Wim Wenders on ‘Bad Day at Black Rock’ (1955): “A dusty American colour film by John Sturges where everything’s so right and correct that it is almost unbearable. You could say of this John Sturges film that it doesn’t show a succession of images, but of sentences. A whole dozen of these sentences are written up in the display cases of the theatres showing ‘Bad Day at Black Rock." The full text is available for our subscribers | History of Cinema

Bad Day at Black Rock is a 1955 American neo-Western film directed by John Sturges with screenplay by Millard Kaufman. It stars Spencer Tracy and Robert Ryan with support from Anne Francis, Dean Jagger, Walter Brennan, John Ericson, Ernest Borgnine and Lee Marvin. The film is a crime drama set in 1945 that contains elements of the revisionist Western genre. In the plot, a one-armed stranger (Tracy) comes to a small desert town and uncovers an evil secret that has corrupted the entire community.