Bad Day at Black Rock

Spencer Tracy shines in this most ambitious, innovative genre-bender. The challenge placed before director Sturges was to dress a film noir in western clothing. The result is a masterful blending of the two genre's most effective symbols into a complex, entertaining thriller.

The opening shots of a train steaming through the desert and slowing at a tiny, one-horse town announce that we are watching a western. The old man leaning back on his chair at the railroad station waiting for no one in particular (like Fonda does so many times in Ford's films) practically screams western. Then suddenly, the tone begins to change. It isn't a threatening gun-slinger, a fashionable lady from the east, or even a cowboy that steps off that train--it's an elderly, one-armed man wearing a fedora, played by Spencer Tracy.

The residents of Black Rock watch him like a hawk and treat him like a criminal, but we're not sure why. These people, like the viewer, are left scratching their heads. That train hasn't stopped here in four years...why would anyone want to visit Black Rock? The concept of the corrupt town, where the walls have eyes and even good people can't escape its evil grasp is the hallowed ground of the film noir. In westerns there's generally nowhere to hide--in film noir everybody's hiding from something.

As the film progresses we learn the source of everyone's anxiety, including Tracy. The film is about a nation wrestling with its guilt over their treatment of the Japanese-American post-Pearl Harbour. Much like the recent "Three Kings" explored the hidden story of Desert Storm, Bad Day at Black Rock examines the attrocities that are too often buried at the back or omitted from our children's history textbooks.

Perhaps this is why the film had to be placed in a western setting--in a world that is both uniquely American and just fictional enough that it might be real. The western celebrates all that America is founded on: good overcoming evil, the right to bear arms, and claiming one's own territory--from a favourite bar stool to a thousand acres of land. The west represents both the nation's greatest aspirations and its greatest failures. By setting a politically charged film in the realm of the western you immediately challenge the ideology of America at its core.

Spencer Tracy and Robert Ryan share a brilliant exchange:

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