Here’s your link for the movie! Show starts at 7:30!
The train going through Black Rock actually stops there! For the first time in years!
Off the train steps determined Spencer Tracy. He’s come here to teensy Black Rock with some Questions, by gum. And he’s gonna get them answered… no matter who stands in his way. Pretty quickly, he’s gonna find that “who stands in his way” means everybody.
What’s amazing about this movie is how the script is structured. In 15 minutes, we know (basically) what the crime
is and (basically) who did it. The drama is, does Tracy know it? And, if the bad guys think he knows it, what are they gonna do to him? The story moves from “Tracy might be in danger” to “definitely in danger” to “how the heck can he avoid the danger” without stopping much at all.
This is directed by John Sturges, who later would do two little movies you might have heard of: The Magnificent Seven and The Great Escape. While this doesn’t have any Yul Brenner or Steve McQueen in it (not even a Donald Pleasance), it does have Tracy up against one of the king-hell baddies of his era, Robert Ryan.
Ryan was an expert at playing irrational haters. He played a vicious antisemite in 1947’s Crossfire and a vicious racist in 1959’s Odds Against Tomorrow (where Ryan is paired up with Harry Belafonte, and they do not like each other One Bit). And he’s a hater here. In real life, that wasn’t Ryan at all; he opposed everything Joseph McCarthy stood for, and supported the civil rights movement.
In 1968, Ryan wanted time off from shooting The Wild Bunch (where he plays a rare good guy) to go campaign for an anti-war candidate. The movie’s director, Sam Peckinpah (a skilled director who could be a gigantic jerk) wouldn’t let Ryan leave… even though he didn’t have any scenes scheduled for several days. In a biography of William Holden (also in that movie), Bob Thomas wrote:
“‘For ten days, Ryan reported to the set in makeup and costume. He never played a scene. Finally he grabbed Peckinpah by the shirtfront and growled, ”I’ll do anything you ask me to do in front of the camera, because I’m a professional. But you open your mouth to me off the set, and I’ll knock your teeth in.’”
This movie was green-lit by MGM head Dore Schary, who’d acted with Spencer Tracy on stage and written a few of his movies. Schary was determined to make more thought-provoking movies than most, like Crossfire and 1951’s Go For Broke!, about a highly-decorated Japanese-American unit in WWII. (You can read about it here, and I took some stuff from that post for this one. I wrote it, I can plagiarize myself.)
Some of the “thought-provoking” movies did well and some didn’t, and when enough didn’t, Schary was fired, leading idiots to claim that oh noes, movies should never have Ideas! Well, that’s bunk. It’s fine if movies have something to say… but you still gotta say it in a compelling and dramatic way, good intentions aren’t enough. (Bad Day is done very well, and was a success.)
This is adapted from a short story called “Bad Time at Honda,” referring to a fictional teeny western town. That title was changed to avoid confusion with a John Wayne war movie called Hondo, and also because “Bad Time at Honda” is a crappy title.
There’s a few towns in America called Black Rock, but this wasn’t shot in any of those. It was filmed near Lone Pine, CA, about 200 miles north of Los Angeles, in the desert east of the mountains. Lone Pine has been the location of hundreds of movies, standing in for India in Gunga Din, northern Mexico in The Hitch-Hiker, lots more. (It’s an alien planet in Star Trek V; curiously, a whole lotta outer space ends up looking like California.)
Here’s your link for the movie again, and click your clicks at 7:30. Here’s the upcoming schedule:
November 13: 61* (2001). Softspoken Roger Maris and brash Mickey Mantle find they have more in common than they expected as they both chase Babe Ruth’s single-season home run record. With Barry Pepper as Maris, Thomas Jane as Mantle, and directed by mega-baseball fan Billy Crystal.
November 20: Roxanne (1987). Steve Martin plays C.D. Bales, a witty fire chief who outduels morons (with a tennis racquet) and has his heart set on Darryl Hannah… but C.D. is insecure about his looks. C.D. Bales has the same initials as Cyrano de Bergerac, by the way. Great supporting part for Shelley Duvall.
Novenmber 27: Forbidden Planet (1956). Hey, after watching an adaptation of Cyrano, why not an adaptation of The Tempest — except IN SPACE! With Leslie Nielsen as the (dead serious) commander, the first appearance of Robby the Robot, and who can forget Shakepeare’s classic line: “Captain, stand by to reverse polarity.”
One more time, here’s tonight’s link, and start the show at 7:30!
