STORM WARNING: beware of star names in unsuitable parts!

STORM WARNING is a taut and atmospheric thriller marred only by the leading lady's inability to act like an actress rather than a film star.

Ginger Rogers was past her prime by the time she signed on with Warner Brothers for this 1951 B-movie but she wasn't about to get her hands dirty by playing the role the way it was intended in the script. Rather than have the actress subsume herself in the character she made sure the character came to her. That meant playing the part the way she'd played all her parts in her prime - as movie star Ginger Rogers; with just a token hint of the character's personality dabbed lightly on her neck like an expensive perfume.
It was a formula that had worked for the musicals and light comedies that had been her stock-in-trade, but it was considerably less appropriate for the part of a New York model who witnesses the mob murder of a reporter by the Ku Klux Klan in a small southern town. Although she's from the Big Apple, Marsha Mitchell's no big-time glamour model. She lives out of a suitcase, riding the Greyhound bus from one small town to the next to model the clothing her salesman traveling companion is trying to sell to local department stores. She's a working girl without a past or a future. She has no dreams about making the big time, nor any resentments about her lot in life. Marsha Mitchell simply exists in the present.
Back in the early 1930s, when she was first at Warners and before she met Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers could have pulled it off. She was a convincing showgirl on the make in films like '42nd Street' and 'Gold Diggers of 1933' but by 1951 that scrappy ambitious young woman had solidified into a bona fide film star, trapped by the rigid cast of her on-screen persona.
That persona wasn't much interested in depth. The fact that Ginger Rogers was playing the part told us all we needed to know about the character. Except that Marsha Mitchell is not a Ginger Rogers-type character. She's an ordinary working woman who finds herself intimately involved in a nightmarish, life-threatening situation, and confronted with a terrible moral dilemma. None of which can be adequately conveyed by the Ginger Rogers

on-screen persona. Ginger tries, but her efforts amount to little more than alternately looking sad and looking at people with an almost blank expression.
Which is a real shame. Because the story's genuinely exciting and suspenseful, with a real sense of small town claustrophobia and fear, and fine performances from Ronald Reagan, Doris Day and Steve Cochran. Unlike Rogers, Reagan pitches it just right as the DA determined to bust the local Klan despite the threats to his life and, unlike Rogers, Day successfully sheds her songstress image to convince as the naive and trusting wife of the man (Cochran) that Rogers has just witnessed committing the murder.
Admirers of Don Siegel's classic 1954 'Invasion of the Bodysnatchers' will appreciate the similarities in the delving beneath the surface of apparently picture-perfect small town America to expose the sinister secret life of friends and neighbours, although unlike 'Bodysnatchers' STORM WARNING has no aspirations to deeper political meaning. Indeed, if it has any message at all it's a bizarre one. The Ku Klux Klan should be condemned not because it's a racist organisation that takes the law into its own hands to terrorise and murder innocent people solely because of their religion or the colour of their skin, but because it's a racket run by corrupt men who steal the money they charge members for dues, and costumes and other Klan activities.
Despite the missed opportunities, the pulled punches and an unsuitable leading lady, I have no hesitation in recommending STORM WARNING as a worthwhile investment of 93 minutes of your time.