We liked this one for its camera work, score, story line, and the fact that virtually every actor familiar to us in 1955 had a role and rocked it.
Except for Anne Francis, but we think she was written in to satisfy the “romantic” or “glamour interest” the studios demanded back in the day.
You may know that we’re train fanciers, particularly the lines that criss-crossed The West back in the day, and Bad Day comes at you with a helluva establishing shot of an old Southern Pacific chugger signaling a stop at a dried up mid-desert town with every ounce of moisture sucked out of it. The residents, sun-baked and leathery, are as stunned as the train’s crew when it stops.
“Man,” the conductor assesses as the townspeople size up the train’s lone passenger – a one-armed man named Macreedy (Spencer Tracy) – “they sure look woebegone and faraway.”
“I’ll only be here 24 hours,” Macreedy states.
“In a place like this that could be a lifetime,” the conductor prophesies and, with a jumble of unreadable hand signals (one of the movie’s only mistakes) sends the train on its way and leaving Macreedy standing in the dust.
It’s about here we see two film genres begin to merge: the tried and true Western and the overtones of Film Noir, as the townsfolk tip forward on their porch chairs and begin to circle the wagons around a dark secret the one-armed newcomer appears hell-bent on figuring out, until we are left with what has come to be known as the New Western.
Bad Day is one of the first of the genre – and one of the best. Macreedy has come a long way to get to the bottom of a mystery, with Robert Ryan, Lee Marvin, and Ernest Borgnine lining up to stop him. The rest of the cast, Dean Jagger as the ineffectual sheriff, Walter Brennan, John Ericson and Walter Sande the willing, controllable accomplices to the atrocity. The townspeople know, or at least suspect, what happened – but they ain’t talkin’.
You’re on your own for the rest, we don’t want to ruin it for you. Bad Day is streaming on YouTube and other platforms and it’s worth the time. Shot in Cinemascope and pared down to the essential characters for effect, Bad Day gets it done, reminding us of small towns we’ve stumbled into back in the day, and the suspicious looks of locals who didn’t like our hair, our license plates, or politics – and were anxious to see us go.
There are a lot of secrets in those small towns.
And every city too.
A good movie ahead of its time. Stellar cast.
I liked the movie when I watched it years ago. But Tracy, who enlisted in the Navy during WWI, was just too old to be playing a WWII veteran.