'Bad Day At Black Rock'

A smart film that has a number of different themes that I either found interesting or pretty poignant for the time.

First, it should be noted that Spencer Tracy almost backed out of the role. A severe alcoholic at the time, which exacerbated his diabetes, Tracy never committed to the role until the studio called him and told him that Alan Ladd had agreed to do the film. Tracy committed the next day. Of course, Ladd had never received a script or agreed to do the film.

The story is about a stranger (Tracy) who takes a train to a very small, remote and dying town supposedly in the west. There he is looking for a man named Komoko.

The town's citizenry is hostile and angry. They don't take kindly to strangers, they don't like Tracy, they're all a little stir crazy, drunk and completely under the thumb of super-villian Reno Smith.

They also don't like talking about Komoko. They want Tracy to leave as soon as possible until their patience runs dry and they pretty much want him dead.

To me, this is the scariest of all movie plots: The outsider trapped in the antagonist's environment. The villians control all the variables. they know what Tracy is going to do before he does it and there's the element of hopelessness that seeps into the viewer's brain.

Granted, I realized that Tracy was going to escape. The good guys always won in old films. However, I couldn't help but share in Tracy's character's frustration and fear. That's terrorizes me.

The second element is Komoko. As Tracy is playing his chess game against the villians, the character of Komoko and Tracy's presence in the town gets a little buried.

Komoko was a Japanese-American that leased land from Reno Smith. When the attack at Pearl Harbor happens, Smith is denied enlistment into the military. Frustrated at Komoko finding water on the leased land, his denial into military and just a bit of racism, the township sets fire to Komoko's house. He escapes the house on fire, but is shot by Smith and killed.

As it turns out, Tracy's character is attempting to find Komoko because his son died saving Tracy's character in Italy during World War II.

A year later, the adaptation of Edna Ferber's Giant would be released. Both films are similiar. They are both set in the southwest and both wind up addressing racial attitudes in the 1950s and set around World War II and sacrifice.