Popular reviews

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  Review by K. Austin Collins 7

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  There's of course a lot to be said for the expressive blocking; the aggressive beauty of the Lone Pines backdrop; the muscular moralism of the writing; the wizened professionalism of Spencer Tracy; Liz Wirth's heartbreaking near-last shot, a panicked face jutting into the sky's damning black void; and on and on. But honestly, the best detail of them all is somehow Robert Ryan's red baseball cap, which to me adds this tinge of dastardly boyishness to everything here—for its horror, the group politics at play throughout is essentially juvenile. The outsider is an outsider just because; the recourse to blaming World War II is never quite convincing, is it? Their hearts aren't in it, because the reality of it is…

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  Review by 🇵🇱 Steve G 🇵🇸 ★★★★★ 7

  "You're not only wrong, you're wrong at the top of your voice."

  Bad Day At Black Rock is an extraordinary film. There probably isn't another film like it from the 1950s. For its time it was incredibly risky and even considered subversive in some ways, taking a very open shot at post-war racism towards the Japanese and yet placing it in an almost traditional Western setting.

  These aren't the only things about it that are remarkable. The quoted line is barked by Spencer Tracy at Ernest Borgnine before he karate chops the hell out of him as Lee Marvin and Robert Ryan, among others, watch on shortly before Walter Brennan then strolls in to tidy up the mess.

  That's probably…

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  Review by SilentDawn ★★★★★ 3

  100

  It's funny - I waited and waited to write something on Bad Day at Black Rock because I figured eventually I'd find something of substance or productive to say, but it's one of those movies that defies anything beyond the witnessing of its craft. Just watching it, every composition and color and character has not only meaning but an propulsive energy in fueling this air-tight narrative. From the blocking to the structure, it moves like melted butter. Not one moment or line of dialogue is out of place. No one speaks too much, or says too little. It's perfectly calculated, but also, it's so exacting. Every creative decision in Bad Day at Black Rock is the right one. Not many movies can say that with such confidence, but this one does it in less than 90-minutes and with an all-star ensemble cast.

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  Review by Matt! ★★★★½ 5

  I love when films touch on subjects that aren’t discussed onscreen as often as they should be. The time period surrounding WWII was perhaps the most profound era in human history, mostly due to how unanimously it affected every area of the world. There were thousands of impactful themes that came out of it and, naturally, a select few rose to the forefront of the film industry, which allowed them to live on for generations through public consumption. However, many other themes were left mostly as memories or as things to be learned only through history textbooks. Luckily, some films at the time did choose to acknowledge less “popular” concepts, and I appreciate when I can stumble upon them; Judgment…

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  Review by Jamelle Bouie ★★★★½ 2

  quietly devastating myth puncturing about the “greatest generation.”

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  Review by ScreeningNotes ★★★★★ 12

  "You look like you need a hand."

  A one-armed man confidently strides into a small town community, and it falls to pieces when its residents assume the worst of him—or that he knows the worst of them. Paranoia belying guilty conscience; suspicion belying shame. Only people who know they've done something wrong worry this much about someone they don't know entering their little society. Inclusion (in the community) as hidden exclusion (of the unknown outsider). A community desperately repressing its own past, waiting for someone to confess before it turns into a mob. A series of personal confrontations with the difficulty of making a moral choice, of accepting moral agency, and of redemption.

  There's a real lost art in great…

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  Review by Sally Jane Black 5

  I don't know that I've ever seen a mainstream film acknowledge the concentration camps the U.S. put the Japanese into during WWII. Surely I must have and don't remember? But perhaps not--it's not like Hollywood is much in favor of dredging up the worst of U.S. war crimes.

  Regardless, I would never, ever, ever have expected a western/noir crossover staring a who's who of Hollywood tough guys and Spencer Tracy to not only mention it, but to use it as a plot point and to convey a message of anti-racism while inexplicably not showing a single Japanese person on screen. It's a flawed approach, but it manages to do so with dignity all the same. And the anti-ableist messaging is…

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  Review by theriverjordan ★★★★ 3

  “Bad Day at Black Rock” is a depiction of traditional Americana left out to rot in the desert sun. 

  Through imagery of diners and pump gas stations, “Black Rock” holds a mirror up to American iconography, and then lets the picture distort itself. 

  Director John Sturges’ film begins with a gleaming silver modern train tearing through the iconic Old West landscape. The calculated blasphemies on the country’s legends continue from there. 

  Sturges uses the framework of the prototypical American genres of noir and Western genres to confront the internment of Japanese Americans in WWII; an aspect of the collective national past even a half century later seldom faced. The familiarity of form doesn’t make the function of self-reflection any easier. 

  The clash of the uneasy noir and traditionalist Western work to cause maximum unease in a realm that should be comfortable. 

  It’s a daring use of genre as a political assertion that remains biting decades after its release.

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  Review by Josh Gillam ★★★ 2

  The arrival of the mysterious MacReady (Spencer Tracy) to the isolated Californian hamlet of Black Rock begins to stir up long buried secrets that have long hung over the small community, in John Sturges’ neo-western co-starring Robert Ryan, Anne Francis, Dean Jagger, Walter Brennan, Ernest Borgnine and Lee Marvin.

  It’s very atmospheric, with Sturges gradually building a creeping sense of unease that grows over the course of the film, hinting at the darkness lurking at the core of this seemingly sleepy town. From the moment MacReady steps off of the train this unsettling mood drifts over the action like a hazy yet slowly oppressive fog, filling each interaction with a menace that’s always held just below the surface.

  It’s almost…

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  Review by Channing Pomeroy ★★★★★

  Film noir stretched wide and left in the sun to dry. Modern graphic designers would approve of Sturges’s use of maximum white space in his compositions. He makes no attempt to fill the void. The town of Back Rock is mostly unbuilt lots and negative space. (I’ve got to believe Sergio Leone spent many hours here.) And either Sturges had no budget for extras or chose to populate it solely with coconspirators and enablers. His choices are not merely aesthetic, but create an existential dread that saturates the suspense and elevates the stranger-comes-to-town mystery. His abstract Black Rock is a cross section of 1950s America and a taxonomy of flawed masculinity.

  Bad Day at Black Rock is Sturges’s first masterpiece,…

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  Review by Mike Ginn ★★★★ 1

  I predict that in the next year Twitter girls rediscover Ernest Borgnine and all take turns calling him hot

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  Review by Paul Elliott ★★★★½

  Commencing with an intriguing opening and structured by some patient and carefully measured pacing, this crime thriller directed by John Sturges, and starring Spencer Tracy, disburses an abundance of reverences to conventional western tropes. 

  The narrative follows chief protagonist John J. Macreedy as he arrives at a tiny secluded desert town in the southwest United States, and unfolds as he begins to search for the location of a Japanese farmer who resides in the area. He soon finds, however, that the townfolk are doing their utmost to constrain him at every opportunity due to the concealment of a past that they prefer to remain unknown. 

  Lee Marvin and Ernest Borgnine are both tremendous as extremely cruel and unpleasant cowhands, and…