Storm Fear

Over the years that Eddie Muller has hosted Noir Alley on TCM, he's selected several movies that I'd never heard of, even if I don't necessarily think of all of them as noirs. One example of this is the Christmas noir Storm Fear. Since it sounded interesting, I recorded it to watch it and do a post on.

David Blake is a 12-year-old boy living on a mountain in the middle of nowhere together with his parents, Elizabeth (Jean Wallace) and Fred (Dan Duryea). Dan is nominally a writer, but like George Peppard in Breakfast at Tiffany's, he hasn't been able to sell anything for some time, which is why he's living out here and living off the kindness of people like farmhand Hank (Dennis Weaver) who bought the family a new radio for Christmas.

David and his father were out ice fishing, and on their way back to the house, David sees clouds that imply another storm is coming, and then hearing a car, which seems strange, since nobody comes up here. And when they get back to the house, they find that the car doesn't just have one person in it. There's Charlie (Cornel Wilde), a bank robber who happens to be Fred's no good brother. Charlie robbed a bank with three other people, although the cops picked one of them up. The other two are Charlie's moll Edna (Lee Grant), together with the hair-triggered robber, Benjie (Steven Hill). Charlie, like the guy the cops picked up, was shot in the botched robbery, but not fatally like the unseen accomplice.

David doesn't know Charlie's real identity, but Fred and Elizabeth sure do, and they're mighty displeased to see Charlie here. David, for his part, seems excited to see these exotic strangers, and it seems like he's looking up to them, especially Charlie, something that alarms Fred and Elizabeth even more. So there's a volatile mix of people cooped up in a mountain cabin with a storm raging outside with the possibility of the police coming by to pick up some of them, with the legitimate inhabitants of the place not wanting anything like this. And wait until Hank possibly shows up again and finds these people here, putting two and two together.

Unsurprisingly, Charlie is thinking of escape. The problem is that there are going to be roadblocks, so if they try to go by road there's no possibility of them getting out. The only other way out is over a snowy mountain. Naturally the robbers don't know the area, and Fred isn't about to help them, never mind the fact that he's not healthy enough to help them. But David knows the way, and Charlie sets about using David's admiration of him to get him to possibly help....

Cornel Wilde directed in addition to starring, something he could do in part because this was his independent production company making the movie. It's also why his real-life wife at the time Jean Wallace is starring. The movie has a lot to like, but at the same time it's also wildly uneven. That's because parts of the story really strain credulity, while other parts seem very obviously telegraphed. The end result, however, is a movie that's interesting and more or less entertains despite its failings.