Bad Day at Black Rock is as timeless now as it was in 1955.
Released in the mid-fifties, the film’s paranoia is a reflection of the period’s anti-communist atmosphere. In its focus on the Japanese internment, and the town’s willingness to cover up its guilt, it is a sadly evergreen reflection of the ways in which America refuses to reflect on its past.
The genius of the film is that it manages to balance this social dimension within the framework of a spare action thriller - one that features one of the iconic examples of a disabled action hero.
This movie is so streamlined. From the runtime of 82 mins, to the limited cast and small setting, this movie is tight as a drum.
John Sturges directs the movie in his straightforward, unflashy style, a combination of tight interior compositions and exteriors that show how small the town is.
Our hero arrives and immediately is surrounded. The town is literally a street, shown in a long street as the train arrives.
That mise-en-scene is key. While McReady is often presented at a disadvantage, that vast backdrop of mountains and desert is always there - a reminder that all the characters are living on the edge.
At one point, the film’s villains congregate near the rail tracks, surrounded by desert and mountains - they are at the mercy of forces they can no longer control.
That sense of a frontier also ties the action to the country’s real and cinematic past - this is a western town McReady is like a lone gunslinger coming into town to bring the law.
The setting is so evocative and familiar that if you took away the cars this could be the old west.
Crossing from the reel to the real, it is hard not to see Komoko, the victim we never see onscreen,as a stand-in for how America's history is framed to exclude anything that contradicts the myth of manifest destiny and white masculinity.
The only sign of Komoko’s existence is the burnt-out shell of his home. His killers have not just killed him but tried to remove any evidence that he existed.
The casting of Robert Ryan as the villain Reno Smith is one of the film’s master strokes.
A forerunner to Michael Douglas’s embodiment of curdled white masculinity, Ryan built a career of showing the dark side of onscreen American male stars, and was nominated for an Oscar for playing an anti-Semitic murderer in 1947’s Crossfire.
He is the locus of the film’s racial politics: at first he is presented almost as a figure out of a western, from his name to his height and machismo.
But as the g progresses, that presentation is revealed as simply that, a facade.
Despite his patriotic posturing, he never went to the war. And he used the racist atmosphere of the time to kill Komoko.
Smith is a failure in terms of every standard he sets for himself: strength (he could not enlist because he failed the physical) and self-reliance (it is revealed that Komoko had discovered water on the land he leased from Smith).
What is striking and transfixing about Ryan in this role is what he manages to avoid - Smith is not a charming villain or a caricature of a Klansman. He is disgustingly human, trying to impose his will on a world and people he cannot control.
It is impossible to watch Robert Ryan and not think of America now. You watch his performance as Smith - the rage, the sense of impotence - and it feels evergreen as an allegory for facism.
Smith only succeeds because he is enabled by the community around him, one that shares his guilt and a desire to hide their collective sins. Even though they could stand against him, no one does anything.
It takes a stranger, someone who represents everything Smith is not, to finally destroy him.
As his nemesis, Spencer Tracy is wonderfully deceptive.
His weary, everyman quality - the source of his success as a movie star - is completely misread. And his missing arm is read as a weakness.
What works about the character is that this impairment does not grant him any superiority in terms of fighting skills. The film is smart enough to present McReedy as a man.
There is a sense of stakes to the whole piece, and that does not dissipate once he has revealed his true colours.
He is vulnerable. He is a confident loner waiting to unleash. He is aware that he is outnumbered, and spends the first half of the movie avoiding violence.
Tracy seems genuinely afraid of Ryan and his crew.
As someone who watches a lot of action movies, what I love about this movie is how much of a slow burn it is.
We have grown so used to action movies which are almost purely a series of action sequences. Bad Day at Black Rock is a product of different kind of storytelling - and a different set of audience expectations.
There is no opening action sequence to establish our hero’s credentials. And there is no series of action sequences which grow more elaborate as the film goes on.
This means when McReedy beats up Ernst Borgnine’s thug in the diner, it is more powerful, a moment of catharsis after all of the trouble the town goons have put this man through.
And after this shocking victory, the odds still do not turn in our hero’s favour.
The film manages to maintain the tension right up to the final showdown, in which McReedy outsmarts Smith with a MacGyver-style improvisation. It is a testament to the filmmakers that they also manage to cast doubt on whether this last gambit will succeed.
What a picture.
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