Sunday Morning: “Bad Day at Black Rock” by John Sturges

A man gets off a train in a desolate Western town where nobody ever gets off the train. He’s a stranger in one of those towns that doesn’t take too kindly to strangers. He’s well-dressed and missing an arm and carries himself as if a tornado wouldn’t rattle him, so we have to assume he’s a detective of some sort, although it’s never quite made clear. Nevertheless, everyone tries to rattle him, from the hotel clerk to a local roughneck, played by Lee Marvin. And who among us would not be intimidated by Lee Marvin?

Well, Spencer Tracy for one. He plays the stranger, John J. Macreedy, in the 1955 classic Bad Day at Black Rock, and he is sure of his mission throughout. He has come to the town of Black Rock to find the whereabouts of a resident named Komoko who has seemingly gone missing. Why exactly he’s searching for this man is unclear at first, and what happened to Komodo is unclear. It is clear though that everyone in town knows what happened and they’re not telling. The Hotel Clerk is hostile, the town sheriff is a drunk, the cowboys glare at him, and all the residents seem cowed by a local landowner named Reno Smith (Robert Ryan).

That’s pretty much all there is to the story, but the film doesn’t need anything else. The Duffer Brothers could stand to take notes; there are no wasted shots, actions, lines of dialogue, or moments of film. Everything serves the story. In fact, the first scene sets the basic tone of the film and then every scene progressively increases the tension from the scene that came before it. As we watch Macreedy close in on the truth, we also watch the town close in on him.  By the last act, it seems highly doubtful he’s going to make it out of Black Rock alive. Paul Thomas Anderson has said that aspiring filmmakers should skip film school and watch this movie. As the streaming series has become the dominant narrative form, we seem to have lost our taste for lean, taut stories with no needless subplots. We mistake bloat for “epic” storytelling. This one is tight as a drum.

Have we mentioned the Cinema-Scope?

Thrillers of the era tended to be fairly no nonsense and Bad Day at Black Rock is one that straddles genres: its setting is Western and its storyline is noir. Certainly, the stranger who gets off the line at the town that doesn’t want him is a classic noir storyline, although he’s usually shadowed in night, not exposed in the full light of high noon. Critics of the time and today have tended to praise the “social conscience” of the film, the way it deals with racism, conformity, and arguably the stifling atmosphere of 50s McCarthyism, but the noir was always the closest Hollywood ever came to social realism in film. The protagonists are always social outsiders and outcasts. They’re always trying to catch a break in a society that simply won’t let them.

There’s also a classical tragedy aspect to noirs that I’ve seldom seen discussed, a feeling that one’s fate is inescapable, no matter how man struggles against it. Here, in a strange way, Mcreedy is not so far removed from Antigone, with the same deep sense of responsibility to the dead against all opposition from the larger society. Here too, respect for the dead amounts to civil disobedience and Smith is even a sort of mad king.

Admittedly, this might seem a bit of a stretch, but another thing that happens when you tell a pared down and simple story: it takes on the character of a parable. The town of Black Rock is moldering away and falling apart, rotted from within by the dark secret it keeps, but sunlight is the best disinfectant, as they say, and the town has plenty of that. Is the evil at the heart of town the anti-Japanese racism unleashed by the Second World War? Bigotry more generally? Greed and dishonestly? Closed societies where everyone has an eye on each other? I suspect the reason it’s still a perfect film is it has room to take on all those themes, but it’s still just a story of one guy who’s trying to find out what happened to another guy.

And so, friends, what are YOU watching, reading, pondering, playing, creating, or trying to cover up this weekend?