NFR Project: 'Bad Day at Black Rock' (1955)

 

NFR Project: “Bad Day at Black Rock”

Dir: John Sturges

Scr: Millard Kaufman, Don McGuire

Pho: William C. Mellor

Ed: Newell P. Kimlin

Premiere: Jan. 7, 1955

81 min.

John Sturges (1910-1992) was a profoundly gifted director who never really received his due in the awards department. He created many great action films, including The Magnificent Seven (1960), The Great Escape (1963), and Ice Station Zebra (1968). Here he first makes his mark, with an effective and compelling film that builds its suspense slowly until its violent conclusion.

Bad Day at Black Rock is a modern-dress Western. A stranger comes to town and imposes justice on a lawless environment, the basic plot of many a horse opera. What distinguishes this film is the stalwart presence of Spencer Tracy as the One-Armed Man, and the themes of prejudice and cowardly collusion that it raises.

Shooting in the hot, dusty scrub desert of California, the film is set in 1945, immediately after the end of World War II. Tracy is John J. Macreedy, a one-armed veteran who has come to the tiny town of Black Rock on an unspecified mission. (No one has gotten off the train at Black Rock for four years.) Macreedy is a bit of a Zen master – calm, cool, deliberate, deferential. He is after something, something only gradually revealed as the film unwinds.

The townsfolk are not pleased about this. Something bad happened in Black Rock during the war, and nobody wants to talk about it. At the center of this web of silence is Reno Smith (Robert Ryan, evil as only he could be), a violently prejudiced rancher who’s resentful as he was rejected for military service and therefore couldn’t kill any “Japs.” It turns out he was a perpetrator of an evil deed, and he has all the other inhabitants of Black Rock under his sway. Everyone is complicit.

Among Smith’s compatriots are the sadistic Trimble (Ernest Borgnine) and the insolent Homer (Lee Marvin). Others, such as Liz (Anne Francis), the local sheriff (Dean Jagger), and the town doctor (Walter Brennan), grudgingly reveal bits of information that add up to solve the mystery of what happened. Meanwhile, Macreedy reveals his reason for coming to town. He is there to deliver a medal won by a late soldier under his command to the boy’s father. That father and son are Japanese-American is significant.

Sturges had directed 20 B movies before Black Rock, and he is perfectly assured here. He uses the CinemaScope screen with wisdom, composing shots that utilize the expanded frame beautifully. His use of Technicolor is also incomparable, given the lack of a broad palette on the desert. Millard Kaufman’s script is tight and fast-moving, and manages to make effective points about the emptiness of racial prejudice and citizen inaction in the face of evil as well.

There! I managed to describe the film without giving away too much of the plot. It is exhilarating to see this film for the first time, and I would not spoil your pleasure. Tracy, playing his age, in particular plays a noble, understated, and brilliant protagonist who breaks the spell of a curse that overhangs this tiny town in the middle of nowhere.

The NFR Project is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: Blackboard Jungle.

NFR Project: 'The Phenix City Story' (1955)

 

NFR Project: “The Phenix City Story”

Dir: Phil Karlson

Scr: Daniel Mainwaring, Crane Wilbur

Pho: Harry Neumann

Ed: George White

Premiere: Aug. 14, 1955

100 min.

An interesting low-budget anomaly. This film is an awkward combination of would-be documentary and fictionalized potboiler. It purports to show the events surrounding the uncovering of systemic and pervasive corruption in Phenix City, Alabama in the early 1950s. (In fact, the Columbus, GA Ledger-Enquirer won the Pulitzer Prize in 1955 for its reporting on Phenix City.)

Phil Karlson (1908-1982) was a maestro of the mediocre. He made his living directing movies for off-brand studios such as Monogram. He was competent and professional, bringing in all his efforts on time and under budget. Name a genre, and he directed a film in it. He was one of a fraternity of lesser-known but steadily working Hollywood directors such as Allan Dwan, Joseph H. Lewis, Edward L. Cahn, Roger Corman, and Edgar Ulmer.

Phenix City is located across the river from Columbus, Georgia, which hosts Fort Benning. The presence of enlisted men led to the creation of a red-light district that gave the town the unofficial title of “Sin City, USA.” In the 1940s and ‘50s, gambling, prostitution, and drug usage there were rampant. The town was run by organized crime, with the full cooperation of the municipal authorities.

Attempts were made at reform that were rebuffed violently. On June 18, 1954, the Alabama attorney general pro tem Albert Patterson, who ran on reform, was shot to death outside his law office in downtown Phenix City. The situation was so out of hand that martial law was declared in the city on July 22.

So this film was made immediately after the fact. Interestingly, it opens with about 20 minutes of interviews between journalist Clete Roberts and some of the citizens who witnessed the actual carnage. It then kicks in to an overview of the sordid conditions in Phenix City. We are taken into the story of John Patterson (Richard Kiely), a lawyer and Korean War vet who goes into practice with his father Albert (John McIntire) in town.

An improvement committee is formed, but there is a spy in its midst. Its efforts are thwarted by the town’s criminals. The committee members are harassed and assaulted; one man’s daughter is murdered and tossed onto John’s lawn.

Albert, initially disinclined to get involved, eventually consents to run for attorney general. As in real life, the character is murdered. Son John flies into enraged action, finding the crime boss (Edward Andrews) responsible and beating him half to death. He is only restrained by Zeke (James Edwards), father of the slain girl, who exhorts, “Thou shalt not kill!”

