Bad Day at Black Rock (1955) is a 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.
In 1945 a train pulls into Black Rock, hardly even a whistlestop, and lets Macreedy off. He wants to give a local Japanese farmer his son's war medal, but the townsfolk will have nothing to do with him. Written by Ed Stephan
John J. Macreedy doesn't know it, but when he steps off the train at the jerkwater town of Black Rock, he will soon find himself the object of fear, hatred, and even a murder plot! The altruistic Macreedy came to Black Rock to hand over a posthumous military award to a local man whose son had died gallantly in the Second World War. What Macreedy couldn't know when he stepped off of that train was that the town had a shameful secret, one that must be kept at all costs. Written by Alfred Jingle
