Storm Warning

The set-up is nearly identical to another 1951 release, Elia Kazan’s A Streetcar Named Desire: a glamorous blond from the big city arrives in town to meet her naïve, pregnant sister’s new, handsome husband, a sweaty, cocksure, working-class brute who will try to rape her (“some women like to be hurt”) before all is said and done. In Stuart Heisler’s Storm Warning, however, the virile husband (Steve Cochrane at his sleaziest) is more than just a jerk: he’s a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Ginger Rogers plays the visiting sister Marsha, who witnesses a KKK murder moments after she arrives, placing her in immediate danger, and Doris Day plays Lucy, whose infrangible love for her husband hangs on until the very end. Notably in the plentiful outdoor night scenes (shiny streets, backwoods rituals), Heisler paints the noir on thick, while Rogers’ performance stands out as a psychological battle between rage, shame, and love (for her sister); the scene of recognition, in which Marsha remains silent for several minutes after meeting her new brother-in-law, is a marvel of both acting and direction. The melodrama escalates to interrogation under the ceiling light, perjury in the courtroom, sexual assault in the dark, and a public whipping under a burning cross, a final scene that somehow both strains credulity and punctuates the film perfectly. The future President Ronald Reagan plays good cop Burt Rainey.