Bad Day at Black Rock (1955)

I was all set to dislike this movie going in.  Partly it was the presence of Spencer Tracy, whom I've never been partial to.  Something about him always struck me as misanthropic, like there was an innate mean streak underneath, even in his comedies.  Also, the premise of the film, about a one-armed man who asks a few wrong questions in a desert town and finds his life in danger for it, seemed too contrived.  I don't usually go for those one-man-against-the-world stories, but here I was and in the interest of open-mindedness I'd try to keep an...open mind.

The film immediately gets off to an interesting, even rip-roaring, start with several shots of a Southern Pacific train speeding through the Southwest desert.  This isn't a quiet, smooth ride.  Instead, director John Sturges shows it as a series of kinetic shots, as though the train were careening toward a dangerous unknown.  Not a bad use of an opening credit sequence.

Eventually the train stops in Black Rock, small town in the middle of the desert that doesn't get too many visitors.  To call it a small town doesn't do its smallness justice.  There's one road lined by a few buildings, including a jail, diner, telegraph office, and a seldom used hotel.  It looks like a section of a larger town dropped from the sky.  Into this world steps Tracy as John Macreedy, a bit of a mystery man in a dark hat and suit.  He also only has the use of one arm.

The townfolk, mostly cowboys from a nearby (unseen) dude ranch are immediately suspicious of this newcomer.  Included are Lee Marvin at his infuriatingly best and Ernest Borgnine as that dumb-as-a-rock grinning sadist everybody knows from high school.  Also around is Anne Francis who appears to be the only woman in Black Rock.  The story doesn't delve into that one.  When Macreedy asks around how he can get to a place called "Adobe Flats," suddenly everyone clams up at those seemingly innocent words.

Enter Robert Ryan as Reno Smith, the ranch boss, who gets word of this stranger asking questions and fires off a telegraph to his man in LA to find out all he can about this Macreedy.  Don't we all wish we had a man in LA?

It's here where the writers pull a clever trick and out the townspeople as hiding something sinister.  Macreedy could've just waltzed into town and told the whole story, that a Japanese-American comrade saved his life in the war and that he was returning a posthumous medal to the man's father, a Mr. Komoko at Adobe Flats.  At that point, anybody could've made up some plausible sounding story about Mr. Komoko's absence and sent Macreedy on his way.  Instead, the writers withhold all that and have Macreedy just mention Adobe Flats.  Like he's scratching a scab and trying to dig deeper at something he has no business in.  Is he a cop?  A private investigator?  By having Macreedy hold back, the writers give Smith and company a chance to assume the worst and act guilty as sin.  They're afraid.  They're all bluster and intimidation, and underneath they're afraid.

The town's hostility at his wanting to visit Adobe Flats only arouses Macreedy's suspicions, but he gets there by renting a jeep from Francis's Liz Wirth and finds the charred remains of a farm and an unmarked grave.  It's now apparent the sinister secret everyone's hiding is a murder, and it's not hard to guess the motive.  Mr. Komoko was Japanese-American, and in the days after Pearl Harbor, someone was determined to make him pay.

After one of those "I know and you know I know" conversations between Macreedy and Smith, Macreedy senses his life is in danger if he sticks around, and that's a problem.  There's no easy way to escape Black Rock, plopped in the middle of the desert as it is, and he has to wait 24 hours for the next train to come.  Hence the "Bad Day" of the title.

Actually, the bad day turns to bad night as Smith and his cohorts prepare to carry out their sentence while Tracy fights a mental and physical battle of survival.  I've probably given too much away, but I don't think I'd shock anyone by saying the ending adheres to the Hays Code.

I think what's most striking about this film is how it's a traditional western in a lot of ways, but the West of this film isn't about freedom or wide open spaces.  This Old West is menacing and threatening.  There are open spaces, but they're not an invitation to adventure.  That dried up desert is an invitation to suicide and an illustration of the huge distance between Tracy and any potential help.  There's a lot of big sky, too, but it's strictly used as background prop.  Many times the characters are filmed in closeup with only the sky as background, which lends them an abstract appearance and draws out the unspoken evil behind those nice, polite smiles.  That silent menace was the kicker for me.  It made me really enjoy this film.

"Bad Day at Black Rock" isn't without its flaws.  I have to mention the music score.  It's an orchestral score, but aside from a bit of harmonica thrown in, it's basically a '50s melodrama score you'd expect to find in a Douglas Sirk film.  It's way overheated, and loud.  It's of its time.  Like an '80s Vangelis score, it's of its time.

The one real problem I had with the plot was the believability of Anne Francis's final betrayal.  It didn't make sense that she'd rat out her brother when he tried to help Macreedy get away in the night.  After all, she'd said earlier the only reason she was still in this town was to protect the kid.  Even if there was some rationale, I still didn't buy that she's lead Macreedy into that final confrontation like a lamb to slaughter.  That's pretty cold-blooded, and I never got a sense her character was capable of that.

