Spending a Good Evening at Black Rock

Bad Day at Black Rock is by no means a small movie. This 1955 MGM western, shot in color and Cinemascope, features three past Academy Award winners: Walter Brennan, Dean Jagger, and star Spencer Tracy. Also prominent in the film are Oscar nominee Robert Ryan and two rising talents who would win future Oscars, Ernest Borgnine and Lee Marvin. Director John Sturges, a former editor, would go on from Bad Day at Black Rock to helm The Magnificent Seven and The Great Escape. The film’s wide-screen cinematography beautifully emphasizes the wide open spaces of the Lone Pine locales, and the mood is enhanced by André Previn’s haunting score.

  So this is hardly a modest indie. And yet it contains many of the elements I’ve learned to admire in B-movies. For one thing, it’s short and tight, coming in at a mere 81 minutes. Locations are limited; dialogue is clipped and to the point; tension is strong; bursts of action are prized. A mystery bubbles beneath the surface. There’s also, along with moments of dark humor, a subtle strand of meaningful social commentary. (I’m certain my former boss, Roger Corman, deeply admired this film, which captures many of his own aesthetic and social values.)

 Set in the California outback, circa 1945, the film begins with a passenger train arriving unexpectedly at a rural outpost. It disgorges a stocky man in a black suit and fedora, carrying a briefcase. The lounging locals are suspicious, especially when they notice the new arrival has only one arm. As played by Spencer Tracy, he is taciturn and unflappable, even when faced with a decided lack of hospitality. He’s hard-pressed to get a room at the one hotel, even though it clearly lacks for paying guests. When he introduces himself as John J. Macreedy of Los Angeles, and explains that he’s looking for a homesteader named Komoko, everyone becomes icier still. The cowpokes and ranchers hanging around the hotel lobby all seem to be sharing a secret. Down the town’s one main street, the sheriff (Jagger) appears to be drinking himself into oblivion. The veterinarian/undertaker (Brennan) lets slip that Komoko is no more.

 Managing with some difficulty to rent a Jeep, Macreedy heads over the hills toward the burnt-out mess that was once Komoko’s homestead. But the town’s unofficial boss, Reno Smith (Ryan) is not about to leave this intruder to his own devices. He sends the sadistic Coley Trimble (Borgnine) in pursuit, leading to a taut action sequence.

 It would be unfair of me to spell out precisely what happens next. Suffice it to say that eventually we learn what happened to Macreedy’s arm, why he’s so eager to find Komoko, and who among the townfolk eventually come to his aid. I’ll say also that this is covertly a story about the effects of racism and xenophobia, in the wake of World War II. And that, after all the anger and mistrust, the film ends in a moment of modest but genuine hope for a better future.

 The year 1955 was a great one for American dramas, many drawn from the Broadway stage, including Mr. Roberts, Picnic, and The Rose Tattoo. Two of James Dean’s three starring films, Rebel Without a Cause and East of Eden, were also released. Ironically, Borgnine’s supporting turn in Black Rock was eclipsed by his Oscar-winning good-guy role in Marty, which was also named Best Picture. Though Black Rock was nominated for its script, its direction, and Tracy’s performance, it went home empty-handed. Still, it will live on, in my memory banks and (since 2018) on the National Film Registry.

 

 

 

 

 

Guess Who’s Getting Out

Back in 1967, when I was evolving into a movie nerd, one of the nation’s most popular films was a romantic fable introducing the then-bold idea that an interracial marriage could succeed. The film, of course, was Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. Its director was Stanley Kramer, known and respected for such hard-hitting work as The Defiant Ones and Judgment at Nuremberg. Its stars were Hollywood legends Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy (who finished shooting his role a mere 3 weeks before he died), along with Sidney Poitier, America’s favorite Noble Negro. Everyone involved knew that Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner was essentially a fairy-tale, in which all potential social difficulties are swept away by a burst of good feelings, culminating in Tracy and Hepburn joyously celebrating their daughter’s engagement to a man of color. (The plan is for the young couple to spend their married life in Africa, where Poitier’s doctor-character is engaged in doing serious humanitarian work, so that their probable difficulties in building a life in an American suburb are neatly sidestepped.)

 Though the film roused in some Americans a great deal of anger (including death threats directed at Kramer and his family), most the country applauded it. It was nominated for ten Oscars, including Best Picture, in a strong movie year, and won two, including a statuette for William Rose’s sentimental but serviceable screenplay. This hardly meant it impressed the intellectuals (of various colors) on both coasts. James Baldwin, for one, quipped, that “as concerns Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, we can conclude that people have the right to marry whom they choose, especially if we know that they are leaving town as soon as dinner is over.” But a columnist from America’s heartland, Bill Donaldson of the Tulsa Tribune, sagely put the film into historical perspective: “It could not have been successfully released nationally five years ago; it will be hopelessly out of date five years hence.”

 It took not 5 but 38 years for Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner to be updated into a laugh-out-loud comedy starring Bernie Mac as a frazzled dad reacting to the surprise of meeting his daughter’s intended (Ashton Kutcher). By 2005, a mildly-humorous social problem play with an uplifting ending had morphed into a farce, with the focus on the Black father’s awkward stabs at accepting a white son-in-law-to-be. The film was a box-office hit, but not exactly Oscar bait.

 Then came 2017, when Jordan Peele burst onto the scene with Get Out, which I believe is the first time the basic situation of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner was turned into a horror film, as seen from an African-American point of view. I didn’t check out this film immediately upon its release. When I did watch it on video, all the buzz insured that I pretty much knew what was coming. (What a shame that we so rarely approach horror films in a state of total ignorance: imagine encountering Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde if you had no idea of the relationship between the two men!) Still, in Peele’s film there were a few perverse plot twists I hadn’t anticipated, along with some logic questions I couldn’t help asking. Recently, I watched Get Out again, after being told it’s the rare film that’s so craftily written that it contains no extraneous parts. Quite true, as I’ve discovered: some seemingly random characters and bits of dialogue turn out to be totally essential. Just keep your eye on that central relationship, and discover that the guest who’s coming to dinner may be welcome for all the wrong reasons.