- There are frontier towns, backwaters, and boondocks, but rarely do you encounter a town so small and ingrown that the most exciting part of the day occurs when the train goes by, even though it hasn't stopped in years. But that's Black Rock for you, a Western hamlet with one street, a great view of the mountains, and some painfully dark secrets. Then one day, the train does stop, and John J. Macreedy (Spencer Tracy) gets off. The townspeople are in a panic, but neither Macreedy nor the audience initially knows why. We're all about to find out.
- Although the townspeople seem like a suspicious lot under any circumstances, their real concern seems to stem from Macreedy's interest in a place called Adobe Flats. A Japanese man named Komoko used to live there, but not anymore. Black Rock's de facto leader, a suspect fellow named Reno Smith (Robert Ryan), tells Macreedy that Komoko got shipped off to a Japanese internment camp right after the attack on Pearl Harbor and never came back. The ineffectual sheriff (Dean Jagger) doesn't really know what happened and doesn't want to know. The town doctor (Walter Brennan), an unusually honest man, lets slip that Komoko died. How did it happen? Let's not kid ourselves: we know how it happened.
- As Macreedy continues his inquiries, the situation escalates. Suddenly, Smith's thugs (Lee Marvin and Ernest Borgnine) proceed from simple rudeness to trying to run Macreedy off the road. Macreedy's strongest weapon is his incredible patience, but even his patience has its limits. Finally, Smith reveals his true colors when he enlists the help of a local woman (Anne Francis) to ensnare Macreedy and then proceeds to double-cross her. Now Macreedy faces a life-or-death nighttime standoff with Smith on an isolated mountain pass. Macreedy's war injuries left him with only one good arm, and that doesn't seem like much against Smith and his rifle. Is "something terrible" going to happen in Black Rock again, or will the town finally stand up to confront its past?
- Bad Day at Black Rock is a good movie made even more impressive by the fact that it champions both the handicapped and racial minorities, two groups that probably didn't have much traction back in 1955. Furthermore, Tracy is one of the five actors of his time that could play a completely decent man (the others being Gregory Peck, Henry Fonda, Jimmy Stewart, and Gary Cooper), even if his adroitness with judo and Molotov cocktails seems a bit over the top. Ryan, too, is excellent as a smarmy villain whom one imagines could be the result of his character from Crossfire not being able to enlist. All of that said, the best part of the film may actually be the scenery. The film was obviously shot on location, and I suspect that the entire town was constructed around some existing railroad tracks just for this film. When you see Black Rock standing alone in the middle of desert and mountains, you realize just how far removed from civilization this place really is.
