Angry White Men

Bad Day at Black Rock  a film by John Sturges.  With Spencer Tracy, Robert Ryan, Ann Francis, Dean Jagger, Walter Brennan, John Ericson, Ernest Borgnine, Lee Marvin.  *****

I’m tempted to say they don’t make them like this anymore, except that they never did.  How this movie got made in 1955, when what people really wanted was Pillow Talk with Doris Day and Rock Hudson, I’ll never know.

I’d heard about this movie for years as a violent and disturbing one, and on a given night would avoid it for that reason.  Normally my wife and I think of our movie nights as a chance to relax, and on a night I might have been up for such a movie she wasn’t.  But as disturbing as this movie is, it’s oddly comforting in 2020.  It lets us know that the problems we’re having now are not new; they’re reflections of the perpetual problem, as old as humankind.  And the plot of this movie is as tight as any I’ve ever seen: it arrives like an express train—it actually arrives on an express train—and never lets up.  And the cast is amazing.  I list so many because I didn’t want to leave anyone off.

John J. Macreedy arrives in the town of Black Rock as the quintessential outsider.  The train that roars through the town every morning hasn’t stopped for years.  The downtown is composed of a single street of businesses, a hotel, a diner of some kind, a garage.  This is—as a friend of mine often says—Bum Fuck, California, as dry and dusty and unwelcome a place as you could imagine.  But that’s nothing compared to how unwelcoming the townspeople are.  They’re instantly alarmed that the train has stopped—though they knew it had to to stop someday—and every eye is riveted on the man who got off.  He’s a one-armed veteran of World War II, and wants to go out to a particular piece of land.  They knew he’d want to go there.  Nobody wants to take him.

Black Rock is a town with a crime in its past, though we have no idea what the crime was or how anybody would know about it.  In fact, Macreedy doesn’t know.  He wants to find the man who lives on that plot of land, but when he finally “rents” somebody’s jeep and rides out there, the place is deserted and the house burned down.  He collects a few wildflowers from the side of the road, and heads back to town.  Then the real trouble begins.

This is a movie about angry violent white men who have a crime in their past and they’re afraid someone will discover it.  (Does that sound familiar?)  They’re surrounded by other white men who weren’t involved in the crime but know about it and never did anything, so they’re complicit and feel guilty.  Reigning over the place is the man who primarily committed it, Reno Smith (Robert Ryan), who seems to be the town’s leading citizen but is also the head bully.  He has a couple of henchmen, Coley Trimble (Ernest Borgnine) and Hector David (Lee Marvin).  Trimble is an ill-tempered hothead who is out of control, David a sullen, menacing, total asshole, Lee Marvin to a T.

The real “other” in this movie is Japanese Americans, though it could have been anyone.  Ten years later it might have been Vietnamese, and more recently Iraqis.  Some other group, some supposed enemy, is always the problem.  The white men took it upon themselves to put the “other” in his place, and one of them went too far.  They believed what they’re doing was “right.”  But at some deep place they knew it wasn’t.  A single strong men—strong because he’s afflicted (one-armed)—stands up to them.  That gives other men in town courage to come.

This movie is about the years after World War II but it’s as timely as anything I’ve seen this year.  According to the IMDb website, it has been screened at the White House more than any other, although I’d make a bet it hasn’t been screened at the current White House.  It seems to be about one man attacking a problem, but it’s really about the way his presence stimulates a group of men to come together.  They don’t end the problem.  The problem will never end.  But the struggle in this movie seems more relevant now than it did in 1955, at least to me.

If you haven’t seen Bad Day at Black Rock, today’s the day.  It’s deeply satisfying in a way that’s hard to explain.  It names the problem, for one thing.  It sees it, and says what it is.  It has a satisfying ending but that’s almost beside the point.  Being honest about the problem is enough.