THE WESTERN IS the quintessential American film: the genre captures the ideals of American individualism while also showing the horrors that it produced. From the early origins of film through most of the 20th century, the Western film genre provided a model of cinematic storytelling that brought together themes of failure, triumph, struggle, and redemption set in the “lawless” American West. For many, the Western embodied the American Dream: the ability to start out with nothing in a new place and build success. The Western film has been so popular that it has gone on to inspire subgenres around the globe, from Italian “spaghetti Westerns,” to Indian “dacoit Westerns” and even Soviet “Osterns.” If jazz is the United States’ musical gift to the world, then the Western is its chief cinematic contribution.
Yet the idea that a Western movie can carry a civil rights message seems paradoxical. If anything, the Western represents the antithesis of civil rights and racial equality. For most of its existence, the Western genre has been tied to the history of the extermination of Indigenous peoples and wholesale violence in the service of promoting a positive narrative of white American expansionism. Until the release of Buck and the Preacher in 1972, which boasted a majority African American cast led by Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte, very few Westerns ever sincerely examined the issue of race critically, instead opting to incorporate the theme of racism in a way that, at best, offered progressive, against-the-grain readings.
Yet, hidden amid the long filmography of Westerns, a few “unknown” films examine prejudice and civil rights, such as the 1943 film The Ox-Bow Incident, which dramatizes the horror of lynching. An even more powerful example is the 1955 film Bad Day at Black Rock. One of the first Westerns by director John Sturges—who, five years later, achieved international renown for directing The Magnificent Seven—Bad Day at Black Rock boasts a star-studded cast. Spencer Tracy appears in the lead role opposite Robert Ryan, with supporting performances from Ernest Borgnine, Walter Brennan, John Ericson, Anne Francis, Dean Jagger, and Lee Marvin. The film won less attention upon its release than its contemporary Westerns, High Noon (1952),Shane (1953), or The Searchers (1956); today, it is relatively obscure to the public. In recent years, industry veterans and film critics have lauded it as a cinematic triumph and an important chapter in Sturges’s career. Paul Thomas Anderson told the Los Angeles Times that you can learn more from Sturges’s discussion of the production of Bad Day at Black Rock than from “20 years of film school.” Along with its cinematic qualities, the film is remarkable for its commentary on racial violence in the American West. Released amid national debates on civil rights and desegregation, it offers a critical discussion of racism through the story of the lynching of a Japanese American during World War II.