The movie ends with armed soldiers taking over the district, and destroying its crooked gambling equipment. It is implied that the reign of terror is over. However, Karlson had a pessimistic outlook that runs like a thread through his films. The Phenix City Story is consonant with that perspective.

Those in charge are the bad guys, and violence is their stock in trade. Almost all the citizens have given up, resigning themselves to domination by society’s dark forces. Almost everyone is crooked; almost everyone can be bought. Crime is a major industry, a revenue source for a whole culture. It takes making it personal with a murder, for a man to avenge his father’s death, for anything positive to happen.

The tone is spare, shrouded in night on rain-slicked streets. The actors are a curious combination of polished pros, local amateur actors, and people seemingly drawn in off the street. The result is a documentary-like evocation of the underbelly of the American dream.

And, in real life, unlike the seemingly liberal character in the film, John Patterson went on to be one of the most anti-Black governors of all time.

The NFR Project is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: Bad Day at Black Rock.

NFR Project: 'The Man with the Golden Arm' (1955)

  

NFR Project: “The Man with the Golden Arm”

Dir: Otto Preminger

Scr: Walter Newman, Lewis Meltzer, Ben Hecht

Pho: Sam Leavitt

Ed: Louis R. Loeffler

Premiere: Dec. 15, 1955

119 min.

Otto Preminger, a dictatorial menace of a director, was noted for his willingness to tackle controversial subjects. He had just addressed premarital sex in The Moon Is Blue (1953). Here he was to turn a great, gritty American novel into a slightly more palatable product starring Frank Sinatra in a role that confirms his ability as an actor. (He lost the Best Actor Oscar to Ernest Borgnine in Marty.)

Nelson Algren (1909-1961) was a novelist and short-story and non-fiction writer out of Chicago. He was a “bard of the down and out,” a chronicler of the American underclass, the folks who lived on the fringes of society. Read him; he’s good. He has a kind of tough-guy poesy that puts him somewhere between Chandler and Bukowski.

He is a resolute pessimist, and this is reflected in the original, National Book Award-winning novel, The Man with the Golden Arm, he wrote in 1949. It took a while for his work to percolate into the mainstream, but when it did it hit hard. Preminger, no stranger to controversy, snapped it up.

The resulting script, originally essayed by Algren, was turned over to Walter Newman. The script made tailor-made as a Best-Actor type of project Frank Sinatra could star in. In the novel, the protagonist kills himself. Obviously, this could not be in mainstream cinema. Therefore, the story was altered to give us an equivocally upbeat ending (that doesn’t work, by the way).

It’s the story of addiction. Frank plays Frankie, a would-be drummer in a studio recreation of a blighted Chicago slum. The feeling is gritty, tense; it does evoke the lives of people on the bottom rung of society, the criminals, prostitutes, drug dealers, gamblers who populate Algren’s world. Preminger gives us a wretched aesthetic that magnifies the emotional content of the brutal narrative. It is not Neorealism, but it is as close as Hollywood would ever come.

There in the depths of degradation and despair Frankie dwells with his wife “Zosh” (Eleanor Parker), who is out of her fricking mind. She sits around all day in a wheelchair, as Frankie had crippled her when he was driving drunk. Except she’s not: she’s faking it to keep Frankie around out of guilt!

He really digs Molly (Kim Novak), who works the door at a strip club. She loves him and believes in him, all the more important for him as he’s just returned from the Narcotic Farm in Kentucky, free from his addiction to what is generally regarded, though never specified, as heroin. (In the novel, pointedly, Frankie gets hooked on morphine due to injury in World War II combat.)

Frankie tries to go straight. He joins the musicians’ union, he goes out on an audition (disastrously). He rubs up against the local gambling shark Schwiefka (Robert Strauss), who gets him to deal illegal poker games for him again – as he is known as a genius with cards, “the man with the golden arm.” Meanwhile, the local pusher Louie (a young Darren McGavin) gets him hooked on the stuff again.

Things go from bad to worse. Frankie’s agony over his relapse manifests itself in Sintra’s sweaty, desperate features, lit grimly in a kind of dour “problem picture” style.

Preminger doesn’t preach; he simply follows the increasingly frantic machinations of the hero, Frankie Machine, as he declines into hopelessness. Frankie gets involved in a violent, crooked card game. Louie gets murdered and everyone thinks Frankie did it. Preminger and Newman give him a kind of ersatz redemption. Frank as Frankie gets to kick heroin in front of our eyes.

Surprisingly, it still works. Sinatra really could act, usually in proportion with the quality of the director he worked with (Zinnemann in Fron Here to Eternity, Frankenheimer in The Manchurian Candidate). He carries the film and makes us root for him.

He is ably assisted by the immortal Arnold Stang as Sparrow, his sidekick, Parker (an uncharacteristic choice) as his wife, and Novak in a star-making turn (with Picnic the same year). 

Frankie gets to walk away in the end . . . but where is he walking to? The ineffectiveness of its contrived ending reduces what came before to mere melodrama. There is no indication that Frankie is on his way to better things, save that he is clean. For now. This provisional view of humanity was about all the censors of the day could stand.

But it was important. It raised an issue that was pernicious and unacknowledged. History has not yet decided whether Preminger was a huckster exploiting the controversies of the day or a sincere pioneer of “problem” cinema in the modern era.

The NFR Project is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: The Phenix City Story.