Bad Day At Black Rock

Bad Day at Black Rock (1955) is a thriller film directed by John Sturges that combines elements of Westerns and film noir. It tells the story of a mysterious stranger who arrives at a tiny isolated town in a desert of the southwest United States in search of a man.

It stars Spencer Tracy, Robert Ryan, Anne Francis, Dean Jagger, Walter Brennan, John Ericson, Ernest Borgnine and Lee Marvin. The movie was adapted by Don McGuire and Millard Kaufman from the story Bad Day at Hondo by Howard Breslin.


Bad Day at Black Rock, based on a smart, propulsive script by Don McGuire and Millard Kaufman, precedes the epic grandeur of Sturges's The Great Escape and The Magnificent Seven but it synthesizes and streamlines the explosive action sequences and steely intelligence that the director showed off in those films. Urgency and an unyielding tension are built into every single scene, and when things erupt -- as they do in a brilliantly choreographed fight scene in the town diner between Tracy and Borgnine