My feeling, shared by many other Asians I konw, about BDABR was that it was part of a larger propaganda program rather than a statement against racism. The 50's was a time when a quick shift of "good" Orientals was needed and the Japanese were selected. After Pearl Harbor, Life Magazine run a special issue with photos and diagrams to tell Americans how to distinquish a benign Chinese from a sneaky "Jap", because the former was a meek friend and the latter was monstrous foe. By the 50s, the situation has changed. BDABR was a resurrection of the former enemy among us. Asians were not the only pawns. A Steinbeck novel has a scene (East of Eden) about the plight of German Americans during World War I. The infamous Committee on Public Information (1907), headed by George Creel, launched an anti-German hysteria of historic proportions. Italian Americans had Sacco And Venzetti, executed in 1927. The Jews had the Rosenburgs. The Left of course faced the blunt of persecution. Some 250 alien radicals were deported to Russia in 1919, after 4 million workers took part in strikes. The 1917 Espionage Act and the 1918 Edition Act justified the arrest of 1,597 persons, including Socialist leaders Eugene Debs and Victor Berger who got long prison sentences. Justice Holmes's dissenting opinion in the Abrams case, in which five persons were jailed for circulating a Communist leaflet, remains the most eloquent defense of free speech in America. But it did not free the arrested five. The America First Committee (1940), home of reactionaries who preferred Hitler to the New Deal, open and closet anti-Semites, and all kind of fervent anti leftists. enjoyed wide popular support. BDABR was a convenient atonement for all the above inhumanity while serving the new national interest. The real irony is that these 110,000 Japanese Americans who were relocated to concentration camps and later settled around St Louis, did not get much sympathy from their Japanese cousins in Japan who considered Japanese Americans as getting what they deserved in their naive belief in American propaganda on minority rights. Earl Warren, who was the governor of California who signed the relocation order, went on to head the Warren court, best known for its defense of individual liberty. Life is complex.
Henry C.K. Liu
Louis Proyect wrote:
> Last night while rummaging through Blockbusters trying to find a movie to
> rent--an experience I always find dismayingly similar to picking out a
> novel at an airport newsstand--I spotted "Bad Day at Black Rock," the 1954
> adventure saga directed by John Sturges, who is no relation to screwball
> comedy's Preston Sturges.
>
> 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)