Years ago, I developed an interest in film noir movies and viewed many classics of the genre like “Double Indemnity”, “Touch of Evil”, “Notorious” and even neo-noirs like “Chinatown” and Brian De Palma’s “Sisters” (fun and kooky with gorgeous Margo Kidder!)
More recently, I’ve been seeking some lesser known noirs and so my wife and I dug up 1950’s “Storm Warning”. It’s quite good, and loaded with stars: Ronald Reagan, Doris Day, Ginger Rogers.
The plot has a great hook. A fashion model, played by Rogers, arrives in a small town to visit family and sees a mob of Ku Klux Klansmen break a man out of jail and kill him. (The victim is, perhaps surprisingly, white because of… reasons.) Rogers’s character is shocked at the violence, but remains unseen by the attacking mob. She goes to the bowling alley where her younger sister, played by Day, is employed. There, the older sister is introduced to the younger sister’s new husband, played by Cochran, who is—surprise!—one of the killers.
When Ronald Reagan shows up as an unrelenting DA trying to get the bottom of the case, Rogers’s character faces a dilemma. She can rat out her brother in law or just leave town with her lips shut. (One thing I love about film noir is it allows its protagonists to be flawed and not always doing “the right thing” (yawn).) The story nicely ratchets up the tension, culminating in an appropriately dark finale.
All the actors do fine work within the confines of the genre. But Cochran really stands out—he oozes malice and threat, but you can understand his appeal to the naïve young woman played by Day.
Cochran, a Standard good looking Hollywood bad boy, had an interesting life, and even more interesting death. In 1965, he boarded a yacht (fittingly christened “the Rogue”) for a sailing journey planned to go from Acapulco to Costa Rica. Joining him were three young Mexican women he’d hired for supposed assisting and cleaning duties. More than twenty days later, the drifting boat was rescued by a fishing vessel. The women were alive, albeit panicked. But Steve Cochran was weeks dead from a lung infection. The women had been stuck on board with his decomposing body.
