“I’ll only be here twenty-four hours.”

“In a place Like this that could last a life-time. “

It seems like a good time to talk about John Sturges’s 1955 genre hybrid Bad Day at Black Rock, since it’s going to be playing in a new print at Film Forum for the next week or so.   Shot in beautiful Cinemascope by the perpetually underrated Sturges, who would mark American film not only through classics like The Magnificent Seven and The Great Escape but equally fascinating films like Ice Station Zebra and Joe Kidd, with a screenplay by blacklisted writer Millard Kaufman that stands out as much as a dissenting voice in Cold War America as Clouzot’s Le Corbeau did in occupied France.

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The plot of the film – which was most likely spoiled half a century ago, though here’s a warning right now – starts with black-hatted, one-handed veteran Spencer Tracy stepping off the steam train and into the town of Black Rock, where no one has disembarked in four years.  He’s looking for his friend, and Japanese farmed named Komoko who lived out at Adobe Flats, and gets nothing but distrust from the townsfolk.  He gets to the bottom of it, gently poking away at the guilt residing in this decaying town, even through threat of death.  He finds that Komoko was murdered, burned to death and shot; Tracy, who only wanted to visit the father of a war buddy before leaving the living world for a drunken “retirement,” finds himself turned into an instrument of righteousness. By the end of the film the whole town, nearly, is arrested or dead; Komoko’s killer is burned alive. Tracy gets back on the train.

“I believe a man’s as big as what he’s seen.”

We never see Komoko’s murder, never see Komoko’s son die trying to save Tracy’s life, never see Tracy lose his hand in the war. All are explained, simply through dialogue, and a shot of wild flowers growing over what is probably Komoko’s grave.  The killer, or rather the man who had the most to do with enabling this murder, is burned alive in front of us, and that sight rhymes, just a little bit, with that which we have not seen, and we may think, “maybe that’s what it was like, after all.” This is, after all, a film about evil buried in the collective memory, which nonetheless contains not a single flashback.  It doesn’t much need to – the entire style, the decaying Western town with train tracks and telegraph wires, sitting in the middle of a country that was going through the largest economic boom of the century, is already at war with the present. It’s been stunted; there is,  as they say, poison in the well, a metaphor made literal throughout the film – the town of Black Rock has no water, Kokomo dug deep enough and found it, and his well lies unused on the place of his murder.

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Whether or not to read the film as a state of the union allegory about the country in ’55 is almost beside the point – Western iconography is so intimately tied to the iconography of America as a country that it would almost impossible to make a film in the genre which did not resonate as such – especially since our historical understanding of the moment is so assaulted by the concerns of the present.  The skies of the town are so blue, the Western backdrops so perfect, that they look almost artificial; the sound-stage backdrops used for the views in interiors seem more “natural.” The sort of we imagine might be found in 1950s America, but by then already starting to disappear. As of this writing, you can get on a train from mid-town Manhattan, and after an hour’s travel upstate arrive at the kind of view that the Hudson River School might have  sketched centuries ago.  That kind of vertigo, the look back into a crumbling past that seems transparently there is an inextricable part of the Western genre, even as that genre itself started to disappear, as the locations moved bit by bit overseas, to the deserts of Spain.   The specificity of the plot may be directly from the film’s year, but the plot is timeless; the man in black could be Melmoth, could be Kafka’s Hunter Gracchus. Within a few years he would be Clint Eastwood, Steve McQueen.  Sturges would work with Eastwood years later, on the fascinating, Elmore Leonard written Joe Kidd,  which – despite being set squarely within the classic Western era -  seems more modern, less Classic in its setting. The past there has grown even further away.

The Way Some People Die

The one thing — Black Rock ends in an ostensibly optimistic fashion, with Tracy handing the medal to the poor old drunken Doctor/Mortician/Vet, Tracy getting on the train, perfectly mirroring the opening.  We know that he never meant to be stuck in a life or death moral struggle — this trip was merely supposed to be a quick stop, to drop off the medal and leave. His suitcase is packed with several pairs of clothing, and a bottle of liquor; after the medal was passed off, he planned to disappear off the face of the map.   So where does he go? Are we to believe that this experience has changed him, in some fundamental way, that the planned trajectory of his life is going to change? Or just travel through the world, liquor in hand, like a specter, righting wrongs?  If this phantom series ever got made, then what would it look like, four movies down the line? Tracy, one hand, black suit, even older than before, departs at, what port? Bangkok? It’s gotten slower, emptier, the framings wider, more artificial. No music anymore. no women, none of the supporting cast survives.  Maybe there will be a brothel. How many films could it go for? At what point would he rest? And when he died, what would it have looked like?

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