Doris Day Marries a Klansman in Storm Warning

A genre-blending mess of a film that takes frosty relations between in-laws to extremes, Storm Warning is also notable for its unusual denouement, in which Ginger Rogers is lashed (seven times!) with a whip. Alas, that is only the beginning of her suffering — her pregnant sister still has to die in her arms. We could debate whether Warning is more film noir or melodrama, but the question I kept returning to was whether its final 20 minutes might qualify as a primitive iteration of torture porn.

Rogers plays Marsha Mitchell, a New York-based model who hasn’t seen younger sister Lucy (Day) in two years. She takes a business trip detour to Rock Point, the small town where Lucy lives with new husband Hank (Steve Cochran). Shortly after her arrival, she witnesses the murder of an incarcerated reporter by a mob of Klansmen. Her family reunion takes a twisted turn when she recognizes Hank as one of the killers.

Cochran, sweaty and brutish and clad for a time in a dirty t-shirt, takes some cues from Stanley Kowalski; Day is all eyes and hair as the naive sister who doesn’t want to believe the worst about her man. Rogers is where things get a little strange. She spends nearly the entirety of the movie looking both dyspeptic and like someone just defecated in front of her.

In 2022, we’d observe her largely frozen facial muscles and think “Ah, new fillers.” In 1951, even her dim-bulb brother-in-law senses her barely concealed contempt. “What do you keep looking at me like that for?” he asks, shortly after their introduction. “I don’t go for these outsiders starin’ down their noses at us. What is she, anyway? Nothing but a model. A dress model. Runnin’ around half-naked all the time and lettin’ men slobber over her.”

“Outsiders” are a popular topic of discussion in Storm Warning. The fangless screenplay (credited to Daniel Fuchs and Richard Brooks) is hesitant to portray the Klan for what it is, leaving racism, xenophobia and anti-Semitism unmentioned. Instead, these hooded cretins scapegoat all-purpose “outsiders.” “Outsiders, that’s who killed him,” Hank theorizes about the dead reporter, Adams. “Outsiders, hiding in Klan robes. And they blame us. We’re lynchers. You wait and see, when it all comes out, it was outsiders.”

A radio reporter dispatched to Rock Point to cover the Adams inquest sounds not unlike a modern-day journalist interviewing patrons of a red state diner. During a live spot, in a crowd of residents radiating suspicion and hostility, he notes, “Undoubtedly, many of these people here are seriously concerned about the good name of their town, about its future. As you look at them, you can see the deep shame that they feel. Many of these people also feel, however, these respected folk, a serious resentment. A resentment against the press. Against outsiders. Against the national coverage that this inquest is receiving.”

The inquest is the chance DA Burt Rainey (Ronald Reagan) has been waiting for to nail the Klan to the wall. His prior efforts had failed due to the unwillingness of (plentiful) witnesses to cooperate. This time around, he thinks Marsha could make the difference. He vents his frustration in an exchange with Rock Point’s Sheriff Jaeger:

Jaeger: I take orders. You give me an order, I’ll do it. You know anybody in Rock Point that will go to the inquest for you and testify against the Klan? Tell me, and I’ll bring them in. If you don’t, and you don’t, stop kicking my men around for not doing what you can’t do yourself.

Rainey: I know. But every time someone from New York, Washington, or points north, starts poking his nose in our affairs, we holler foul. Well, if we don’t want the meddling, one of these days we’re gonna have to start cleaning up our own messes. You and me. All of us.

storm warning (1951)

Rainey, we surmise, knows exactly what the KKK is up to, but do viewers? The screenplay presents it not as a terrorist organization or hate group, but as a racket. A rattled associate delivers a warning to Hank’s boss Charlie (Hugh Sanders), the Imperial Wizard. “If Rainey gets that indictment, if he gets the hands on those books, where will we be? In jail, serving time for income tax evasion. Initiation fees, insurance, insignia sales, Klan regalia, dues.”

When Rainey’s crusade for justice is derailed by Marsha’s deference to her sister, the town erupts in celebration. He lectures the New Yorker as she leaves: “Hear that yelling out there? That’s the Klan. They’ve just found out that law and order can’t touch them. You did that when you let them off the hook. They’re running wild, they’re gonna rip up the old laws and make new ones. They’re gonna do every rotten thing they can think of doing.” And indeed they do, as the tension-packed final third of the film soon illustrates.

Director Stuart Heisler (of Smash-Up, Story of a Woman and The Star) brings suspense but little style to the protracted tussles between Cochran, Rogers and Day; his work here is unremarkable. The strangeness of the ending, and the spottiness of the acting (Cochran and Day fare better than the one-note Rogers and Reagan), can’t overcome the essential silliness of the screenplay. Hank provides one of its few memorable moments when he grabs Charlie by the lapels and exclaims something that’s had a resurgence of sorts in our degraded Trump era: “You always said that what happened to one of us happened to us all!”

Streaming and DVD availability

Storm Warning is available on DVD and Blu-ray from Warner Bros., and you can rent or purchase it digitally through Amazon.

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… But wait, there’s more!

A popular bit of trivia associated with Storm Warning is that Lauren Bacall was suspended by Warner Bros. for refusing the role of Marsha. In 1949, the LA Times quoted her as saying “I am neither a puppet nor a chattel of Warner Bros. studio to do with as it sees fit.” I noticed a few claims that she snubbed the role in order to travel with Humphrey Bogart, who was filming The African Queen, but I’m skeptical that was the sole reason.

My idle speculation, as a fellow Jew, is that Bacall probably felt it was an insultingly mealy-mouthed screenplay. With that in mind, I consulted my copy of her autobiography, By Myself and Then Some, and looked up this particular suspension of hers. (It was one of many.) Here’s what she had to say, which didn’t clarify the issue:

Jack Warner had been trying to get me into a picture called “Storm Warning.” I didn’t feel it was right for me, but I wanted to work. I thought if I talked to him, perhaps some changes could be made that would enable me to be in it, so I didn’t intend to tell him about the coming baby.

lauren bacall, by myself and then some

Bacall then segued into a story about her first pregnancy, and her anger that Hedda Hopper wanted to blab about it. “Oh, she could be a bitch,” Bacall wrote of Hopper. Of the film, she added, “The picture was never fixed — I was put on suspension.”