Film review: Bad Day at Black Rock (1955)

Another classic we'd somehow managed never to see before crossed off the list, thanks to the Criterion Channel.  This one fits with the "Western Noir"s we watched a while back, particularly The Walking Hills, because, like that one, it's not set in the 19th Century.  In fact, this one takes place in 1945, and, given the events, couldn't happen before then.  Like many a classic Western, it's also filmed in glorious technicolor wide-screen and looks fabulous.  It begins with a train (a modern diesel one) racing through the desert, finally to pull up in the tiny one-horse town of Black Rock, to the amazement of its residents, because the train hasn't stopped there in four years.  Out steps Spencer Tracy, clad in a sober black suit, which contrasts nicely with the spectacular desert landscape, making him look small and isolated, which, in effect, he is.  His left arm doesn't work, which prompts cracks like "you look like you could use a hand" and names like "crip" from the unsavories he will encounter.  The first person to seem alarmed at his arrival is the telegraph operator, a weaselly little fellow who gets on the phone to somebody to tell him about this strange arrival.  We soon learn that Tracy is a man called John Macreedy and that he's looking for a man called Komoko.  After open hostility from everyone from the young blond Hotel desk clerk (who is fairly easily steamrolled by Macreedy into letting him take one of the clearly empty rooms that he claims are unavailable) 

to thugs, played convincingly loathesomely by Lee Marvin (Hector) and Ernest Borgnine (Coley), whom Macreedy seems positively meek around.  It turns out that Komoko's farm is a few miles out of town, and initially Macreedy is unable to get transport out there.  Eventually he persuades the girl who runs the local garage (Liz, the sister of blond Pete from the hotel) to rent him her jeep, something that enrages Robert Ryan's Reno Smith, the local Big Man, and someone not to be crossed.  

Prophetically he says of the money Macreedy has given Liz that it will be the most dangerous $10 she ever earned.  Out at Komoko's place Macreedy finds a working well but also a burn-out house and new wildflowers growing out front.  On the way back Coley rams the jeep off the road, but Macreedy, despite his one arm, is obviously a skilled jeep driver.  It later emerges that this is because he's just out of the army, and in fact the reason he wants to find Komoko is to give him the medal that his son earned saving Macreedy's life (at the cost of his own).  The odious Reno has claimed that Komoko was taken off to an internment camp in 1941, immediately after Pearl Harbor (and the set for this film was in fact built in the shadow of a real internment camp, out in the wilds of central California), but the wildflowers tell a different story.  The rest of the film is very western-esque, as Macreedy knows that Reno and his thugs will kill him before he can leave town and expose their secret.  Coley has special reason to hate him, because he finally pushes Macreedy too far in the local diner (putting ketchup in his chili) 

and gets karate-chopped into unconsciousness for it.  Eventually Macreedy shames Pete and the local doctor (old reliable Walter Brennan) and the broken-down old drunk town sheriff into helping him, and thinks he's got safe passage out of town with Liz in the jeep, but Liz is too in love with Reno, and tragedy awaits...  All in all a rip-snorter with a message, tightly plotted in breathtaking scenery with a cast jam-packed with top character actors, and a central performance by Spencer Tracy that commands the screen.  We listened to a bit of the director's commentary, and he confessed that it was at his insistence that there were no extras, so that the town appears to be peopled only by the very few main characters, which, as he concedes, is artificial, but serves the movie.  It heightens the sense of isolation of Tracy's character, who is as outnumbered as Gary Cooper in High Noon, only without the guns.  The director (John Sturges) also revealed that studio heads were mystified by him wanting wide-screen for a movie with a small cast, believing that it was only suited for "cast-of-thousands" sword-and-sandal epics.  Well, he showed them.

I think Quentin Tarantino was probably inspired by this when he insisted on filming his similarly small-cast-in-one-location film The Hateful Eight in wide-screen.

 All in all, a deserving classic, far superior to Sturges' more star-studded Magnificent Seven, if you ask me. Good dialogue, too, and a satisfying denouement. Oh, and interesting nugget: the actors who play siblings Liz and Pete, Ann Francis and John Ericson, later teamed up in a short-lived American Avengers rip-off called "Honey West".  So there's that.