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Bad Day at Black Rock (1955)

This movie jumped out at me from the book I recently bought, "1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die". The book isn't actually as cheesy as it sounds, and it's useful at least in the sense that it gets people that aren't film experts acquanited with good movies they've never heard of.

Anyway, the title alone and image that followed it seemed pretty cool so I went ahead and randomly watched the it. It's good! For a 1955 thriller, I think it's really pretty tense. A man jumps off a train at the small town of Black Rock in the middle of nowhere because he wants to (as it turns out later) give his old Japanese friend Komoko his son's medal. However, Komoko isn't apparently around and the townsfolk are fully inhospitable and unhelpful.

Anyway, the story unravels and you find out what happened at Black Rock. The movie leaves you feeling a little sorry for both sides, but mostly you're happy to have watched the mystery unfold. It's a little gem of a movie, not too imposing but yet quite memorable. Shows that movies from the 50's could be quite fast paced and I think it could easily capture the attention even of today's attention-deficitary population. I expect at the time people were at the edge of their seats during the hour and a half that the movie runs.

Bad Day at Black Rock isn't a movie that will change your life in any way whatsoever, but will provide true entertainment. It's a small-scale thriller set in a tiny isolated town in the west (and it has the true western movie aesthetic in a more modern way) set during the course of 24 hours. If you don't mind older movies, you might well enjoy this western-meets-detective movie given that you don't expect too much from it.

Rating: 4.0 / 5

Posted at: Sep 01, 2012 @ 20:49:10