← Back to Reviews
in
#220 - Bad Day at Black Rock
John Sturges, 1955
In the aftermath of World War II, an old soldier travels to a small town looking for some but soon learns that everyone in town is hiding a dark secret.
I'm quite fond of the "town with a dark secret" trope and the various details that it encompasses. The uncanny sense that something about the place just isn't right, the investigating character becoming more and more frustrated by the difficulty of their search for answers, the town's population ranging from the good-hearted but useless to the villains closest to the secret, the growing sense of dread as the secret is slowly revealed...even if it's not executed properly, at least it's a good exercise in mystery. Bad Day at Black Rock is a good execution of this particular trope that feels very much like something out of the Wild West despite its relatively modern setting (you could quite possibly swap out World War II for the Civil War and it wouldn't be much different aside from the period-appropriate details).
Spencer Tracy leads the cast as a disabled veteran searching for one of the town's residents. He gives a strong performance where he starts out at a friendly old man but that exterior soon gives way to a multitude of raw emotions that he expresses in numerous ways against the inhabitants of the town. He's backed up by some good actors - Robert Ryan, Ernest Borgnine, and Lee Marvin show up as some of the more obviously antagonistic characters that Tracy encounters, while Anne Francis and Dean Jagger make for much more ambiguous foils for Tracy. The film is generally pretty lean and knows that there isn't enough of a mystery to sustain the film's length. Fortunately it makes up for it with some reasonably well-developed characters, a cursory exploration of moral relativity, and some solid Western-style filmmaking.
John Sturges, 1955
In the aftermath of World War II, an old soldier travels to a small town looking for some but soon learns that everyone in town is hiding a dark secret.
I'm quite fond of the "town with a dark secret" trope and the various details that it encompasses. The uncanny sense that something about the place just isn't right, the investigating character becoming more and more frustrated by the difficulty of their search for answers, the town's population ranging from the good-hearted but useless to the villains closest to the secret, the growing sense of dread as the secret is slowly revealed...even if it's not executed properly, at least it's a good exercise in mystery. Bad Day at Black Rock is a good execution of this particular trope that feels very much like something out of the Wild West despite its relatively modern setting (you could quite possibly swap out World War II for the Civil War and it wouldn't be much different aside from the period-appropriate details).
Spencer Tracy leads the cast as a disabled veteran searching for one of the town's residents. He gives a strong performance where he starts out at a friendly old man but that exterior soon gives way to a multitude of raw emotions that he expresses in numerous ways against the inhabitants of the town. He's backed up by some good actors - Robert Ryan, Ernest Borgnine, and Lee Marvin show up as some of the more obviously antagonistic characters that Tracy encounters, while Anne Francis and Dean Jagger make for much more ambiguous foils for Tracy. The film is generally pretty lean and knows that there isn't enough of a mystery to sustain the film's length. Fortunately it makes up for it with some reasonably well-developed characters, a cursory exploration of moral relativity, and some solid Western-style filmmaking.