starring Ginger Rogers, Ronald Reagan, Doris Day
directed by Stuart Heisler
93 minutes
Marsha Mitchell (Ginger Rogers) stops in Rock Point where Lucy (Doris Day), her recently married sister, lives. Marsha arrives at night and is unable to get a cab. She walks through town looking for her sister and witnesses a White man get lynched by the KKK. The Klansmen don’t see her but a couple of them aren’t wearing hoods and she sees their faces.
She later learns that the faces she saw were those of Hank Rice (Steve Cochrane), her brother-in-law, and Charlie Barr, the head Klansman. The murdered man was a reporter from out of town. Burt Rainey (Ronald Reagan), a lawman from the county government, investigates the murder. No one in town wants Rainey’s investigation to succeed.
Hank, Lucy, and Barr all put pressure on Marsha to leave town and not talk to Burt about what she saw. Marsha tells Burt she saw Klansmen but they were wearing hoods. It is enough for him to hold a hearing and force her to stick around. She is his star witness but she changes her story when she’s on the stand and says she didn’t see anything. No one gets accused of murder.
Hank is delighted. He gets even more obnoxious after the hearing. He catches up to Marsha while she is packing and getting ready to finally leave town. He attacks her and tries to rape her but Lucy comes back home in the middle of it all. Lucy tries to defend her sister. Hank beats them both up.
Hank’s friends show up and help him drag Marsha to a Klan rally led by Barr. They insist that she not breathe a word of what she saw, ever. She refuses to promise to do that. Barr has one of his henchmen whip Marsha.
Burt Rainey shows up at the rally with some backup. He’s there to get Marsha. He saves her but things get messy and before the moment is over both Lucy and Hank are dead.
Thoughts
This is the second of four movies from this year’s Noir City DC Film Festival at the AFI that I watched. The theme of the 2022 festival is “They Tried to Warn Us”.
Richard Brooks, who also wrote the book upon which Crossfire (1947) was based, wrote the first draft of Storm Warning.
I don't recall if I have seen any other movies in which that Ginger Rogers, Ronald Reagan, or Doris Day have appeared. I'm sure that I have not seen any recently.
Despite the fact that the KKK are the bad guys in this movie there are virtually no people of color in it. There are a few African-American extras in a few crowd scenes but that's it. None of them are seen close up or have any lines.
I thought the scene where Marsha meets Hank for the first time was really tense. He does most of the talking. I kept waiting for her to get a word in edgewise. I wanted to know what she was going to say. They really dragged that out in a good way.
I wouldn’t say this is a great movie but I enjoyed it. It felt out there, especially for a movie of this era.
Storm Warning was the primary topic on Episode 13B of Red Time for Bonzo. It's worth a listen, especially if you have seen the movie. There is more than one mention of Crossfire in that episode even though it is for the most part about Storm Warning.
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