Storm Center (1956)

Storm Center (1956) is a book-burning Red Scare small-town film noir starring Bette Davis as a local librarian who is shunned after she refuses the City Council's request to remove a book on Communism from the shelves.

The picture which packs a certain punch for its ultimate lack of 1940s style chiaroscuro, hoods, slayings, femmes fatales — and other recognisable forms of film noir — is one of the more subversive of the later film noir era and bravely enough is thought to be the first overtly anti-McCarthyism film to be produced in Hollywood.

It is said that in the year of 1950, the United States' share of the entire world Gross Domestic Product was in the region of 50% — and this from a nation that contained only 4% of the world's population.

At the height of the film noir era and in the immediate aftermath of World War II,  the US was absolutely unrivalled and stood alone in its financial power. The nation held 80 percent of the world’s hard currency reserves and was a net exporter of petroleum products — indicating a position of supremacy that does not manifest precisely in 1940s film noir, but starts to be felt around the turn of the decade in two film noir themes — that of corporate crime and that of the red scare.

Bette Davis and Paul Kelly in Storm Center (1956)

Bette Davis is a scion representative of the late noir era persona known as cold war career woman. 

The major Red Scare of the 1940s and 1950s was a form of public hysteria provoked by fear of the rise, supposed or real, of leftist ideologies — especially communism. Little touched upon by the movies, the Red Scare was in the public imagination probably centred in the movies and in Hollywood, where highly public hunts for Communists took place.

The book that causes ALL the trouble  in Storm Center (1956)

This led to political persecution, scapegoating, and the blacklisting of those in the industry who had connections with left-wing to far-left ideology.

This infamous Red Scare after World War II  is known as "McCarthyism" after its best-known advocate, Senator Joseph McCarthy. McCarthyism coincided with an increased and widespread fear of communist espionage that was consequent of the increasing tension in the Cold War through the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe, the Berlin Blockade (1948–49), the end of the Chinese Civil War, the confessions of spying for the Soviet Union that were made by several high-ranking U.S. government officials, and the outbreak of the Korean War.

Bette Davis extols the virtues of books and libraries in Storm Center (1956)

Most infamous of these outside of Hollywood were the trial of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg (1953), but the Soviet Union's first nuclear weapon test in 1949 (RDS-1) surprised the American public, and influenced popular opinion about U.S. national security.

Joe Mantell in Storm Center (1956)

The final corollary was a fear in the early 1950s that the Soviet Union would drop nuclear bombs on the United States, and in turn this led to fear of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA).

Small-town patriarchy gather in Storm Center (1956)

Although the hearings regarding Hollywood's connections to left-wing ideology were [potentially sensational and visible, the process was underpinned by the fact that the same was going in in government.  At the House Un-American Activities Committee, former CPUSA members and NKVD spies, Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers, testified that Soviet spies and communist sympathisers had penetrated the U.S. government before, during and after World War II. 

Business is concluded at Morrissey's restaurant in Storm Center (1956)

Other U.S. citizen spies confessed to their acts of espionage in situations where the statute of limitations on prosecuting them had run out. In 1949, anti-communist fear, and fear of American traitors, was aggravated by the Chinese Communists winning the Chinese Civil War against the Western-sponsored Kuomintang, their founding of the Communist China, and later China intervenes (October–December 1950) in the Korean War (1950–53) against U.S. ally South Korea.

It's in the nature of paranoia to keep quite about hidden threats because sometimes even discussion of a subject for good or ill can lead to accusations and trouble concerning that subject. 

It's for that reason there were not many films at the time dealing specifically with McCarthyism — it's a subject that sneaks up in a clever manner in films like The Underworld Story (1950) — but it's easy to miss.

A few of the events during the Red Scare arose from power tussles between director of FBI J. Edgar Hoover — a man who featured in the opening montage of film noir spy film The House on 92nd Street (1945) — and the Central Intelligence Agency. 

Bette Davis faces down the local dignitories in Storm Center (1956)

They had differing opinions on the nature of the alliance with the Soviet Union, conflicts over jurisdiction, conflicts of personality, and disagreements about the OSS hiring of communists and criminals as agents.

