esrosedotblog

BAD DAY

There used to be an expression; Bad Day At Black Rock. The CBS building in Manhattan was known as 'black rock' for awhile during its turbulent years. Today we saw where it came from; one of the NYTimes 1176 Best Films. I saw it in 1954, the year I graduated from high school.

Spencer Tracy stars in this morality play with a lot of the heavy hitting supporters of the time: Robert Ryan, Walter Brennan, Dean Jagger, Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine,

It is a tight, fast 82 minutes of tension in an excruciatingly small desert town. It all takes place in just one day.

It's a morality play and one of the first films to show the racism against Japanese Americans in the Second World War. There is Tracy, the unwilling avenger. The town villains who perped it. The town citizens who stood by and let it happen. They all get to work it out, or not, in this tight 24 period.

I have remembered this film over the years more graphically than many other films I have seen; the town, the desert. Funny thing is that Tracy, who has one arm in the film, was remembered as having a prosthetic hand in a leather glove. No arm, no hand. My mind's eye had a different vision than the film I guess.

It is pretty good. It was shot in Cinemascope, so the opening shots with a train and André Previn's symphonic over the top music seem silly in the flat DVD version. There is a lot of good handling of people moving around and the street is picture perfect. Very good work by John Stergis.

I will give it a 4 out of Netflix5. I may be shading it a bit high for nostalgic reasons. But what the hell.