Excellent but underrated film

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

Watching it is like watching the spectacle of a class clown at their best: you laugh at their jokes, instigate their defiance, and "ooooh" when they get in trouble.

Ginger Rogers and Doris Day are believably cast as sisters in Storm Warning. Steve Cochran plays one of his usual shady characters. And Ronald Reagan appears in his last picture for Warners as a prosecutor who saves the day.The subject matter is rather dark. It's a story about Civil Rights and the Ku Klux Klan. Shot in black and white photography, the film's noir aspects are gripping to say the least, and aside from a somewhat melodramatic ending, the film has a fair amount of social realism in it.Originally Jack Warner wanted Joan Crawford to do this picture at the end of her contract. But she told him that nobody would believe she was Doris Day's sister.

Storm Warning is directed by Stuart Heisler and written by Richard Brooks and Daniel Fuchs. It stars Ginger Rogers, Ronald Reagan, Doris Day and Steve Cochran. Music is by Daniele Amfitheatrof and cinematography by Carl E. Guthrie. Stopping over to see her sister in Rockpoint, model Marsha Mitchell (Rogers) witnesses the Ku Klux Klan committing a murder and sees two of the perpetrators with their hoods off. Upon arriving at her sister's house, she is stunned to find that the beau of Lucy's (Day) life is one of the killers! Should she do what is morally right? What District Attorney Burt Rainey (Reagan) wants her to do? Or should she think of her sister and keep Hank Rice (Cochran) out of prison? Lets get the big complaint out the way first. What has been written before is true, the issue of race hatred and the KKK is not dealt with, this really does soft soap that particular issue in favour of a more - less - controversial angle. Film does still portray them as cowardly murderous thugs hiding behind hoods, even portraying them as dimwits following one almighty Grand Wizard (or is it Dragon?) who is more concerned about cash than colour of skin, but trivialisation of a hot topic occurs. We are the law here. The judges and jury! So, accepting it on its own "non social issue message" terms, then it's a thoroughly engrossing piece of film noir styled melodrama. Thematic noir staples are within, with bigotry, fate, family dysfunction and a woman in peril scenario (the fox in the hen house situation is super) all bubbling away under the moral obligation surface. Laid over the top is no short amount of atmospheric style, as Heisler (Among the Living/The Glass Key) and Guthrie (Backfire/Caged) produce dank shadowed streets, misty jails and a big court room segment bathed in slatted shadows befitting the moral discord filtering around the room. Don't give me that Halloween routine. Heisler proves to have a good eye for imagery as well as technical nous, such as snaps of child Klan members or the symbolic falling of a burning cross. He also marshals his cast very well. Don't believe any review that says Rogers is miscast, she simply isn't, she's feisty, sexy and strong, yet vulnerable as well, she's perfect for the role that was originally intended for Bacall who bailed out. And with Day exuding a confused innocence that hits the right notes, Heisler's reputation as a great director of actresses holds weight here. Reagan and Cochran are fine, with Cochran veering away from his normal cool, calculated persona to offer up a characterisation we rarely saw from him. It misses a trick to really strike a dagger in the KKK scheme of things, and yes some of it feels like lower grade Tennessee Williams. However, the makers turn this Southern town into a diseased noir landscape, where the story is paced and performed with skill, and it all builds moodily to a truly great finale. Well worth seeking out. 8/10

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!

Stark, brutal Warner Bros. drama about the Ku Klux Klan, in much the same vein as the studio's "Black Legion" from 1937 (and with curious echoes of Tennessee Williams' "A Streetcar Named Desire", written in 1947). Fashion model from New York checks in on her recently-married kid sister once she's down South, only to run into a KKK lynch-mob and their murder of a white male reporter who was attempting to unmask the Klan's dirty financial dealings (seems the Grand Dragon was doing a little money laundering on the side, as well as evading the I.R.S.). Ginger Rogers doesn't dance, Doris Day doesn't sing, and Ronald Reagan (as the County Prosecutor) doesn't win one for the Gipper; still, the star-trio does remarkably well with this provocative scenario, unusual material for these particular actors. The middle portion during a court hearing (with Rogers perjuring herself on the stand to keep her brother-in-law out of trouble) sags a bit with the weight of too much melodrama--and for someone who dearly wants to get out of town, Ginger certainly takes her time getting her act together--but otherwise the film is heated and prickly, overwrought at times but engrossing. *** from ****