Storm Warning 1951

     The setting of this film is somewhere in the deep South.  Marsha Mitchell is a model based in New York.  She is on her way near Rock Point where her sister Lucy lives with her husband.  Marsha hasn’t seen her sister in a while and she hasn’t met Hank Rice yet.  She’s planning on just staying for less than 24 hours and then she needs to leave for her next modeling job.  She takes a bus to Rock Point.  It’s dark when she gets in and she sees a taxi outside the bus station.  When she asks about a driver, she is told there isn’t one but the driver is sitting right in front of her?  He tells her it’s nine blocks to her sister’s house and she can walk?  She checks her suitcase and as soon as she starts walking, she witnesses the Ku Klux Klan murder a man.  She hides behind a corner so the Klan will not see her there.  She later learns that the man is Walter Adams and is an out of town reporter and he planned to write an article about the Klan.  Marsha saw the faces of two of the men and now she is very frightened.  When Marsha arrives at Lucy’s house, in just a few minutes she learns that Lucy’s husband Hank was one of the men.   Marsha makes a BIG mistake and she confronts Hank and Lucy about what happened.  Lucy didn’t know that Hank was part of the Klan.  The county prosecutor Burt Rainey knows that the Klan committed the murder and everyone in town has the same idea.  Burt needs just one person to come forward at a hearing and tell what they saw!!

     I didn’t know there would be violence against women and a murder in this film.  There is also a very scary meeting the Klan members.  I didn’t know what was going to happen to Marsha after she saw the murder.  I was also surprised that Lucy’s husband was a member of the Klan.  In addition to being a Klan member, he’s shifty, sleazy, a liar, doesn’t know when to keep his mouth shut, he’s loathsome and despicable.  There isn’t one redeeming thing I can say about him and the other members of the Klan.  

    

93 min, Drama directed by Stewart Heisler with Ginger Rogers, Ronald Reagan, Doris Day, Steve Cochran, Hugh Sanders, Lloyd Gough, Raymond Greenleaf, Ned Glass, Paul E. Burns, Walter Baldwin, Lynn Whitney, Stuart Randall, Sean McClory.    

Note:  Imdb 7.3 out of 10, Amazon 4.1* out of 5* with 81 reviews, Rotten Tomatoes 56% audience, Letterboxd 3.5* out of 5*, TCM Leonard Maltin 2.5* out of 4* average user rating 4.02* out of 5*.

Special Note:  Filmed in Corona and Burbank, California.  Joan Crawford was asked to take the role of Marsha.  She told Jack L. Warner that no one would believe that Doris Day was her sister??  Doris Day was happy to co-star with Doris Day.  Doris has aspired to be a dancer and Rogers was one of her childhood idols.  Lauren Bacall was asked to star but she went to Africa with her husband Humphrey Bogart to film The African Queen 1951.  This is Doris Day’s first non-singing role.  Warner Brothers also released A Streetcar Named Desire in 1951.  The relationship between Ginger Rogers’ character and her on-screen brother-in-law Stephen Cochran has a resemblance to that between Blanche Dubois and Stanley Kowalski.  Ronald Reagan was a vocal and active liberal Democrat.  Between 1950 and when he entered politics as a 1966 candidate for governor of California, his beliefs took a 180-degree turn.  He became a “right-wing” Republican?  There is an Australian movie 2008 with the same title with Nadia Fares, Robert Taylor.