Bad Day at Black Rock
Posted by J on November 13, 2008
Bad Day at Black Rock will strike you in different ways, depending on how you watch it. On the one hand, in
a formal sense it is a “supreme work of craftsmanship,” as Pauline Kael says about it. John Sturges, the director, uses the whole screen to set the mood well. We’re in a Western (circa 1945 mind you) and the town of Black Rock is a haunted, isolated place.
On the other hand, the movie’s plot wants something more. Essentially Bad Day at Black Rock plays with the contract between author and reader/viewer. In almost all plots, there is a known problem or set of problems. The author makes an unstated contract with a reader/viewer to solve that problem by the end of the work. With this movie, the plot problem is that we don’t know what the problem is. We know there’s a problem, but the movie asks us to wait through two-thirds of the movie to find it out. This kind of plot setup doesn’t have many variations, so there can’t be too many stories with its premises.
The story is that a man (Spencer Tracy) shows up in the tiny town of Black Rock on a hot summer’s day. Immediately we realize that, as a stranger, Black Rock’s citizens don’t like him too much. They’re all standing outside the train station, astonished that anyone actually showed up in town. What’s he here for anyway? Well, that’s the plot problem we don’t know about, and neither do we know why Black Rock’s citizens do not want strangers to pass through.
The movie is essentially a Western, (SPOILER ALERT) with a lone hero matching muscles and wits against a band of thugs who plot to kill him. Heck, when Walter Brennan shows up, you know we’re in a Western. Once we learn exactly why the hero’s in town, the movie sort of deflates. It hits its climax and only needs to resolve from that point.
We might ask key questions that explode the premise — like why do Black Rock’s citizens sit around all day waiting to exterminate anybody who passes through? Don’t they have jobs? Why keep worrying about retribution for a four-year-old event? More importantly, though, the movie addresses and seeks to amend historical guilt over the United States’ internment of the Japanese in World War II. This is a fine subject to bring up, though notice that once again Hollywood turns rural backwater places into seedbeds of hidden evil. Hicks are always easy targets. It’s not like urban Americans and Hollywood liberals weren’t complacent in the internment of the Japanese either, though the movie gives them a free pass.
Personally, we’re not into historical guilt trips that don’t involve breaking covenant with God. We feel badly for Japanese Americans circa 1942. But there is no such thing as national sin against the Declaration of Independence, or sin against abstract notions of the rights of man. It’s arguable whether the movie engages in such guilt trips, but given today’s P.C. environment, it’s easy to interpret the movie that way now.
Entertainment: 5
Intelligence: 5
Morality: 6
