John Sturges (1955)
The symmetry and economy of the plot are appealing. One day in late 1945 a stranger steps off the Southern Pacific train into a small, isolated town on the edge of a desert. The stranger’s name is James J Macreedy. He says he’ll be in Black Rock only 24 hours – he’s looking for a man called Komoko, a Japanese-American farmer. In the course of his stay, Macreedy discovers that Komoko was murdered by some local men, shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. After seeing that the killers’ ringleader, Reno Smith, gets something approaching his just desserts, Macreedy, good as his word, takes the train out of Black Rock next morning. He has only one arm, having lost the other in Italy, as a soldier in the recently ended war in Europe. Macreedy nearly lost his life too – it was saved by Komoko’s son, who died as a result. Macreedy wanted to present to the father his son’s medal of honour and his own gratitude. Shortly before he leaves Black Rock, the local physician, who doubles up as an undertaker (a really good idea – you wonder why it isn’t standard practice), asks Macreedy for the medal. This is to help the town, traumatised by the evil deed that took place there, back to spiritual health. Macreedy hands over the medal and boards the Southern Pacific.
This is a Western-like narrative and moral schema and maybe that’s why I couldn’t see much in Bad Day at Black Rock. (Wikipedia describes the film as a thriller combining ‘elements of Western and film noir’ – a profile that’s particularly obvious in André Previn’s overexcited score.) From the little I’ve read about it, the film was praised for its accumulating suspense but it’s a very limited kind of suspense. Reno Smith and his henchmen are all immediately hostile and all physically intimidating: the threat of harm being done to Macreedy is there from the outset. He refuses, repeatedly and tenaciously, to rise to their menacing bait. According to the law of Hollywood, it’s long odds against any harm coming to Spencer Tracy, especially as he’s playing a one-armed man. What’s more, you immediately suspect that the disability is designed to give greater impact to the inevitable moment when Macreedy fights back. And what happened to Komoko isn’t a mystery for long. In other words, you’re not waiting for much to happen except for the locals’ baleful hostility to explode and for Macreedy to handle it. The violence may be simmering but, as Sally said, it goes on and on simmering: the picture, although it’s very short (81 minutes), is on a low heat for what feels like a long time. Macreedy eventually retaliates when, as he’s eating a bowl of chilli in a bar, Reno’s sidekick pours lashings of ketchup into the food and taunts him. Macreedy floors him with a karate blow. (I managed to misunderstand this, assuming it signified a Japanese connection rather than the common sense of a one-armed man.)
Spencer Tracy gives Macreedy a bloody-minded gravitas that’s impressive, even if he’s improbably mature as a member of the fighting forces in World War II. (Tracy was fifty-four when he made this picture but looks considerably older.) Robert Ryan is a good actor but his quietness as Reno Smith doesn’t work particularly well – perhaps because Tracy is determinedly quiet too, and more expressively so. The two other heavies are played more predictably, and characteristically, by Ernest Borgnine and Lee Marvin. Walter Brennan is the sympathetic medic-mortician, Dean Jagger the hopeless town sheriff, and Jon Ericson a hotel desk clerk who’s more uncertainly unfriendly towards Macreedy than Reno and his cronies are. Anne Francis – literally the only woman in town – is the desk clerk’s sister, who runs the local garage. The screenplay, by Millard Kaufman and Don McGuire, was adapted from a story by Howard Breslin.
26 February 2010
