The New Pictures

Storm Warning (Warner). A traveling dress model (Ginger Rogers) stops off in a Southern town to visit her married sister (Doris Day). She hardly sets foot on the town's strangely dark and empty main street when she stumbles on a violent scene: a sheeted mob of Ku Klux Klansmen hauls a man out of jail, beats him, shoots him down on the sidewalk.

Ginger is the only witness to the murder, and almost the only one in town who might dare to testify against the high-riding Klan. But when she meets her brother-in-law (Steve Cochran) for the first time, she recognizes him as one of the murdering Klansmen. Buffeted by her sister's pleading, the Klan's threats and pressure from a Klan-busting prosecutor (Ronald Reagan), she must decide whether to join or break the town's scared conspiracy of silence.

Storm Warning skillfully exploits this situation both as exciting melodrama and as a frontal assault on the KKK. Shrewd Producer Jerry Wald also manages to make the picture inoffensive, and even palatable, to most Southern moviegoers. To do so, he passes up chances to give authentic flavor to the movie's locale. Though the town is identified as Southern and looks realistically lived in, none of its citizens speaks with a Southern accent, and nothing about the appearance and customs of the town or its inhabitants sets them apart from California or the Middle West.

On the positive side, the picture makes its prosecutor-hero a native son who argues pointedly, as many Southerners do, that the town must clean up its own mess if it wants to avoid interference from Washington and points north. The "outsider" who is killed by the mob is a crusading newsman who works for a paper no farther away than a large Southern city. Though they want to suppress the scandal, the town's respectable citizens are opposed to the Klan.

The local mill-owning Klan bigwig (Hugh Sanders) is pictured as a cynical racketeer fattening on the dues and fees of an ignorant rank & file. In the movie's best performance, Actor Cochran, bullying and toadying by turn, creates a picture of an ugly, slack-witted Klansman. Storm Warning hits hard at these characters. By knowing when to feint as well as when to punch, the picture loses no excitement, gains a chance to make its message connect where it will do the most good.

I'd Climb the Highest Mountain (20th Century-Fox), the sentimental story of a circuit-riding parson in a 1910 Georgia town, is made out of the same cloth as Stars in My Crown (TIME, Jan. 8). A narrator's voice strings together a rambling account of rural joys, sorrows, faith; some of the incidents and characters (e.g., an epidemic, a greedy general-storekeeper) directly parallel the earlier movie, and again they are all designed to warm the heart.

The new picture tumbles into almost every pitfall that Stars in My Crown tastefully avoided. It miscasts its parson (juvenile William Lundigan) and his loyal wife (sexy Susan Hayward), sugarcoats the characterization of its village atheist (ably played by Alexander Knox), plugs away so tritely and self-consciously at its tear-jerking and spiritual uplift that it appears insincere. Though shot in Technicolor in the red hills of Georgia, the movie generally seems truer to Hollywood, especially when it gives Actress Hayward such lines as: "I had begun to commit the gravest sin a woman can commit against her husband. I had ceased to care how I looked."

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