Storm Center - Bookmarking a Movie

​This unassuming bookmark advertising the movie “Storm Center” in 1956 dramatically declares that the book in the story has “enough dynamite in its pages to blow a city apart”.  The movie stars a favorite actress, the inimitable Bette Davis.  When I received an inquiry from Kay Delanoy asking if I would like to have it, I immediately said I would.  Little did I know that the story behind this movie had so many angles relating to libraries, books and censorship. 

In 2010, a librarian wrote to the American Library Association with this inquiry: “I saw this week's article at the Huffington Post website about movie librarians, Librarians Save The Day! 11 Great Movies In Which They Star  . I was very surprised to see a film there starring one of my favorite actresses, Bette Davis, that I never heard of! By any chance, can ALA tell me anything about Storm Center (1956)?”

​Indeed they could and referred to the July/August 1956 issue of the ALA Bulletin which “had a two-page article that featured still photographs from the film. But more importantly, the article explained that there was a private preview showing of the film at the ALA 75th Annual Conference that year in Miami Beach, …. The showing of the Columbia Pictures release was presumably set up when the film's producer, Julian Blaustein, and its director and co-writer, Daniel Taradash, spoke about the film at the Midwinter Meeting earlier that year.”

They go on to explain that “The movie's events were largely fiction, but the character played by Bette Davis was based on Miss Ruth Brown, Librarian of the Bartlesville Public Library in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, from 1919 until she was fired in 1950 on suspicion of being a Communist. Her so-called crimes included treating the town's African American residents as equals, letting them borrow books from the library well before Brown v. Board of Education allowed them access. There's a bust of Miss Ruth Brown at the Bartlesville Public Library that recognizes and celebrates her achievements”. ​

Another person commented that there is a book about her: “The Dismissal of Miss Ruth Brown: Civil Rights, Censorship, and the American Library” by Louise S. Robbins. University of Oklahoma Press (2001).

​The commenter explains: “This book is the winner of the Eliza Atkins Gleason Award and the Willa Literary Award for a nonfiction book from Women Writing the West. The author, Louise Robbins, is not only a professor at the School of Library & Information Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the former Director of the School, but is also the former Mayor of Ada, Oklahoma and first woman elected to their city council!”

Ironically, in the movie, it is the city council that demands that Bette Davis’s character, librarian Alicia Hull, should remove a book about Communism.  In this clip from the movie , she makes her case about why removal and censorship is something she cannot do, even if it means she loses her job.

The movie was filmed in Santa Rosa, California in a classic Carnegie library.  In 2012, one of the librarians wrote a post for Banned Books Week about the movie and some of the behind-the-scenes details that were described in an article by Ruth Hall who was the librarian at the time of the filming. [photo of Ruth Hall and Bette Davis]

The plot includes the librarian’s influence on a young boy, Freddie Slater.  Without giving away the shocking developments related to Freddie, the “Winners of the Children’s Book Contest” listed on the reverse of the bookmark can be explained.  As the winner of a contest to name the world’s ten best books, Freddie participates in the ground breaking ceremony for a new children’s wing in the library in a critical scene.  Presumably, the bookmark lists Freddie’s selections. [See Robbins, Louise. “Fighting McCarthyism through Film: A Library Censorship Case Becomes a ‘Storm Center.’” Journal of Education for Library and Information Science, vol. 39, no. 4, 1998, pp. 296. JSTOR] .

At the time of its release in 1956, the movie received lukewarm reviews due to its heavy handed approach to the story and because much of the fervor over McCarthyism had subsided.  Bette Davis was praised for her acting in which she portrayed a stereotypical prim and proper librarian, but infused the character with her usual steely determination.  [See for example the New York Times review and these excerpts from reviews.]

How did the bookmark for such an obscure film survive?  Because Kay’s father was  assistant librarian at the District of Columbia library when it was playing there and saved it. Kay says he would have been glad to pass it on to a fellow librarian, and I hope he would have appreciated seeing it in context of its story. 

The movie is difficult to find but occasionally a library will screen it because they still deal with censorship. It has received more attention recently from academics and various bloggers, such as this one whose comment from five years ago rings even more true today: “It’s striking how little has changed in fifty-eight years. Oh sure, we like to convince ourselves that we are more evolved than our elders but when it comes right down to it, we are just as susceptible as they were to fear and propaganda.”  

Poster from Wikipedia cite rights holder By Corporate author/original rights holder: Columbia Pictures - Scan from private collection, PD-US, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9713493