30 Years of Brilliance: 1930-1959
Bad Day at Black Rock is a tense thriller, full of suspense and, despite its Western landscape, it falls into the genre of film noir, with its story of dark secrets in the past. The whole action of the film takes place over a tight time period of just 24 hours and it contains just about everything - a gripping storyline, a small cast of vivid characters, a dangerous setting, and the plight of a brave loner on the side of justice who beats the odds. The film was nominated for three Academy Awards - Spencer Tracy was nominated for Best Actor, director John Sturges for Best Director, and Best Screenplay for Millard Kaufman. All three nominations lost to the Best Picture winning film of the year, Marty (1955). The score by Andre Previn brings effective reinforcement and emphasis to many of the film's melodramatic scenes.
The action of the movie takes place in 1945, just after the end of World War II. Spencer Tracy plays John J. Macreedy, a one-armed ex-army man who steps off the train in Black Rock, a remote California desert town. We don't know what he's come for, nor do the inhabitants. But they resent his presence and are instantly hostile, and it soon becomes clear that they are hiding something.
Three of the residents, excellently played by Robert Ryan, Ernest Borgnine and Lee Marvin, are particularly formidable. Director John Sturges slowly tightens the tension as Tracy doggedly continues to pursue his investigations, digging deeper and closer to the town's secret. When threats and intimidation have no effect on Tracy, the three villainsresort to violence cutting phone wires and disabling a car in which he tries to leave.
Also in the impressive cast are Russell Collins as the weak, cowardly telegraph agent, Dean Jagger as the played-out sheriff (his humiliation at the hands of Robert Ryan is unpleasant), and, most of all, Walter Brennan as the doctor who tries to push things but isn't dumb enough to push too hard.
With the help of the 'good' elements in the town, and after surmounting many obstacles, Tracy eventually gets the upper hand, and brings the film to its exciting climax. He learns the town's dark secret, and fulfills the promise he made to present a posthumous Congressional Medal of Honor for heroism to the farming father of a Japanese wartime buddy who had saved his life in World War II on the battlefields of Italy.
On the surface, this Hollywood film classic is concerned with the themes of individual integrity, group conformity and complacency, and civic responsibility. It can also be seen as a powerful, allegorical indictment of the Hollywood blacklist, created during the climate of suspicion and fear of the 1950s McCarthy era.
The film was produced by Dore Schary, who tried to stand up to blacklisting and whose regime at MGM was marked by a number of liberal productions. But whatever its good intentions, it's Tracy that we remember most.
