Bad Day at Black Rock (John Sturges / 1955)
I really must say that, although I love
The Magnificent Seven and I thought
Gunfight at the O.K. Corral and
Hour of the Gun were decent versions of the Wyatt Earp / Tombstone saga, I have to say that
Bad Day at Black Rock is my favorite John Sturges film (so far). Something of a "neo-Western," it's also a very taut and involving crime thriller with a group of very well-written and well-conceived characters. Spencer Tracy portrays John J. Macreedy, a one-armed World War II vet who's taken the streamliner train to a small, isolated town in the middle of nowhere to look for a Japanese man named Komoko. What he finds, however, is a town full of shifty, mistrustful people who respond adversely to his presence. There
is a sheriff (Dean Jagger), but he proves to be somewhat useless. Sometime John Wayne sidekick Walter Brennan gives one of his best performances - "teeth in" - as the local doctor, who is struggling with his conscience and is one of the few people determined to aid Macreedy in unearthing something terrible that happened four years before. The unofficial leader of the town is Reno Smith (Robert Ryan), and he's backed up by two threatening sidekicks, Coley (Ernest Borgnine) and Hector (Lee Marvin). Macreedy isn't looking for trouble, and is in fact here on one last errand before - in his words - "retiring from the human race." But the suspicious actions and behavior of Black Rock's citizens put his antennae up and make him energized and determined to find out just what's going on and what happened to Komoko.
The movie is very much a character-driven piece, and almost has the feel of a stage play. But that doesn't mean it skimps on action setpieces. There is a car chase in the desert, and at one point the one-armed Tracy is forced into a physical confrontation with Borgnine's character at the local bar, where he proceeds to quite satisfactorily wipe the floor with him! And the final nighttime showdown between Tracy's Macreedy and Ryan's Reno is quite suspenseful, with Macreedy being forced to drain fuel from his car in order to make a Molotov cocktail. The supporting cast of course is familiar to anyone who's familiar with the Western genre. In addition to Marvin, Borgnine and Brennan, we've also got Dean Jagger and John Ericson. I'm also a really big fan of Samuel Fuller's
Forty Guns, and Jagger and Ericson both have supporting roles in that one. One might say that the characters they both play here are
slightly more redeemable incarnations of the characters they play in Fuller's film. The film also owes a great deal to other similar serious, character-driven Westerns of the '50s such as
The Gunfighter and
High Noon
One of these days, I'm also going to check out Sturges'
Last Train from Gun Hill. Believe it or not, I've also never seen
The Great Escape, either!
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