Bad Day at Black Rock

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched Bad Day at Black Rock made in 1955 at MGM and directed by John Sturges. Ice Station Zebra DVD had a trailer for this, so I watched it.

The story is set in 1946 or so. Just after the war ends. In a small town in the desert east of Los Angeles, by the mountains – maybe it’s in Nevada – the train pulls to a stop, and a man in black gets off. Spencer Tracy, a man with one crippled arm. The telegraph operator is shocked: train hasn’t stopped at Black Rock in over four years.

The townsfolk are suspicious of the stranger. Nobody wants to help him or answer any of his questions. Particularly when they learn he’s interested in going out of town to Adobe Flats to see a man named Kumoko.

A man named Smith (Robert Ryan) seems to be running the town in good old western bad man fashion. Tracy manages to get a girl to rent him her jeep, and he drives up to Adobe Flats, where he finds a well, and a burned down farmhouse, and a few wildflowers growing in the dust. He picks a couple and heads back to town.

On the way back he’s run off the road by one of Smith’s goons. In town it gets even worse: even though Tracy now only wants to leave, nobody will let him go. The next train doesn’t come through until tomorrow morning. The local sheriff is no good; the telegraph operator won’t send his telegrams to the police, and the telephone wires out of town are cut. The old doctor offers to lend him his hearse to drive out, but it’s too late, the goons have wrecked the motor. Tracy can’t even walk out; as soon as he leaves the confines of the town he’ll be killed.

After dark, he is promised, he will be murdered.

Finally he turns on one of the goons, and beats him up, though he’s only got one good arm. Tracy is a veteran, and lost the use of the arm in battles in Italy. Now in the hotel lobby he confesses he was all washed up, ready to give up living, when he came to town. He only stopped here because Kumoko’s son saved Tracy’s life in Italy and died in the battle; Tracy wanted to leave the kid’s medal with his father, then go on to Los Angeles and take a ship to someplace where he could just leave his life behind. But now that Smith has threatened his life, he’s come to realize how precious it is, and he wants to fight.

He manages to persuade the young hotel clerk to tell him what happened to Kumoko: just after Pearl Harbor, Smith went to LA to join the army, but was turned down on medical reasons. He came back to Black Rock sore and mad and got drunk with his buddies. Once they were mean drunk, they went up to Kumoko’s ranch. Smith hates Japs anyway, and he hates Kumoko even more, because Kumoko worked hard on the place at Adobe Flats that Smith leased to him, and dug a well and found water. Smith felt cheated and made a fool of, so he took his boys up there and taunted Kumoko. Kumoko locked himself in, and Smith set the place on fire and when Kumoko stumbled out, Smith shot him. They buried him up there where the wildflowers are growing. Tracy figured the wildflowers marked a grave, and guessed it was Kumoko’s.

Tracy manages to get help from the few decent folks left in the town, and he rides out; but he’s betrayed by the girl driving him – she takes him right up to where Smith is waiting. But Smith shoots the girl to do away with one witness, and comes after Tracy. Tracy rigs a molotov cocktail from the jeep and overcomes Smith.

In the morning Tracy drives Smith back to the jail. The sheriff has found his self-respect again. As the train pulls into the station, Tracy prepares to leave; the town’s doctor asks if he won’t leave Kumoko’s kid’s medal for the town, ‘Something for us to build on.’ Tracy agrees, and gets on the train, and rides out. 24 hours have passed since he came to town.

This is another widescreen picture from MGM. Dore Schary got Producer credits, it was shot in Cinemascope, and they built a nice convincing little town out in the scrub desert. All the outdoor shots are nice, they really emphasize the dryness and emptiness, but the skies are blue with white clouds and not blown out; colors are good, exposures are good all around. Sturges gives us a good feeling for being trapped and confined without any walls, just deadly desert all around.

The interiors don’t work quite so well. These were all shot on soundstages back in Culver City, and it shows. We can see out the windows the painted walls posing as the out of doors. The exposures are too dark inside, and through the windows the exposures are not blown out enough. The contrast between the realistic location footage and the interiors is too much for me.

Robert Ryan played this sort of sneering bigot in many films. He’s not given too much to work with here, so he just gives us another excellent portrayal. Nowhere near Ryan’s best, but Ryan was so good, he’s still good. Ernest Borgnine (13 years later to act for Sturges in Zebra) plays one of the goons – the one Tracy beats up. The other head goon is played by Lee Marvin, and Marvin is always a joy to watch. Marvin had a great physical gift; he really looks like a cowpoke here, lazy and coiled like a panther. He was one of the great physical actors. But this is early in his career, when he was playing mostly second-tier goons and hoods. Watching him in these early roles makes me wonder by what miracle he ever got to be a leading man.

For this movie, Sturges was nominated as Best Director at the Oscars. Shocking.

One thing I can see runs between this and Zebra is that Sturges likes longshots – at least in widescreen shooting. In Zebra this is a flaw, because it keeps us out of the emotions, out of the action, and is totally out of place when shooting the cramped confines of a submarine. In Black Rock though, the widescreen shots really help give us the landscape in the exteriors. The interiors are still longshots though, which is too bad. He just doesn’t build up the suspense, the sense of Tracy being trapped, his growing desperation.

(31 March 2009)