filming of Bad Day at Black Rock
Actor Spencer Tracy (right, in black) and director John Sturges (seated, in white baseball cap and glasses) during the filming of Bad Day at Black Rock (1955).
Bad Day at Black Rock
film by Sturges [1955]
Bad Day at Black Rock, American mystery film, released in 1955, that fused elements of the western with those of film noir. It was based on Howard Breslin’s short story “Bad Time at Honda” (1947). (Read Martin Scorsese’s Britannica essay on film preservation.) Spencer Tracy starred as John Macreedy, a one-armed World War II veteran whose life was saved during the war by a Japanese American soldier. He becomes a de facto detective when in 1945 he arrives in a sparsely populated Arizona desert town in search of the soldier’s father, Komoko, in order to present him with a medal ...(100 of 443 words)