Here’s an oldie-but-a-goodie that I recently caught on Turner Classics On-Demand: Bad Day at Black Rock, starring Spencer Tracy and directed by John Sturges.

It’s a film about two things:

First and foremost, Bad Day at Black Rock is about the incredible, even murderous, lengths that people will go to avoid an admission of guilt, to the public and to themselves. The resonance this has for our country today is obvious. There are real issues of disagreement between political parties and there are real differences of faith and philosophy among us. Democracy is about hashing that stuff out. What’s not democracy are weird and scary attempts to refute those things that cannot be refuted, like science, and facts.

Bad Day at Black Rock concerns a remote western town whose residents are living in exactly this sort of crazed, willful denial of the truth—in this case, an awful truth. It’s only by the imperturbable moral force of a one-armed man named McCready, played by Spencer Tracy, that they are made to face up to it. Now unfortunately, we don’t have Spencer Tracy to lead us to the light, but we can profit by his cinematic example.

This brings us to the second great point of the film: on the most basic narrative level, it is simply a chronicle of endurance. Spencer Tracy does the enduring. The person he has to endure is Richard Ryan, and man, can Richard Ryan dish it out! What a cool bastard!

Here’s the set-up:

When Tracy’s McCready steps off the train at Black Rock, he creates an immediate, inexplicable panic. The entire population of this dirt speck town—a few glowering cowboys and Anne Francis—turns out. What does the stranger want? What does he know? Who sent him? The culpability of the townspeople is obvious from almost the first minute of the film. It’s the nature of that culpability that’s a mystery.

So, when the stranger asks for a hotel room, none can be found. When he asks if anyone can take him to a place called Adobe Flats, everyone acts as though it doesn’t exist, as if the words, “Adobe Flats,” can’t be heard by normal human ears. Then, after McCready finally does get a car, Richard Ryan sics one of his minions on him. It’s Ernest Borgnine, and he’s cackling like he just had a giant snort of nitrous oxide as he tries to ram our hero off a cliff!

But McCready refuses to be denied. He doesn’t even really get mad, just a little grumpy. Tracy is the very soul of the truth here. Richard Ryan can sabotage the truth’s potential escape vehicle. Richard Ryan can appoint Lee Marvin sheriff and put him on guard against the truth getting up to any funny business. Richard Ryan can even try to dry gulch the truth in a midnight ambush. It won’t work! The truth—Spencer Tracy—is as unstoppable as a river. He will find a way.

Stick Bad Day at Black Rock on your Netflix queue. When it shows, you’re going to be in for a treat—

Cheers,

Owen