Bad Day at Black Rock (1955) is still a movie worth seeing. I eagerly watched the old chestnut on PBS because the movie is often described as in the film noir tradition (my fav), more often described as a western crossed with a film noir. I’m saying nothing against the picture when I say that it has nothing to do with film noir. The topic certainly could be film noir: A one-armed man gets off a train in a one-horse town in 1945 only to receive a hostile reception when he says he is looking for a Japanese farmer, and the townspeople know they secretly murdered the farmer the day after Pearl Harbor. But the treatment of these events is decidedly not in the film noir tradition. The outstanding feature of film noir is, as the name says, that it is black, it is nitty gritty reality where things do not work out nicely like they do in standard Hollywood movie fare. The bad day at Black Rock turns out to have happy endings all around! The tormented young man involved in the murder comes clean, the bad guy is caught, the townspeople fess up, the spineless sheriff takes action and rounds up the murderers, and the one-armed man escapes death. There is even a symbolic triumph over racism: In the last scene the new leader in town asks for and receives from the one-armed man the WWII medal earned by the Japanese farmer’s son.
The one-armed man walks into a mess that he cannot figure out. This is, actually, like many film noir. But what he does in the overwhelming situation is not noirish at all. He remains calm, so calm that the villagers find him eerily threatening. This contrasts with the typical noir protagonist who is beaten down by complexities he cannot fathom. Our hero also figures out pretty much what happened even before he gets a confession. And, of course, our hero saves the day—most un-noir.
The camera work in Bad Day at Black Rock is also un-noir, and whether that works or not is debatable. The great film noir cinematographers were always looking for the unsettling camera angle, the jolting lighting, and the powerful close-up. But in Black Rock, the camera angles are all standard fare except for one shot which is repeated several times: A steep angle shot from the hotel lobby where the townsmen sit looks up the stairs to where the one-armed stranger enters and exits his room. This noirish shot succinctly emphasizes the distance, the otherness, and the wariness. The lighting is almost always flat, like the washed out south-western dessert. Most obviously, there are almost no close-ups. In fact, some of the shots of the town gang are at such as distance that on the television screen it is difficult to tell the guys apart. I’d guess that this was done intentionally to manifest visually the anti-McCarthy theme of group-think replacing individual responsibility, of almost faceless “citizens” manipulating others into abdicating their duties as real citizens. However, it gives the movie a remote feel as you the viewer are kept in a viewer’s role.
I don’t think film noir has a music style—I’ve heard overbearing Duke Ellington sound tracks and subtly effective electronic music—but the thundering orchestra in Black Rock is entirely out of place with every element of the movie from the taciturn hero to the subtle group manipulation to the barren setting to the western genre. The soaring and crashing orchestra tries mightily to tell us how to feel—for example, during a car chase scene we should feel excited, even though the vehicles are only two tiny black dots on the screen. But at one point, as if even the composer grew tired of inflating the action, he had a short and irrelevant classical piano solo. The score is terrible and makes the movie seem more dated than it is, but Black Rock is still worth seeing. The evil the movie portrays happens daily on a small scale and, if we are not careful, could happen at the drop of a hat on a large scale.