Storm Center (1956) on Netflix
Alicia Hull has run the Kenport library for decades. When citizens object to a book called The Communist Dream, the city council asks her to remove it, and she refuses.
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- Netflix3.3/5
- IMDb6.6/101,919 votes
- Rotten TomatoesNot available
Trailer
Plot summary
Alicia Hull is the head librarian in Kenport, where she has worked since her husband died in the First World War. She has asked the city council for a children's wing, and the council has agreed to go ahead with it. Then citizens complain that the library owns a book called The Communist Dream, which argues for communism. The council asks Alicia to withdraw it. She agrees at first, then decides she cannot, since removing it would be censorship.
Cast
- Howard Wierumas Mayor Levering
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Storm Center (1956)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Mary Pickford was to return to the screen after an 18-year absence in The Library, but withdrew a month before filming began, reportedly because it was not a Technicolor production; Stanley Kramer signed Barbara Stanwyck within days to replace her.
- After the film's American release, the National Legion of Decency invented a new classification for films of its type, saying they were not morally offensive but needed analysis and explanation; the Motion Picture Industry Council called this a move to censorship.
- Graphic designer Saul Bass created the film's opening title sequence, in which flames eat away at a boy's face and at pages from a book; the two pages shown are duplicates of one page from Chapter 2 of John Stuart Mill's 1859 essay "On Liberty".
- The film's fictional events are largely invented, but the librarian Alicia Hull is based on Ruth W. Brown, a librarian in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, who struggled with the county commission over communist literature.
- Bette Davis was reported to be so pleased with the film that she volunteered for a 20-city promotional tour, something she had never done for any of her other films.
- Storm Center is the only film Daniel Taradash ever directed; he took over the project himself and gave it a new title after Stanley Kramer withdrew and it stalled.
