Depending on how you
look at it, the most distinctive aspect of Stuart Heisler’s Storm Warning
is either bizarre or offensive: it dramatizes the menace of the Ku Klux Klan
without ever mentioning racism, or any other form of bigotry. The film startles
early on with the sudden outburst of a Klan lynching, and then again in a different way when their victim is shown to be white; we learn he’s a journalist who was poking around in
their finances, uncovering evidence of both tax evasion and of the leaders
siphoning off money for their own use. All that flows from there is strangely
compromised: the film effectively stirs one’s sense of outrage as it depicts
the fear, corruption and compromise that underlies small town America, but its
lack of forthrightness makes it feel oddly abstract (the film has been
interpreted as a parable of the Hollywood blacklist, but unlike, say, body snatching invaders
from space, the KKK is surely too historically and culturally specific in its
imagery and resonances to be a well-chosen allegorical vehicle for something
entirely different). That aside, the narrative and cast easily carry one along:
Marsha Mitchell (Ginger Rogers) arrives late at night to visit her
recently-married sister (Doris Day), finding herself the only witness to the
atrocity, then recognizing one of the perpetrators as her sister’s husband: the
district attorney (Ronald Reagan, solid but hardly suggesting future President-level
qualities, even with the benefit of hindsight) subpoenas her to testify and
she’s torn between her legal and moral obligations and familial loyalty, going
first one way, and ultimately of course the other (made easier by the husband’s
increasingly spectacular awfulness). The climax sums up the film’s oddity: it’s
an exciting orchestration of peril, but one that treats the Klan as a weird kind
of social club, and one that ultimately rapidly crumbles all too easily in the
face of a real test.
