A Town Without Pity-Spencer Tracy’s Bad Day At Bad Rock (1955)-A Film Review  

DVD Review

By Sam Lowell

Bad Day At Bad Rock, starring Spenser Tracy, Robert Ryan, 1955

No question the internment of every Japanese person who could be found on the West Coast during the early days of World War II whatever their beliefs, whatever their loyalty to America, aided by the highest court in the land, the U.S. Supreme Court rubber-stamping that executive decision, was a dark day for the vaunted American values and adherence to a belief in civil liberties. (And if anybody wants to say that the governmental action then was an aberration look at the plight of most Moslems here these days in post-9/11 America.) Despite that injustice one would not assume that those actions would be the backdrop for a 1955 film, Bad Day At Bad Rock, which obliquely addresses the whole question in a dramatic way.

John MacCreedy, played by Spenser Tracy, is a man on a mission, an undisclosed mission through most of the film, as he gets off the train in some Podunk town in the Southwest. This town, like a lot of towns which are isolated out in the sticks, and insulated too, had citizens very unfriendly to our man. All he wants is to be able to contact a resident of the town, a Japanese-American, in the immediate post-World War II period. This fact sets off a train of events that by the end will make it very dicey about whether MacCreedy will get out of the town alive. But before that he stirs up some hidden past that many of the townspeople are trying to forget-or at least not rake up again. The leader of this town, a large ranch owner named Reno Smith, played by Robert Ryan, orchestrates the negative attitude that MacCreedy finds at every turn as he doggedly looks for that missing Japanese man whom he wants to find. At the beginning everybody, standing in fear of Reno, or indifferent to MacCreedy fate, stonewalls him at every point. Then slowly as the injustices to his person mount up and the citizens get tired of Reno’s overweening antics a few brave souls help MacCreedy. But in Reno’s eyes MacCreedy is a loose cannon, has to be gotten rid of-and fast. 

The attempts to murder MacCreedy, there is no other way to put the matter, naturally failed as Reno went down, literally, in a blaze of fire. You might ask why Reno and his accomplices were so adamant about kicking MacCreedy out of town. After Pearl Harbor Reno’s hatred of “Japs” was uncontrollable (especially after he was turned down when he tried to enlist) and after a drunken spree he had killed the “Jap.” That madness known to the residents either through direct knowledge or fear, was why the townspeople were so suspicious of MacCreedy. And Mac’s mission-to give a Japanese father the posthumous medal his son had won saving MacCreedy’s life in Italy where laid down his head as an American soldier (there actually was a famous Japanese unit that fought all the battles in Italy and grabbed a ton of medals and commendations. Nice plot-line to make that point-a point that bears repeating today.