, the movie recenters around Ronald Reagan’s district attorney and the case he has been building against the local Klan chapter. Reagan correctly surmises from the time Rogers’s luggage was checked-in at the depot that she had to have witnessed the murder. What the plot will hinge on is whether she will testify against her brother-in-law or if she will lie on the stand to save the man Day loves.
I’m not sure I have seen Reagan in anything before. I have always seen him labelled as a hack who never graduated from B-movies. His performance here is rock-solid, but maybe this film in an outlier in an otherwise lackluster career.
Sadly, the movie is still rather prescient, even if the Klan isn’t the threat it used to be. Businessmen and politicians are more worried about the court case’s potential damage to the town’s economy and image than they are about a man being murdered in cold blood. They are especially appalled this had to happen the week before Christmas. As Reagan drolly retorts, “So a week after Christmas would have been alright.”
Another prescient moment is when a radio reporter is insulted and threatened by people outside the courthouse—people who despise outsiders, the media and, most of all, national news reporters. It breaks my heart that so little could have changed since 1951. I’m just surprised the crowd is this picture doesn’t chant “FAKE NEWS!”
The element of Storm Warning that will stick with me is it has some jarring shifts in tone. Among the genres it dabbles in to varying extents are noir, earnest social drama, soap opera, courtroom drama, and the kind of overheated fare Tennessee Williams used to pen. And that is no way a dig at the picture. All I am saying is it kept me on my toes the entire time.
Dir: Stuart Heisler
Starring Ginger Rogers, Ronald Reagan, Doris Day, Steve Cochran
Watched on Warner Archive blu-ray