Finally, it's a bit of historical irony that although this story centers on an Asian-American character there are no Asian characters onscreen.  To say there was a dearth of Asian parts in Hollywood at this time is an understatement, and that sad fact is not the sole responsibility of this film.  However, for a story that makes racial hatred so prominent, and the plight of Japanese-Americans so prominent, it's a little odd not see see a single Asian onscreen.  Not even as a member of the state police at the end as a bit of irony?  It could have happened, but I'm not sure the filmmakers even considered it.

Bonnie and Clyde (1967)

"Bonnie and Clyde" was the French New Wave come to Hollywood.  Or rather, Hollywood taking bits of the French New Wave and repackaging them for mass appeal.  And judging by its reception, box office, and now-classic status, it worked, though more as an exercise in calculated trendsetting than a step forward in cinematic expression.

Produced and pretty much brought to screen by star Warren Beatty, the film  tells the well-known story of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, two Depression era outlaws who shot to fame after the release of captured photographs showing them cavorting and posing with their wares (and in Bonnie's case a famous cigar) during their multi-state crime spree.  In the hands of director Arthur Penn, it became a glamorous, seriocomic adventure with some heavy-handed psychpop thrown in (got phallic symbol?), wrapped up in Godardian and Truffault-like flourishes.  Nevermind the two French auteurs were feuding.

The film announces its intentions from the very beginning.  Faye Dunaway as Bonnie pouts boredly in her bedroom waiting for just the right gangster to come and take her away.  The scene is all hand helds and jump cuts, but when Clyde shows up and Bonnie dresses and rushes down to meet him, the film returns us to the comfort of traditional Hollywood narrative – movie star closeups, conventional editing, static camera work.  This stylistic give and take is repeated throughout, but with the New Wave aesthetic never gaining preeminence.  It's just window dressing meant to advertise a coolness and flatter its audience as in-the-know.

One area the film does innovate is with its narrative jump cutting.  It doesn't waste much time with setup, the screenwriting equivalent of an establishing shot.  Instead, it cuts right to the action, like when Clyde announces to a foreclosure victim, "We rob banks," and the film cuts mid-sequence to them robbing a bank.  This abrupt change of pace, fast-paced cutting in the storyline, is the film's most compelling feature and was probably the main reason behind its success with audiences.  Boring it ain't.

Another attempt at something new was the violence.  This was bloodier than anything Hollywood had ever served up.  We never saw squibs used to simulate exploding bullet wounds before.  The gunshots were louder.  Changes of tone more abrupt.  You'd think it would make it all the more shocking, but it was just the opposite.  "Bonnie and Clyde" wasn't the forerunner of a cinema more conscious of brutality and the reality of its consequences.  Instead it foretold John Yoo's balletic violence, violence as beauty, or Tarantino's violence as irony, in addition to countless action flicks with body counts (and squib counts) to numerous to tabulate.

The violence in "Bonnie and Clyde" was commercial.  It was to get people talking, but it failed to achieve an artistic statement because it could never separate itself from the undeniable glamor of the film.  And if you think undeniable is a lazy word, look at Beatty and Dunaway again.  The point is, where the violence complemented the old-style, Hollywood glamor is where the film fails itself.  The violence served the glamor of its stars, never undercutting it.  Bonnie and Clyde were portrayed as always likable with charisma in spades.  Especially with the police portrayed as mostly faceless cutouts, there was no question who we'd root for.  Penn and company left no room for it.

Inevitably, talk of "Bonnie and Clyde" leads to the subject of antiheroes, but these aren't antiheroes in the sense of those so prevalent in '40s noir.  Dunaway's and Beatty's Bonnie and Clyde are a glossy reproduction.  No effort is given to explore their dark sides, and dark sides they had.  They didn't just kill cops.  They killed plenty of civilians, too.  There was some effort to explore a psychosexual theme with Clyde's impotence, but it was played merely as a contrasting symbolism rather than a serious informing of a character and his motives.  There was also an effort to draw on motives of class struggle, with Clyde saying repeatedly, "I ain't against them," after almost getting his head torn off by an employee in a robbery.  This comes across as something tacked on to, again, increase his likability factor, but the injustices of the Depression are only a backdrop to serve the character.  He isn't born of this backdrop as Edward G. Robinson's Rico Bandello was of the backdrop in "Little Caesar" or James Cagney's Tom Powers was of the setting in "Public Enemy."  Clyde was still Warren Beatty from Hollywood.

So what's the takeaway?  Is this about the seduction of Hollywood's star machine?  Is it a meta message about pushing violence forward purely for visual appeal and to satisfy an audience's thirst for the aesthetical new?  If the goal of the film was to shake things up and offer Hollywood a new toolkit they knew would succeed at the box office, then it was a success.  But if the goal was to confront audiences with violence in a way that made them question their previous perceptions and the way Hollywood uses violence for entertainment, then it's a missed opportunity.  Even in the final death scene, Bonnie and Clyde's bodies are riddled with bullets in romantic slow motion, the film passing up a final chance to confront the audience with brutal reality, instead clinging to the old Dream Factory mindset, a new Dream Factory but a Dream Factory nonetheless.

Late in the film, Bonnie wistfully states, "When we started out, I thought we were going somewhere.  But this is it.  We're just goin'."  Kind of like this film artistically.