Very well executed

Good concept, poorly executed.

Absolutely Fantastic

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Struggling writer Dan Duryea lives in a remote mountain house with wife Jean Wallace and son David Stollery. Then Duryea's brother and bank robber Cornel Wilde arrives with his accomplices Steven Hill and Lee Grant. Wilde's been shot in the leg during a robbery but after Wallace removes the bullet the robbers can't move on, because of a fierce snow storm. Stollery's never seen his uncle and is fascinated by Wilde, who's the complete opposite of the sickly and weak Duryea. But Wallace and Wilde used to be lovers, with their past becoming an additional source of friction and tension in the cramped house.A claustrophobic home-invasion thriller meets love-triangle melodrama, actor/director/producer Cornel Wilde ('The Big Combo') does a good job of keeping this movie, which is rather talky, tense and gripping. And he also gets good performances from most of the actors, including himself. Especially Wilde's real life wife Wallace ('The Big Combo') gives a great performance, as a woman struggling with several dilemmas that come to a head when Wilde forces himself back into her life. I also really enjoyed Grant's ('Detective Story') performance, who was blacklisted at the time. She reminded me of the streetwise and tough but sympathetic gunmolls from the 30s gangster movies, particularly Gladys George in 'The Roaring Twenties'. I kinda wanted to see more of her part in this movie. And while kid actors are 9 out of 10 times either wooden or annoying, Stollery is pretty convincing and even subtle. He gave up acting however and became a successful car designer. Noir icon Duryea ('Scarlet Street') plays against type and he does well as always but he doesn't have a lot to do besides cough and moan, which is a shame. Hill (TV's 'Law & Order') is the only dissonant, he's uneven and seems unsure how to play his part.Wilde keeps the movie focused and never lets the narrative wander off too far. Once the dramatic moments inside the house have been exhausted, he moves the story outdoors, with Stollery guiding Wilde and his crew across a mountain, pursued by Dennis Weaver (TV's 'McCloud'). Oddly enough tho, while Weaver has no problem following their tracks, he doesn't seem to notice one of crew members who's been left behind halfway with a broken ankle. What also helps is that DoP Joseph La Shelle ('Laura') does a great job with both the indoor and outdoor scenes, his lensing is both effective and nice to look at, but also not too prominent to take over the movie. Having said all that tho, I am not sure this movie has a lot of rewatch value. The story is not very surprising and moves to a predictable climax (altho the final moments are rather touching, thanks to some pretty good acting), and I feel that by focusing primarily on himself and Wallace's past, Wilde left out some opportunities to really crank up the heat. Still, I can recommend it.

Another of the 'home invasion' dramas so popular at the time, except with a twist. Here the fleeing criminals (bank robbers) invade the secluded mountain home of one (Wilde) of the robbers' old sweeties (Wallace) now married to a failed writer (Duryea) with an adolescent son (Stollery). Naturally, in these cramped quarters with a blizzard outside, emotions bubble over, especially with the consumptive, jealous Duryea, plus the unstable gunman Steven Hill. These are promising elements but the drama really fails to gel, because Wilde is too nice to project real menace, while the real menace, Hill, is never given the kind of emotional close- ups that would establish his danger. Instead, he just sort of prowls around in the background. Actually, the movie's mainly about the burgeoning Wilde-Stollery relationship, where you have to read between the lines about the actual source of the dog collar. Then too, it's Stollery stealing the movie in a poignantly shaded performance, while Wilde unwisely spends too much time showing off his manly chest.The second half moves to the great outdoors, where the gang tries to escape the approaching cops by fleeing over the snowy mountains. Here we get some suspense as the figures are reduced to little dots on a great white landscape. Now they're struggling not only with each other, but with an overwhelming nature. This part plays out in fairly effective fashion, though I never did figure out what exactly the errant snowplow was doing on an anonymous mountainside.All in all, it's an uneven, sometimes awkwardly filmed movie, whose chief virtue may be what it doesn't tell the audience about the relationships instead of what it does. And kudos to producer Wilde for giving the blacklisted Lee Grant a minor part as the gang's moll, at a time when the best this fine actress could get is TV walk-ons. My guess is Wilde took on too much for a first-time filmmaker (director-producer-star) and would have been advised to hire an accomplished director. But then this was a low-budget effort, (the interiors were filmed in a TV studio!). Wilde's real filmmaking talent would show up later in the acclaimed Naked Prey (1966), so I guess this was something of a learning experience.

The outdoor scenes in Storm Fear were filmed near Sun Valley, Idaho. A local fellow named Eddie Bennett donned a fur coat and a blonde wig, and played "Edna" when she was pushed off the rock formation (which is located about 3/4 of the way from Ketchum NW to Galena Lodge). Eddie later gave the wig to my father, who gave it to me. Mr. Wilde was kind to a young girl eager to become a writer, and gave me one of the working scripts of Storm Fear. My little sister and I (in our serious moments) read the lines and acted out the script very seriously. In our silly moments, we took turns wearing the wig while the other shouted "Die, Edna, die!" and pushed "Edna" off the roof of our grandparents' house into deep snow.

A husband and wife plus their son are visited by the husband's brother and his gang after the thugs pull off a bank heist. The meeting stirs up a lot of trouble, and dredges up old memories and desires. Great dramatic finale as the thieves try to escape over the mountain.