Bad Day at Black Rock is a fascinating transposition of western situations and schemes: it takes place in the time of its making, with associations of second world war instead of those of ‘old west’. The arrival of one-handed man (Spencer Tracy) into a small community starts to open secrets relating to the treatment of the Japanese citizens during the war, and more generally, cold realities of everyday racism. The film, populated by a captivating bunch of great character actors, is devoid of sentimental turns or familiar coup-d’oeil’s for liberal-minded spectator. Idea and action are inseparable as they should in a story respectful of the great western tradition. Wim Wenders has written the best lines about the film (my favourite passage starts with armchairs of the hotel…):
“It was only after a while that I suddenly discovered what was really happening in this film, when I saw the worn-out seats in the foyer of the hotel in Black Rock: these seats didn’t simply stand around there, they stood around as precisely the chairs that had to be there, the ashtray beside them was the only possible ashtray for these seats, the one-armed bandit was the only conceivable slot-machine for a hotel like that in a town in the Mid-West. Every thing in this film, by itself, was the most exact and the most right and the most suitable that could be. Every object was so right that it could form a completely self-contained sentence, it could be distinguished from all the others around it, but for precisely this reason it suited everything else perfectly. (…) The film retains the impression that the coloured photographs have left behind. All the way through it looks hand-painted. The backdrops of the landscape that constantly show through windows or doors have more in common with paintings by Magritte than with the real landscape shown in the outdoor scenes. But even these look much more like a mile-wide, sky-high stage-set built in a gigantic studio.” (Wim Wenders, Emotion Pictures)

Peter von Bagh