Bad Day at Black Rock (1955)

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Directed by John Sturges.

Starring Walter Brennan, Anne Francis, Dean Jagger, Spencer Tracy, Robert Ryan.

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This powerfully tense, fast-paced suspense drama also yields a grim social message about racial prejudice. Spencer Tracy is John J. MacReedy, a one-armed stranger who comes to the tiny town of Black Rock one hot summer day in 1945, the first time the train has stopped there in years. He looks for both a hotel room and a local Japanese farmer named Komoko, but his inquiries are greeted at first with open hostility, then with blunt threats and harassment, and finally with escalating violence. MacReedy soon realizes that he will not be allowed to leave Black Rock; town boss Reno Smith (Robert Ryan), who had Komoko killed because of his hatred of the Japanese, has also marked MacReedy for death. MacReedy must battle town thugs, a treacherous local woman (Anne Francis), and finally Smith himself to stay alive. The entire cast is flawless, especially Ernest Borgnine and Lee Marvin as the mean-spirited town bullies, and the relentlessly paced action never eclipses the film's sobering themes. ~ Don Kaye, All Movie Guide

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Bad Day at Black Rock
by JimBell in JimBell Blog

liked it.

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"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 co ... " [More]

Bad Day at Black Rock on Reel 13
by jjgittes in jjgittes Blog

loved it.

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"Believe it or not, I had never seen BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK before discovering it this past Saturday on Reel 13. I had seen several other John Sturges films and even suggested in the blog for THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN (1/26/08) that he was primarily an action director, but seemed to struggle when it came to character development (this is a label that followed Spielberg around for many years as well, until he made the likes of SCHINDLER'S LIST and SAVING PRIVATE RYAN). BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK, however, can be called nothing short of a masterpiece. It is nearly perfect on every level – from cinematography to direction to performance to editing to story. I absolutely loved experiencing this film.Sturges and co. don't waste any time – there is a sense of urgency right away, driven by Andre Previn's score that follows a speeding train toward a completely desolate area in the middle of Arizona. One of the first comments uttered in the film is Spencer Tracy telling the train conductor ... " [More]

Review by All Movie Guide

All Movie Guide

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Director John Sturges received his only Academy Award nomination for his work on 1955's Bad Day at Black Rock. Sturges is best-known for his action-suspense movies (Gunfight at the OK Corral, The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape); in his hands, the story of Bad Day at Black Rock -- a good-guy stranger comes to town and ends up the object of town hatred -- slowly comes to a boil. The film is similar in its ever-increasing intensity to many westerns, most notably Fred Zinnemann's High Noon. Archetypal good-guy Spencer Tracy is his usual honorable self, though without any of the characteristic whimsy; he was nominated for his fifth Oscar for the role, and was named best actor by the Cannes Film Festival and the New York Film Critics. Robert Ryan, Ernest Borgnine and Lee Marvin also deliver distinguished performances as Tracy's antagonistic enemies. Screenwriter Millard Kaufman was nominated for his second Academy Award, the first of which was for his previous effort, Take the High Ground. ~ Brendon Hanley, All Movie Guide

Tags: bigotry , outsider , showdown , smalltown , stranger
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