BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK (dir by John Sturges, w/Spencer Tracy, Robert Ryan, Lee Marvin, Walter Brennan, MGM, 80mns, 1955)
Some movies work on the sheer force of their conviction. Their righteous indignation.
BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK finds WWII vet John J.MacReedy (Tracy) coming into a small one street Californian western town in 1945 to deliver a medal to the Japanese farmer father of a man who died saving MacReedy's life in Italy. Macreedy soon discovers the Japanese father was killed in an act of drunken racism and the guilty men of the town would rather kill MacReedy than let him get out of town alive with the secret.
It's a nasty morality play of a movie. As MacReedy realizes what's going on, the guilty men, sinister leader Reno Smith (Robert Ryan channeling the violent patriotic hypocrisy of a racist) and his cowboy underlings Coley (Ernest Borgnine) and Hector (an unsettlingly brilliant Lee Marvin) close in.
What's so powerful about the film is its fury at a society (here microcosmically represented by the town of Black Rock) that doesn't have the backbone to stand up to such men.
Ah, widescreen.
It's instructive to see that right in the middle of the conservative Eisenhower 1950's, the Cold War, and the McCarthy communist witch hunts, indignant violent raw movies like this were being made. It challenges the notion that the 50's were a more reserved time for American cinema.
Clearly Hollywood pictures like BLACK ROCK, GIANT, THE SEARCHERS, ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS, IMITATION OF LIFE, and others were tackling uneasy issues that roiled the country head on.
BLACK ROCK's genius is to do it as a western-noir that takes place all in one day. And MacReedy isn't a holier than thou do gooder from the start. He's a "going about my business" regular Joe. But he's pushed by disgust at the behaviors of those around him to take a stand.
Spencer Tracy and Robert Ryan. Two lions of film acting.
MacReedy fought in Italy, like Komoko's son, and lost the use of his arm because of his service. The violent men of Black Rock didn't serve. And they channeled their shame into drunken acts of vigilante violence against American Japanese. They displaced their own self-hatred into acts of destruction aimed at others they decided merited their rage.
This review is being written in early 2026 and there are sporadic signs that different groups are getting sick of the xenophobic fear mongering that pretends to be returning America to some imagined past greatness. If only the damn illegal immigrants didn't take our jobs, give us fentanyl, rape and kill us, etc.
The majority of America knows there's little truth to those lies. The question is whether we'll stand up and say enough like MacReedy does.
Craig Hammill is the founder.programmer of Secret Movie Club