I chuckled a bit as this movie began, because it actually brought back some personal memories for me. I was once a pastor in a small isolated town, and the sort of suspicious reception that Macreedy got as he got off the train at Black Rock was exactly what I saw happen from time to time in the tiny town I was in for three years. Here, of course, the suspicion was more than just run of the mill, not trusting the stranger type of suspicion. Set a few months after the end of the Second World War, Black Rock has a secret, and almost from the first moment of the movie, director John Sturges does a superb job of pulling the viewer into that mystery that the townsfolk clearly don't want revealed. (Actually, apart from the townsfolk, part of the mystery is why Macreedy bothered going to this little, unknown place.) Slowly things begin to unfold, and we discover that the mystery revolves around the fate of a Japanese American farmer named Komoko, whom Macreedy (a World War II veteran who lost an arm in Italy) for some reason had come to town to see. Spencer Tracy was very good as the one-armed Macreedy, and the fight scene between Macreedy and Coley (played by Ernest Borgnine) was a pretty good one. The movie is very deliberately paced by Sturges, never reaching what I would call a level of real and sustained excitement, but always holding the viewers' attention. A very good job by all, worth a 7/10.
Review of Bad Day at Black Rock
