Bad Day at Black Rock (no 39)

by Allan Fish

(USA 1954 81m) DVD1

The One Armed Man

p  Dore Schary  d  John Sturges  w  Millard Kaufman, Don McGuire  story  “Bad Time at Hondo” by Howard Briskin  ph  William C.Mellor  ed  Newell P.Kimlin  m  André Previn  art  Cedric Gibbons, Malcolm Brown

Spencer Tracy (John J.Macreedy), Robert Ryan (Reno Smith), Dean Jagger (Tim Horn), Walter Brennan (Doc Velie), Lee Marvin (Hector David), Ernest Borgnine (Coley Trimble), Anne Francis (Liz Wirth), John Ericson (Pete Wirth), Russell Collins (Mr Hastings), Walter Sande (Sam),

There’s a certain irony in the fact that John Sturges is fêted the world over for those populist classics The Magnificent Seven and The Great Escape, in both of which everything seems overblown and occasionally bombastic.  Yet Sturges was a very good director capable of directing a film like Bad Day at Black Rock, which is worth all his others put together.  There is not an ounce of fat on the film from start to finish and it remains one of the great modern westerns, as well as the first film to denounce the treatment of Japanese Americans after World War II.

            In 1945, the townsfolk of Black Rock are shocked when something extremely rare happens; a man gets off the train to stay in their one horse town.  The locals greet the stranger, who has only one arm, with suspicion, and use intimidatory tactics to try and persuade him to leave.  It’s obvious they are hiding a terrible secret and the stranger has some idea what it is.  He has come to give a Japanese-American farmer the medal posthumously awarded to his soldier son and comes to believe he’s been murdered. 

            From the first moment, you could cut the atmosphere with a blade; “anything I can do for you?” Ernest Borgnine asks the freshly arrived Spencer Tracy, in such a way as to say “Why are you here?  Get out of our town.”  Tracy is told that all the rooms are taken, yet they are all empty.  Lee Marvin further intimidates him and mercilessly mocks him with “you look like you need a hand.”  At first Tracy is non-confrontational, just wanting to ask his questions, find the Japanese farmer and get out.  When he says he intends to stay only 24 hours, he means it.  However, when he realises that something is wrong and that the man has been murdered on racial pretexts, he knows there is sometimes no answer to provocation but retaliation.  If this means violence, then so be it, resulting in one of the most applause-worthy scenes in fifties cinema, when he beats up Ernest Borgnine with just one arm, exposing him as the cowardly bully that he is.  But Borgnine and indeed Marvin are only lackeys to the real villain, mechanic Robert Ryan, who continually tries to evade the questions and convince Tracy to leave, without success, with thinly disguised threats delivered with Ryan’s trademark menacing smile. 

            The performances are wonderfully nuanced, with Spencer Tracy giving arguably his finest display of old-fashioned integrity in an amoral world and Robert Ryan truly evil as the villain.  If Marvin and Borgnine’s characters now seem clichéd and Anne Francis and John Ericson are dull as the young couple, it does conform to the sense of ordinariness about the town.  Sturges’ use of the widescreen is exemplary and one of the reasons it’s often overlooked today is the fact that it is generally seen in a truly awful pan and scan print, as there’s a real purpose and menace to the director’s mise-en-scene that is totally ruined when seen so terribly visually mangled.  Tracy is often framed dwarfed by the desolate backgrounds, he looks alone and we feel that loneliness, whereas the townsfolk always seem at home in their surroundings and are framed accordingly.  Considering that the film is so lean, it is to Sturges’ credit that, à la High Noon, he lets the narrative move at its own pace, without ever looking for the accelerator.  By the time Tracy defeats the townsfolk and escapes back to Los Angeles, we are not only left thinking about the terrible treatment of Japanese Americans but also about why men of peace should have to resort to violence to enforce justice and, in many ways, that is to be mourned even more. 

Bad Luck Blackie (USA 1949 7m) DVD2 (France only)

 

Paths crossed – guaranteed bad luck

 

p  Fred Quimby  d  Tex Avery  w  Rich Hogan  m  Scott Bradley

 

When it comes to discussing the works of Tex Avery, I always experience a feeling of something akin to fear.  One might think this was down to having to fill a whole page discussing one cartoon, but in truth that’s easier than it might sound.  The hard bit is trying to write it fast enough.  One almost feels that, no matter how quickly one types, one is being disrespectful to his memory, for his work is so quick, so breakneck, that it’s almost impossible to keep up.  There’s no subtlety in Avery, at least not on the surface.  His subtlety lay in adding little intrinsic blink-and-you’ll-miss-’em details that are almost impossible to catch on first viewing, a first viewing that always goes by in a flash.  If one was being honest, Avery was coming to the end of his golden period in 1949, and he would completely withdraw from animating in the mid fifties to a career in advertising.  Here is, quite simply, one of his uncontestable masterpieces.

            Bad Luck Blackie is about two animals; one a vicious bulldog, the other a tiny kitten.  The former picks on the latter something horrible, pulling its tail, swallowing it, spitting it out, passing it milk to drink containing a mousetrap, and even pulling cushions out from under it to help its fall.  He’s so happy with the misery he’s inflicting he can hardly contain himself.  His tiny, defenceless foe, however, is rather depressed, and sees no way out of this predicament.  That is until, one day, he comes across a rather street-smart looking black cat.  He is handed a card on behalf of the Black Cat Bad Luck Company, and the cat explains that he merely needs to walk in front of the bulldog to make him have some bad luck.  Right on cue, the bulldog comes closer, the cat walks out in front of it and a plant pot falls on its head.  This is demonstrated all over again, before the cat informs his young charge that all he needs do is blow on a whistle and he’ll come to save the day.  Scarcely believing his luck, the kitten waltzes off and every time the dog comes close, something progressively nastier happens to it, in the shape of ever increasing – in weight and size – items falling onto his bonce, most memorably a grand piano and a fire hydrant.  After a while, the dog starts to catch on and brings his own good luck charm, in the shape of a lucky horseshoe.  However, when he loses control of it, a host of horseshoes land on his head, followed by the horse.  He nonetheless manages to take the whistle off the kitten and, in true Wile E.Coyote fashion, marks a black X on the ground where the cat will come out so a large object can land on the cat instead.  When said feline does emerge, he notices the X and simply kicks it across at the last minute so the object flattens the dog.  This is the final straw for our growling friend, and he contrives to get the black cat covered in white paint so that, when the whistle is blown, his walking across has no effect.  After walking back and forth in front of the dog until it’s too tired to move, the dog grabs him and beats him senseless.  Seen by the kitten, he realises he has to step in and he jumps into a tin of black paint and walks in front of the dog.  Sure enough, right on cue, a heavy object falls on the dog’s head.  Order has been well and truly returned.

            Few things encourage escalating violence and mayhem like revenge, and this was certainly true of this Avery classic.  There are too many brilliant moments to discuss.  My favourite is probably in the early exchanges when the kitten runs to hide from the dog and hides on a book shelf.  While he hides the dog moves up stealthily upon his prey.  He then quickly squashes the books together on the shelf on which the kitten had been secreting itself, and grabs the kitten, which has been squashed into a book shape with the title of Kitty Foiled.  It’s the sort of moment that makes you groan, but it’s lost amid the laughter because of the inherent pace, a speed which never slackens and which I began this essay fearing I could not keep up with.  In truth, no-one could keep up with Tex, indeed few people would want to, but without his form of totally surreal insanity, the world would be seriously the worse for it.