This stirred up old memories like the tea-soaked madeleine in Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past." All I knew about the movie was that it starred Spencer Tracy as a stand-up, two-fisted guy who confronts a bunch of villains during a 24 hour time period in a tiny western town. Although the flick is second cousin to "High Noon," I seemed to recall that it left most people with a feeling of disquietude back in 1955, as if they were trying unsuccessfully to digest a piece of tough meat.
The movies had a much more important place in people's lives in the mid-50s before TV took over. Nearly everybody went at least twice a week and almost every night included a double feature, with a cartoon, travelogue and newsreel lead-in. On Thursday nights, there was a raffle. You put your ticket stub in a drum and the theater manager, Mr. Balducci, would rotate it and pick the winner. The prize was usually something like a set of dishes.
Mr. Balducci lost a leg during WWII, when his merchant ship was torpedoed. He didn't put up with any nonsense in his theater and would throw you out for whispering too loud. I can't imagine what he would make of today's Manhattan audiences who treat the movie theater as their own living-room. Not only do they often talk at the top of their lungs, you risk getting shot if you try to shush them. When Mr. Balducci headed down the aisles to administer justice, you could hear him coming from 30 feet away. Ker-plunk, ker-plunk, ker-plunk, as his wooden leg announced his coming. As soon as you heard that, you sat upright in your seat, took your feet off the one in front of you, and kept your mouth shut.
That's exactly the kind of impression that Jim McCreedy (Spencer Tracy) makes when he gets off the train in Black Rock. World War II has just ended and McCreedy, like Balducci, has lost the use of a limb in combat, in this case his right arm. When McCreedy shows up at the local hotel and announces that he is looking for Kimoko, a Japanese farmer who lives nearby, he is met by stony silence.
The more he persists in finding out about what happened to Kimoko, who has vanished from his property, which is now a burned-out rubble, the more hostile the local denizens become. They are led by Reno Smith (Robert Ryan) who is the ringleader of a bunch of no-goods including Ernest Borgnine and Lee Marvin, cast according to type. Borgnine picks a fight with Spencer Tracy at one point and gets beaten to a pulp. While he has lost the use of one arm, he is still an expert in judo. At this point, the bad guys decide that nothing short of murder will do.
They are desperate because they fear that McCreedy will uncover their secret: in a fit of racist anger, a mob led by Reno Smith had killed Kimoko the day after Pearl Harbor. And just as was the case in the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII, there were economic motives involved. Smith had leased the land to Kimoko after lieing to him that there was ample water. What Smith did not know is that there was water indeed, that the resourceful Kimoko had discovered drilling 60 feet under his land.
McCreedy came to Black Rock to present him with the medal that his son had won posthumously fighting side by side with him in Italy. After catching on that the father had been murdered, McCreedy decides to administer justice in the good old-fashioned American way.
What is amazing, however, is that this sort of justice did not really fit into the contemporary American scene, which could only be described as a Black Rock from coast to coast. The Korean War had just ended and fear and hatred of the "gooks" ran deep. Nineteenth century fear of the "yellow peril" were now wedded to anti-Red hysteria. The Rosenbergs had been executed two years earlier and the judge delivered a xenophobic speech that practically blamed the two leftists for all the dead American soldiers on the Korean battlefields. He said, "But in your case, I believe your conduct in putting into the hands of the Russians the A-bomb years before our best scientists predicted Russia would perfect the bomb has already caused, in my opinion, the Communist aggression in Korea, with the resultant casualties exceeding 50,000 and who knows but that millions more of innocent people may pay the price of your treason. Indeed, by your betrayal you undoubtedly have altered the course of history to the disadvantage of our country."
The more typical movie of the mid-50s was "The Bamboo Prison," of which I have vivid memories. It is about American GI's in a Red Chinese prison camp. One scene depicts them being "brainwashed." They are seated in a classroom, where a Communist instructor drones on and on about the injustices of class society. One can imagine how laughable that might have seemed to an American audience in that period, especially after having been eligible to win a raffle for a new set of dishes. Because the GI's will get beaten if they fall asleep during a lecture, they paint eyeballs on their eyelids so as to be able to nap safely.
Now why didn't John Sturges elect to make movies like that? There is absolutely nothing in his background that would suggest he would make such a contrarian film. The last thing that American audiences in 1954 wanted to be reminded of was mob violence against the Nisei. Sturges, who made films for the US Army Air Corps during WWII, was no Communist. He just liked to make straight ahead action films. His other credits included "Gunfight at the O.K. Corral," "The Old Man and the Sea" and "The Magnificent Seven."
In a 1975 NY Times interview, Sturges likened pictures to "a chattel mortgage" financed by bankers or other sources of wealth. The only difference between an amateur and professional director is that the professional "finishes the film," paying off the mortgage. His pictures, he added, were to explain "why our side won."
The memorable thing about John Sturges is that at least in the case of "Bad Day at Black Rock," our side is the human race.
Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)