Historian Richard Powers distinguishes two main forms of anti-communism during the period, liberal anti-communism and countersubversive anti-communism. The countersubversive anti-communists derived their position from a pre-WWII isolationist tradition on the right. 

Liberal anti-communists believed that political debate was enough to show Communists as disloyal and irrelevant, while countersubversive anti-communists believed that Communists had to be exposed and punished.

Bette Davis in anti-communist Red Scare film noir Storm Center (1956)

At times, countersubversive anti-communists accused liberals of being "equally destructive" as Communists due to an alleged lack of religious values or supposed "red web" infiltration into the New Deal.

There was decent evidence of Soviet espionage, according to Democratic Senator and historian Daniel Moynihan, with the Venona project consisting of "overwhelming proof of the activities of Soviet spy networks in America, complete with names, dates, places, and deeds." 

The Venona project was a United States counterintelligence program initiated during World War II by the United States Army's Signal Intelligence Service and later absorbed by the National Security Agency (NSA), that ran from February 1, 1943, until October 1, 1980. It was intended to decrypt messages transmitted by the intelligence agencies of the Soviet Union (e.g. the NKVD, the KGB, and the GRU). Initiated when the Soviet Union was an ally of the US, the program continued during the Cold War, when the Soviet Union was considered an enemy. During the 37-year duration of the Venona project, the Signal Intelligence Service decrypted and translated approximately 3,000 messages. The signals intelligence yield included discovery of the Cambridge Five espionage ring in the United Kingdom and Soviet espionage of the Manhattan Project in the US (known as Project Enormous). Some of the espionage was undertaken to support the Soviet atomic bomb project. 

Senator Joseph McCarthy advocated an extremist view and following his lead on the subject the discussion of communist subversion was made into a civil rights issue instead of a counterintelligence one.

Bette Davis and Paul Kelly in Storm Center (1956)

While President Truman formulated the Truman Doctrine against Soviet expansion, it is possible he was not fully informed of the Venona intercepts, leaving him unaware of the domestic extent of espionage, according to Moynihan and Benson.

In the months before the release of Storm Center (1956) many American librarians were aware of the production and in the June 16, 1956, issue of The Saturday Review, a series of stories on the state of American libraries featured an article on the film.

Also in June, there was a special pre-release screening of the film at the summer ALA conference, with the event at which a letter from Bette Davis was read, expressing her hope that she had “reflected accurately” the “dedicated services” of librarians.

Bette Davis in Storm Center (1956)

Librarians do not get the best of delivery from Hollywood, which often associates their trade with negativity and weakness. The librarian can quote easily be shaped to signify isolation when made a female character.

In It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), the lissome and practiced Mary (played Donna Reed) turns into a drab and bygone librarian in the depressing alternative reality created by the angel who is sent to rescue her husband from killing herself.

This implies the librarian is something along the lines of the old maid, an image of the female librarian fits patriarchally minded mid-20th-century American notions of gender and professional identity. But can the woman librarian signify something more, a power not readily reckoned upon by her society?

A real-life Oklahoma librarian Ruth Brown who was fired in 1950 for circulating supposedly subversive materials, did to a small extent inspired the screenplay. Yet Taradish and cowriter Elick Moll created a story that was a much more extensive allegory for the political exploitations of the McCarthy Years. 

The film features an unscrupulous Joseph McCarthy-like member of city council, Paul Duncan (Brian Keith), exploiting Hull’s principled stance for political gain by smearing her World War II-era

The actual echoes of the question Are you and have you ever been a member of the Communist Party? are mocked in Bette Davis' answers to the suggestions that she has been in certain youth leagues and other progressive groups.

Aside from this rampant political fun it should be observed that Storm Center (1956) has a softer family side, harsh as it may all conclude. Bette Davis' librarian is a nurturing and human soul, especially with the children of the community, but also with the adults. That this degenerates to violence and public humiliation is testament to the power of the small town imagination. This white town of neurotic families is possibly facing more than just a political scare, but is showing how it can and must other what it can and when it can.

