Saturday, 18 January 2020

STORM WARNING **

This punchy, noirish thriller, superbly shot by Carl Gutherie, has all but disappeared despite its Grade-A cast that includes Ginger Rogers and Doris Day, both cast very much against type, as sisters in a small town where the Klu Klux Klan have the upper hand. Rogers is the sister who witnesses a Klan killing only to discover sister Doris is married to the killer, Steve Cochran. Ronald Regan is the investigating District Attorney. It's a simplistic little story, closer in tone to the social-conscience movies Warners turned out in the thirties than to the studio pictures of the period with a fine Richard Brooks/Daniel Fuchs screenplay and both Day and Rogers are surprisingly good with nary a song between them. It might have a B-Movie sensibility and it may bang its drum a little too loudly but at least it's honest and well-intentioned, if unusually violent for the time, and is well worth seeing.

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