User Reviews

A young girl (Marsha Hunt) is desperate after being pickpocketed when she's on her way back to Roanoke after losing her job in New York and online to buy a ticket. She's been trying to be an actress of course, and sales, and all she has left is enough for a cup of coffee. Along comes stranger John Rodney who offers her a few days of fun then after those days are over and she's getting ready to go back home proposes to her out of the blue. He claims he has no family and when they get to his country home, everything is fine until she finds out that he actually has a brother, and then his mood swings start. The brother shows up out of nowhere, she goes to visit her mother, and when she comes home, everything is riced out when she finds a body in the cellar.

I've seen this plotline in several films, has someone married on the spur of the moment and then finding out secrets about their spouse, particularly involving their family. There have been several on the subject of mysterious brothers, or a wife showing up out of nowhere to meet her family without the husband present. Of course, when that happens, secrets are bound to come out and they are usually of the dark variety. Hunt, one of the longest living of the veteran actresses, is quite convincing as the vulnerable young lady who is just as guilty as Rodney is of making the spur-of-the-moment agreement, and he's quite a complex character too. When the brother shows up, it's just a very brief scene, and you really don't get to see much detail to determine what the truth really is. In fact, even when twists occur at the end, there are still a lot of unanswered questions. Pretty good for an early TV Anthology show, but it is totally B film noir.

Like other episodes of "Studio One", this one was shown live on television--and was copied using the Kinescope for viewing on the West Coast due to time zone differences. It is amazing to see these copies today, as they were often made with top talent and were done rather seamlessly--and often featured amazing scripts.

Finding this particular episode of "Studio One" is a bit difficult on IMDb. That's because the very first episode (in 1948) was also called "The Storm"--though it's not the same story. And, to make it worse, this 1949 episode was remade in 1953 with "Studio One" as well! Rest assured, this is a review for the Marsha Hunt version--neither of the others.

Marsha Hunt plays a young woman who is stranded in New York when her purse disappears as she's trying to buy a train ticket out of town. A gallant man (John Rodney) comes to her aid and they soon fall in love and marry. Not surprisingly, since she hardly knows the man before they married, the marriage is in for problems--as the man has a lot more to him than she suspects.

Oddly, as I watched the film, I felt as if I'd seen most of this before and after thinking about it realized I had. In so many ways this is the Katharine Hepburn/Robert Taylor film "Undercurrent"--though with a much more creepy finale. Too many aspects were the same, however, to make "The Storm" worth seeing--it just seemed way too derivative. It, too, has the quick marriage, the brooding husband, the younger brother who seemingly torments the older one--and who the husband tells the wife NOT to talk to under any circumstance. It's all exactly the same up until the end....and, frankly, the Helburn/Taylor movie is better--and came out first.