The whole plot is hinged on whether or not people ill stand up and do the right thing with Macreedy. However to me this film is a damnation to those who stand back and refuse to take a stand against wrong doing. But will they stand up now? Most people will tell you this film is famous because it was one of the first times an American film acknowledged that, after Pearl Harbour, oriental Americans were abused and treated badly. Macreedy digs deeper to find a town hiding a shameful secret that they were too apathetic to deal with.
An one armed war veteran gets off looking for a man whose name causes hostility among the residents of the town, led by Reno Smith. Thoroughly enjoyable ,it deserves its reputation of classic.įor the first time in 4 years the train stops at the small desert town of Black Rock.
#Fews into red review movie
This is a modern western,which takes place just after WW2."Bad Day at Black Rock" is also,in its own special way, a war movie ,and also an anti-war one,because Tracy's life was saved by a. Unity of time:everything happens in the space of 24 hours first sequence :the train arrives in Black Rock,last sequence:it leaves it. Stand-out remains Robert Ryan,always excellent in one of his villains parts:funny how an actor who was known for his liberal views should have played so many racists ,anti-Semitics (this film,but also Dmytryk's "crossfire" and Wise's "against all odds").Other good performances come from Marvin and Borgnine. Unity of action:something happened in "Black Rock" ,something that its inhabitants are anxious that it remains in the shadow.Enter Tracy who seems to know too many things he should.Then all the inhabitants all stand together ,and their conspiracy of silence becomes threatening.What's amazing is that John Sturges (it's probably his best film,he uses Tracy in a much better way than he did in "people against o'Hara" some years before)refuses the easy way out:take for instance the only female character played by Anne Francis she does not act as the audience expects. Unity of place:everything takes place in a one-horse town,Black Rock,where an unusually inventive use of the wide screen makes the small town even more isolated,cut off from the world.When you leave Black Rock,you find a desolate landscape where only some flowers (of death?as Tracy points out)grow. This film respects the three unities :unity of place ,unity of action and unity of time. But as Tracy said in another film, what there is is cherce. For a feature film in 1955 it is a rather short one, less than 90 minutes. There was a lot of suspense there as well, similar to Bad Day at Black Rock, as to whether Taylor would escape his predicament. A fews years later John Sturges directed another film The Law and Jake Wade about Robert Taylor being held prisoner by Richard Widmark and his gang. I'm not sure why chief villain Robert Ryan wasn't. But in fact any one of the small cast could have been nominated. He lost ironically to one of his fellow cast members Ernest Borgnine who copped the big prize for Marty. Sturges was in fact nominated for Best Director. Certain arty Hitchcock touches are missing, but the suspense is there. In fact if Hitchcock had ever decided to do a western and was presented with Bad Day at Black Rock, I doubt he could do it any better. John Sturges keeps the tension going here worthy of an Alfred Hitchcock film.
What he does about it is the rest of the film. It gradually dawns on Tracy that by probing about Komoko's whereabouts, he's stepped in one big festering pile and he's put himself in danger. And the townspeople are downright unfriendly to the stranger. He's looking for a Japanese farmer named Komoko who seems to have vanished. Tracy gets off a train at a hole in the wall, whistlestop, speedtrap of a town called Black Rock located somewhere in the Mojave desert. Some reward for an actor who brought so much prestige to that studio. The following year he was fired off the set of Tribute to a Bad Man and left MGM abruptly. Bad Day at Black Rock turned out to be the final film that Spencer Tracy did on his MGM contract.
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