Bad Day at Black Rock

A film set in a small town in the American desert, over the course of a single day. The year is 1945. A train stops at a station where it has not stopped for years, and a man gets off. His name is Macreedy, he has one arm, and he is looking for someone called Komoko. Nobody in the town answers. It soon becomes clear that everyone knows the name and nobody will speak. At the centre is the wartime internment of Japanese Americans and what followed it, a subject Hollywood had barely touched at the time. The structure is built like a western while the time is modern: there are cars, there is a telephone, and the hero does not use a gun. It was shot in widescreen and the desert is used directly as a threat; the town is empty, the distances are open and there is nowhere to hide. Spencer Tracy plays Macreedy, Robert Ryan the town's strong man, and Lee Marvin and Ernest Borgnine his men. John Sturges directed. An important work for anyone who likes films that build tension out of place and the braver examples of classical Hollywood. For a viewer expecting a long narrative, it runs a little over eighty minutes and lingers nowhere.