Never underestimate a one-armed man. For example, nobody believed Richard Kimble in The Figutive when he tries to convince them such a man murdered his wife. I’m not exactly sure what the singularly limbed guy in Twin Peaks is all about, but he’s pretty creepy.
Ernest Borgnine is a thug in a very small desert town who unwisely picks a fight with a one-armed Spencer Tracy in 1955’s Bad Day at Black Rock. Tracy had lost his arm serving in WWII, and he appears to damn near crush the bigger man’s windpipe with a single karate chop. Still, Borgnine will get up three more times and try to take him on. The last attempt is after extricating himself from a screen door Tracy tossed him through.
Tracy is treated in a hostile manner by all but a couple of the denizens of the titular town. Everybody is collectively hiding something, and worried he will get to the root of that mystery. Heck, the telegraph operator is downright apoplectic nobody let him know the train was going to be stopping there to let Tracy off, as no other train had done so in the past four years. In a telling exchange with the conductor as he stepped of the train, Tracy says, “I won’t be here long” and other man replies, “In a place like this, it could be a lifetime.” Well, our hero is indeed at risk of being in the area permanently, though only briefly among the living.
At the hotel, the visitor insists on being given a room, despite the protests of proprietor John Ericson. All the rooms are empty, which makes any arguments against Tracy renting one all the more baffling. And yet, I was even more confused by why this town even has a functioning hotel, given the trains never stop there.
Some other locals who are less than helpful include Borgnine and Lee Marvin as local muscle. The former is especially terrifying as he obviously enjoys inflicting pain on others. And, as the second paragraph in this essay details, he thinks it is fair to pick a fight with a physically impaired man a couple of decades his senior.
But there are a couple of characters who, while not excessively helpful, are at least sympathetic to Tracy’s plight. Dean Jagger is a disgraced sheriff who finds solace in the bottle but obviously still feels compelled by an internal sense of right and wrong. Walter Brennan is the town doctor, in what is pretty much the Walter Brennan role. I was fascinated by an odd line he says when he’s asked how regards the present situation, that he looks at it “with the innocence of a fresh-laid egg.” Lastly, I was surprised to see Anne Francis in a minor role as the owner of the gas station.
Everybody is subservient in varying degrees to Robert Ryan, playing the kind of sociopath he excelled at. I never stop being amazed at how often he played monsters in features, and so convincingly, as everything I have read has described him as a kind and generous soul in real life.
This picture was filmed in Cinemascope, and it makes great use of it. Some scenes that might otherwise feel a bit too stagy are improved by distributing non-key characters to the edges of the frame. It somehow makes those moments feel more natural. The widescreen image makes an impression from the first frames of the opening credits, as it manages to capture in profile the entirety of a passenger train as it tears through the desert.
Perhaps the strangest aspect of this film is Tracy likely wouldn’t be so dogged in his investigation, if everybody hadn’t been so antagonistic. Of course, if everybody acted nonchalant, there wouldn’t be a movie.
The central mystery of this picture is not too hard to figure out, but it is deliberately concealed to an extent that revealing more feels like spoilers. And yet, when we learn what has transpired, it is even more baffling to me why everybody has chosen to be under Ryan’s thumb. What I will say, however, because it is a great line, is what is being covered up occurred after the responsibility parties became “patriotically drunk”.
In the end, Bad Day in Black Rock feels similar to High Noon, with only one man willing to stand up to an evil the rest of a town will not fight. I would say I’m not completely sold on the idea of a town even as small as this one completely acquiescing to the will of one person, except recent history has shown how some entire countries are all too happy to do so. What is even weirder to me is, whether in this movie or in real-life, the one the people will sacrifice everything for is somebody who doesn’t have any of their interests in mind.
Dir: John Sturges
Starring Spencer Tracy, Robert Ryan, Walter Brennan, Dean Jagger
Watched on Warner Archive blu-ray