Book burning years film noir Storm Center (1956)

There are several films which were at the time or have since been interpreted as a reaction to the Red Scare hysteria, and the HUAC trials, notably:

• Miracle (1950) — Although this is a foreign film (produced in Italy and written by Federico Fellini), it found itself caught up in a communist smear campaign initiated by various Catholic organizations in the U.S. This film was used as a test case to go to the Supreme Court and win First Amendment rights for the first time ever for cinema in 1952.

• High Noon (1952)  A classic which may be viewed as either for or against HUAC activities. Its director, Fred Zimmerman argued that it was just a Western.

• The Hoaxters (1952) — The only Hollywood film about communism that takes the form of a documentary. Highly critical of using slander and gossip to attack individuals, as HUAC was doing.

• Viva Zapata! (1951) — Elia Kazan was traumatised by HUAC, with a screenplay partially completed by the now blacklisted and jailed Lester Cole, with a final script by John Steinbeck and with the meddling of Darryl F. Zanuck who is determined not to produce a politically sensitive film, Viva Zapata! survives as a moving and complex, vivid film starring a young Marlon Brando as the Mexican folk hero.

• On the Waterfront (1954) — Elia Kazan perhaps presented a justification for cooperating with HUAC. A study of trying to do the right thing in a corrupt world.

• Salt of the Earth (1954) — The work of a group of blacklisted ex-Hollywood film industry workers, this film is a powerful and didactic, telling of a New Mexico mining strike. Produced by Paul Jarrico, directed by Herbert Biberman, written by Michael Wilson and starring Will Geer, the film had severely limited distribution when first released.

• A King in New York (1957) — Charlie Chaplin's attack on cold war hysteria.

• North by Northwest (1959) — Alfred Hitchcock's almost parodic classic about spies and counterspies near the end of Red Scare melodrama.

Foregone conclusion with Bette Davis and Paul Kelly in Storm Center (1956)

More than could film noir, science fiction did provide an excellent disguise at times for commentary on these political viewpoints, and their effect on either communities or humanity as a whole. The science fiction classics to look out for which one way or another capture these political firestorms of the 1950s include:

Destination Moon (1950) —A race with the Russians to claim the moon is suggestive of the idea of outer space as a political battlefield.

The Flying Saucer (1950) — Sci-fi spy drama In which the The Reds capture a saucer invented by an American. American Intelligence officials learn that Soviet spies have begun exploring a remote region of the Alaskan Territory in search of answers to the worldwide reports of "flying saucers".

The Day the Earth Stood Still  (1951) —  Top drawer cautionary Hollywood story about the madness of cold war politics, and an outstanding sci fi film which set a standard for years to come. 

The Man from Planet X (1951) — But heck, some space aliens are good. We bomb them anyway.

When Worlds Collide (1951) — A Randian industrialist finances the escape to a safe planet after Earth is doomed to destruction.

Red Planet Mars (1952) — One of the classic sci fi films in which God speaks to the world.

Invaders from Mars (1953) — Now a B-movie cult favourite this film explores the quality of fear generated by aliens who take over the bodies and minds of good people, making it impossible to distinguish between us and them. A half-assed remake was released in 1986.

Them (1954) — Communists as giant mutant ants.

This Island Earth (1955) — A very good, thought provoking film that presages the Reagan-era obsession with a protective space-based shield.

Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956) — The aliens in this minor classic destroy every familiar landmark and symbol of democracy in Washington DC. An exploitation movie which edits seminal Harryhausen with stock footage, including shots of a missile launch and of batteries of 90 mm M3 guns firing

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) — The most famous science fiction picture of the 1950's, it can be interpreted as being about the dangers of communist infiltration and brainwashing, or more likely, about the HUAC hysteria and the pressures and social and psychological techniques used to bring conformity to American society. 

The Strange World of Planet X (1957) — Aliens help us repair a hole in the earth's ionosphere caused by a nuclear accident.

Not of this Earth (1957) — A Roger Corman film which is the story of a bloodless alien whose plan is to take over the world.

Source: University of Washington Libraries