OVP: Bad Day at Black Rock (1955)

Film: Bad Day at Black Rock (1955)
Stars: Spencer Tracy, Robert Ryan, Anne Francis, Dean Jagger, Walter Brennan, Ernest Borgnine, Lee Marvin
Director: John Sturges
Oscar History: 3 nominations (Best Director, Actor-Spencer Tracy, Adapted Screenplay)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

We are continuing on our look at the Best Actor field this week with a trip somewhere between Babes in Arms and Saturday Night Fever, to the mid-1950's.  The Academy Awards generally gets a crush on an actor and then it dissipates.  Even with legends like Olivia de Havilland or Barbara Stanwyck who continued working for decades, their nominations usually happened within a ten-year time frame.  But there are a couple of actors who just kept getting nominated for decades, and one of those performers was Spencer Tracy.  Tracy, one of the biggest stars on the MGM lot during the 1940's, kept getting prestige projects right up until his death (he was nominated for his final film role in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner).  When an actor does something like this, there are the legendary performances (Boys Town, Woman of the Year, Guess Who's...) and then there are nominations where it feels like they probably just skated into the nominations field, and that's what I've always considered Bad Day at Black Rock, arguably the least discussed of Tracy's nominations today (this despite it being nominated in three pretty big-tier categories at the time).  Today, though, it will take center stage as we look at Tracy's fifth Oscar nomination.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is really short (it's only 81 minutes long, which is weird for a Best Actor nominee post, say, the early 1930's).  It is about John Macready (Tracy), who has just come back from World War II in 1945 in a western desert town called Black Rock.  They make a point of acknowledging that the train has not stopped there in four years, and thus his entry into the town is surprising.  The town is very reluctant to welcome him, and are actively hostile despite him seeming pretty innocuous at first.  Of particular note is Smith (Ryan), who openly wants to kill Macready once he realizes that Macready is there to give the father of one of his fellow soldiers, a man named Komoko (a Japanese-American) a medal since Komoko's son saved Macready's life.  The only people who attempt to help Macready are Doc (Brennan) and a beautiful young girl named Liz (Francis), who quickly regrets the decision.

The film does a pretty good job of addressing the hatred that was inflicted on Japanese-Americans after the bombing in Pearl Harbor.  As the film continues, we learn that Komoko was burned in his house by Smith, who leased him a piece of land he knew to be barren...only to have Komoko find water on it & thus be able to farm it.  They murder him for his success, first by burning down his house (with him inside), and then shooting him when he escapes.  Smith has so many accomplices that inevitably one will crack, but Macready manages to stop him before he kills too many of them (except Liz), and get the man arrested.

The film isn't bad, though it's not great.  You're not going to hear this complaint from me very often, but the movie is too short.  The animosity that Robert Ryan's character instantly shares toward Tracy's Macready feels weird-like they've spent years expecting to get caught, and are just way too suspicious about a dormant murder.  It also doesn't allow us to really differentiate between a pretty stellar supporting cast (Borgnine, Jagger, Marvin), with only Walter Brennan (as always, playing Water Brennan) seeming to stand out.  I kept thinking weirdly of a rather obscure Hungarian film called 1945, which has a similar idea behind it (a town that has a terrible war crime secret), but it unfolds so much better, and thus proves that Bad Day could be a true classic (see 1945 immediately if you haven't as it's unbelievable).

The film's three nominations therefore are a bit misguided if not unwarranted.  The best of the bunch is Director, as it's taut-this is a movie with no fat, even if it could use some for flavor, but the camerawork is excellent, and I loved the showdown scene & use of the expansive outdoors to give us a sense of isolation.  Tracy's performance is sturdy but dull-if you've read this blog for a while you know that Tracy's not an actor I really enjoy, and this is a good example why-there's nothing other than "silent hero" in his Macready, and compared with an actor who adds so much flavor to his performances like Ryan (or a scene-stealer such as Brennan), I have to assume this was a default nomination even if you enjoy Tracy as a rule.  The script is the least of the three, because it's too short-there's too much exposition to try to make up for the lack of time, and it suffers with so many of the townspeople feeling interchangeable.