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The town of Black Rock is a miserable-looking shamble of buildings straddling a strip of railroad tracks on a southwestern plain. One sunny morning in 1945, the Santa Fe streamliner pulls up at Black Rock with a screech that sounds like trouble. The one man to alight is John J. MacReedy (Spencer Tracy), a robust fellow despite his game left arm. MacReedy is looking for an old Japanese farmer who ran a small place on a nearby rocky slope. The farmer's son saved MacReedy's life in the Italian campaign, and MacReedy carries with him the son's posthumous medal. But wherever he turns for help, MacReedy meets the distrusting, sun-and-sand-beaten faces of five or six townsmen; they do not yet know the stranger's mission, nor are they eager for him to discover that in a fit of distorted patriotic fervor combined with jealousy and just plain meanness, they have burned out the Japanese farmer's shack and killed him. And all they want is for MacReedy to get out of town.
But John J. MacReedy is a patient man and a thorough one. In fact, he appears to accept the snarling opposition of the villains with placidity, and shrewdly allows himself to be buffeted about by their cold-war tactics. Still, when the showdown comes, MacReedy singlehandedly—with judo and some other efficient, war-schooled tricks—mauls them down. And it is a tribute to Director John Sturges that when Bad Day blasts out with violence, the audience is ready—in fact, rooting—for it. For a change, CinemaScope and color go beyond merely recording pretty scenery in wide-open spaces. Cameraman William C. Mellor composed some topnotch shots (reminiscent of the paintings of the Southwest's Peter Kurd) of hardy, blue-jeaned men smoldering idly as if they were as much a part of the dusty brown floor of their town as the yellow sun.
Practically the whole cast is first-rate. As a conscience-stricken, whisky-soaked sheriff, Dean Jagger shows what it means to waver on the drink; Lee Marvin is alarmingly mean as a steely, easygoing plotter, and so is tough-guy Ernest Borgnine. Robert Ryan as the chief villain has some fine scenes with Spencer Tracy, who is at his best.