Bad Day at Black Rock
Director: John Sturges
Year Released: 1955
Rating: 2.5
Spencer Tracy's effective performance as a mysterious detective aside, this is a mostly slow, uninteresting story about the murder of a Japanese farmer in the desolate, lawless town of Black Rock. Robert Ryan, Ernest Borgnine and the always-ominous Lee Marvin play the bad guys who try to make Tracy's life a living hell. The screenwriter and director's approach to Tracy's character is good - we learn about him in bits and pieces as the story progresses, and at the end he still remains a bit of an enigma - but the story itself is snail-paced (and it's only an 80 minute film!) and the way the plot unfolds is a little flawed. The story seems more concerned with the Tracy character than with the murder itself, and I'm still not sure exactly what happened to the man who was murdered (why he was murdered comes across as a little weak).
