John J. Macreedy (Spencer Tracy) blows into the dusty Western town of Black Rock to deliver a medal to Komoko, the father of a fallen soldier Macreedy served with in World War II. Unfortunately, Komoko’s been murdered for being Japanese and the townspeople of Black Rock have covered it up. As Macreedy begins to realize what happened, the villainous Reno Smith (Robert Ryan) decides that Macreedy’s gotta die too—but yeah, in the climactic showdown, it’s Reno that dies.
The town with a dark secret trope is now the stuff of TV procedurals rather than big-budget movies.1 Still, Black Rock overcomes its thin, predictable plot by creating a crackling atmosphere rich with tension. Wide shots of the lonely desert town with imposing mountains in the background; André Previn’s2 brutal, oppressive score; bona fide movie star Spencer Tracy clomping around, pretending to only have one arm. It’s lipstick on a pig, but the pig gets real pretty.
Rating: 7/10, an alright movie that birthed some alright TV.
Cast and Crew
Spencer Tracy was born in 1900. We’ll soon watch him play the titular Old Man in The Old Man and the Sea (1958). So how, in 1955, was he starring as action hero John J. Macreedy? He’s playing a recent WWII vet, but Tracy’s gray hair and crotchety demeanor make it seem more like he just got back from the early-bird special at Golden Corral.3 And this fight scene against Ernest Borgnine is one of the ugliest and least believable fights I’ve ever seen in a movie.4
The years between Father of the Bride and Black Rock were fallow for Tracy, with his only big hit being the Katharine Hepburn comedy Pat and Mike (1952). But don’t worry: we’re gonna get into the era where Spencer Tracy embraces being an Old Man and he’ll be dynamite at that.
The town of Black Rock is littered with Oscar winners. Ernest Borgnine, the lead of 1955’s Best Picture-winning Marty, is one of Reno Smith’s heavies. Lee Marvin, who we’ll be seeing soon enough in Cat Ballou (1965), also plays Reno’s muscle.5 Even three-time Best Supporting Actor winner Walter Brennan shows up as the town doctor.
Anne Francis has the lone female role in this movie, and let’s be grateful that it wasn’t as a love interest to the squat, gray Tracy. Francis has one other major film credit to her name: starring alongside Leslie Nielsen in Forbidden Planet (1956), a sci-fi classic based on “The Tempest.”6
The Trivia
When justifying his murder of the Japanese-American Komoko, Reno Smith mentions both Bataan and Corregidor.
The Battle of Bataan began soon after Pearl Harbor when the Japanese invaded the island of Luzon in the Philippines. (Note that the Philippines belonged to the U.S. at this point because of the Spanish-American War.) Field Marshal Douglas MacArthur7 concentrated his defense force in the Bataan Peninsula and held out for three months until having to surrender. MacArthur escaped to Australia8, where he promised “I came through and I shall return.”
Corregidor, an island that guarded the entrance to Manila Bay, fell soon after the Battle of Bataan ended, leaving plenty of Americans as prisoners. Many were marched to POW camps in what was called the Bataan death march. During the march, the Japanese committed lots of atrocities, and after the war, three of the Japanese Army officials in charge of the march were tried and executed for war crimes.
Macreedy comes into Black Rock on the Southern Pacific streamliner.
Southern Pacific was founded to build a railroad from San Francisco to San Diego and was, at one point, the largest landholder in California. They were also the builders of the 2nd transcontinental railroad.9 The Gadsden Purchase—the last addition of territory to the continental U.S.—was done in part to build a southern transcontinental railroad that would only run through U.S.-held land.10
Odds and Ends
Macreedy blows up Reno Smith with a Molotov cocktail; the Molotov cocktail was invented by the Finns during the 1939 Winter War against Russia and named after Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov, best known later for the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact…Reno mentions that the disabled “put on hair shirts and act like martyrs”; hair shirts, made from rough, coarse animal hair, are worn as instruments of penance (the hair rubs and scratches your skin, causing discomfort)…Reno lies and says Komoko was sent to a Japanese internment camp; by coincidence, the town the movie was filmed in is just five miles from Manzanar, the most well-known of those camps.
Also, the one-armed thing? It wasn’t originally in the script. It was added as a gimmick to goad Tracy into taking the role. Tracy knew early: play a guy with a deformity, get an Oscar nod.
Even Bad Day at Black Rock’s runtime (81 minutes!) screams “episode of prestige TV” more than “major Hollywood movie.”
That’s André Previn, future conductor of symphonies and philharmonics, onetime husband of Mia Farrow…but we’ll get there. He’s just 26 in 1955, getting his start on film scoring at MGM.
Tracy knew it too. He wanted to pull out of the filming because of the poor fit but the MGM production head threatened to sue him if he did.
Spencer Tracy also thought the fight looked ridiculous, but (according to IMDB) director John Sturges “showed the footage to a Marine instructor who not only confirmed the effectiveness of the karate method but told Tracy the blow as executed would have killed his opponent in real life.” I mean…you watch it and tell me what you think.
Though before Black Rock, Marvin played Chino, leader of the Beetles, in The Wild One (1953) across from Marlon Brando, who played the leader of the Black Rebels Motorcycle Club. That film has the interchange “What are you rebelling against, Johnny?” “Whaddaya got?” It also has this fight scene, where Brando’s outfit is busy spawning a whole BDSM subculture.
Anne Francis also played the title role in “Honey West,” a forgotten ‘60s show about a female private eye. Interestingly, John Ericson, who played Francis’ character’s brother in Black Rock, also starred with her in “Honey West.” Wait, you don’t think that’s interesting? Shoot, I guess you’re right.
MacArthur was named Field Marshal of the Philippine Army; the U.S. doesn’t use the rank Field Marshal. (Though, if you’d like a puzzle, remember that the Philippines WAS the U.S. due to the aforementioned Spanish-American War. Now try to explain his rank!)
To escape, he took a PT boat through Japanese-infested waters to Mindanao, the second-largest island in the Philippines (after Luzon). From there, he flew to Australia. Also, the “PT” in “PT boat” stands for “patrol torpedo.”
But yes, the 1st transcontinental railroad gets all the trivia love, and yes, you have to know that it came together when track laid separately by the Union Pacific and Central Pacific was joined at Promontory, Utah.
My mother got me “Slavery, Scandal, and Steel Rails: The 1853 Gadsden Purchase and the Building of the Second Transcontinental Railroad Across Arizona and New Mexico Twenty-Five Years Later” for Christmas one year. I’d quote from that book for this section (if for nothing else, to give myself some justification for having read it) but I lent it to someone who obviously isn’t going to read it because its title is “Slavery, Scandal, and Steel Rails: The 1853 Gadsden Purchase and the Building of the Second Transcontinental Railroad Across Arizona and New Mexico Twenty-Five Years Later.”
Rather than Prestige TV, I always associate Bad Day at Black Rock with crummy '80s action shows, where they were always blowing into some tiny town and rooting out corruption. Also because the A-Team had an episode called "Black Day at Bad Rock" while Knight Rider went with "Good Day at White Rock".