Bad Day at Black Rock

I may be the only member of my generation not to have seen it already, but I recently saw Bad Day at Black Rock, the 1955 film directed by John Sturges, with a cast familiar to old movie and TV buffs (Spencer Tracey, Robert Ryan, Anne Francis, Dean Jagger, Walter Brennan, Ernest Borgnine, Lee Marvin). I highly recommend it.

Not a western in the usual sense, it is set in a tiny western town just after World War II and takes place in one 24-hour day. The story of an impaired but brave man (John J. Macreedy, played by Spencer Tracy) facing a murderous bully (Reno Smith, played by Robert Ryan) and those in thrall to him, it is a universal parable of men and of nations.

Macreedy is Churchill’s England in the early nineteen-forties; he is Todd Beamer, hero of Flight 93 on September 11, 2001; he is the state of Israel today. He is any man or group that risks standing for justice against the intimidation of a tyrant. Though the actual cost of taking such a stand is almost always greater than that portrayed in the film, the risk is present, so the principle is effectively dramatized.