Bad Day at Black Rock

Despite only a handful of scenes with genuine action, director John Sturges fills Bad Day at Black Rock with a steadily increasing tension, each scene revealing just a little bit more of what menace lies at the heart of the titular, isolated town. Making use of a stellar cast (Robert Ryan and Lee Marvin playing sociopaths in the same film!) and a contemporary Western tone, Sturges gives us one of the few noirs whose story touches on the under-exposed treatment of Japanese Americans (“Japs”) just after World War II. Tracy plays John Macreedy, a one-armed stranger in town who’s looking for a former resident whose name elicits displeasure and suspicion among the men in charge, namely Reno Smith (Ryan), Hector David (Marvin) and Coley Trimble (Ernest Borgnine), who attempt to get rid of Macreedy before he finds what he’s looking for. Crafted with the care and precision of a stage production and written with the psychological depth of a classic novel, Bad Day at Black Rock is an unusual, uncategorizable film noir that quietly enters and stays in the viewer’s mind just the way so many forgotten American men languished in the postwar desert.