The Hip Pocket #28: BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK

This week's entry is a one-armed ass-kicking anti-racist thriller

We all have movies we love.

Some of them are great movies. Some of them are terrible movies. Love does not care. Love is unreasonable. Love is blind. We love what we love, and the louder you love it, the better.

One of my favorite things is sharing a film I love with someone. Even if they don't love it the same way I do, that experience imparts something about you to that person. When you share something you love, you are sharing a part of yourself, and there is nothing more vulnerable or personal than that.

I don't think of these movies as the canon or the official library or anything that formal. These are all just movies I keep in my hip pocket, movies I've filed away as part of my own personal ongoing film festival as worthwhile and notable.

This is an ongoing list, one without an ending. This is The Hip Pocket.

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Bad Day At Black Rock
Spencer Tracy, Robert Ryan, Anne Francis, Dean Jagger, Walter Brennan, John Ericson, Ernest Borgnine, Lee Marvin, Russell Collins, Walter Sande
cinematography by William C. Mellor
music by André Previn
screenplay by Millard Kaufman
adaptation by Don McGuire
based on a story by Howard Breslin
produced by Dore Schary
directed by John Sturges
not rated
1 hr 21 mins

A mysterious one-armed man investigates a mystery in a small town.

I love movies that start with trains rolling into town.

We all have those things about movies that are automatic buy-ins. I know my list is very weird and specific, and I don’t care. It’s my list. I like doctors who smoke in hospitals. I like it when a movie is set in a year that was in the future when the film was made, but it’s in the past now. I like it when people mispronounce the word “robot” as “ro-bitt.” If you have a movie that is narrated by a smoking doctor and opens with “The year is 1994, and the ro-bitts have conquered Earth,” then I will run your goddamn campaign for Best Picture. Let’s go.

And, yeah, I like it when trains roll into town to open a film. Maybe that comes from my first exposure to Once Upon A Time In The West. I saw just the opening scene of that film when I was very, very young, before I could consciously understand it, and it stuck in there somewhere. When I finally saw it again, it was the recognition of it that shocked me so much. I remembered it, and it was like this weird chemical reaction for me. I remembered the way Leone had stretched anticipation to the breaking point, turning it into an exercise, seeing how far he could push the audience before giving them one explosive moment of reckoning.

Another fetish for me is super-widescreen photography from the ‘50s and ‘60s. There’s something about the way directors started to explore that super-wide frame and the color on the film stock from those decades that just drives me into an aesthetic frenzy. This is one of the films that helped define just how exciting that use of the widescreen could be, and it’s impressive to see how fully-formed the visual language is here, how impressively it’s used to create a town that is sealed in by distant mountains even as it lays exposed on the flat, featureless anvil where it stands.

This is all preamble to me saying that Bad Day At Black Rock is a film that feels like it is aimed directly at all of my pleasure centers, and I do not return to it nearly often enough. Part of the problem is that John Sturges isn’t really considered part of the canon, and I often neglect his work, even though much of it is important to me and central to the way my love of movies developed in the first place. And in Bad Day At Black Rock, he’s created one of the ultimate games in seeing how long he can tease out a reveal, an exercise in anticipation and dread, built around one of the great movie star performances of the ‘50s.

That first shot of the train, from high above the desert, as it cuts across miles and miles of nothing with the opening power chords of that André Previn score… man, that’s the good stuff. The second shot, we race towards the train, along the tracks, directly facing it, and then lift up so it races under us just as SPENCER TRACY fills the screen. It’s the kind of opening that feels like the filmmakers grabbed you by the shirt and they’re just shaking you. “ARE YOU AWAKE? WE’RE STARTING NOW!” I love it. I think there’s this weird religion of “reality” in movies, where people love movies because of the “realism,” and I am not sure I understand the point of that. The entire title sequence is cut like you’re being slapped. Just WHAM! Here’s Robert Ryan’s name! WHAM! Anne Francis is in it, too! Every cut is a new angle on the train, and it feels like it’s going 1000 miles an hour. It’s all so goddamn urgent, which makes sense. The film runs a grand total of 81 minutes, and not a single one of them is wasted.