.... having just finished watching BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK for the first time since college, I think I finally understand why Kurosawa was so eager to co-direct TORA! TORA! TORA! with John Sturges, and why Sturges' unceremonious replacement with Richard Fleischer was a dealbreaker for him.
Comparing Sturges' and Fleischer's bodies of work, it's as difficult to see much of a qualitative difference as it is easy to overlook BAD DAY camouflaged in the thick weeds of the well-crafted but not peerless Westerns and thrillers Sturges made. Seeing it this evening as its own story, I was thunderstruck by how subtle and truly subversive it is -- Spencer Tracy is at once the unavoidable realities of Postwar America as well as The Ghost Of Homefront War-Crimes Past, and he plays it like a laconic zen monk. It's the kind of layering that Kurosawa regarded highly in film and literature, sometimes berating himself for failing to achieve it in his own movies. That it's a film that took the first kick to America's nuts as payback for its cowardice-enabled racism and the government's internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII was just the cherry on top for Kurosawa-San.
I first saw BAD DAY for an adaptation-writing class; I watched it focused more on the choices Sturges and his team made in reworking Howard Breslin's short story to work on the screen than what he was driving at. Also I was young and stupid; I recognized how they changed McCready from a pistol-packing but broken he-man to the martial-arts-knowing stoic Tracy played, but I think I figured that was more to true up the character to the lion-in-winter, elder-statesman presence Tracy had drank himself into by that point in his career. If I had a go at the screenplay before shooting started, I would chance his name to something less European, but I don't know how far West I would take it before what we were doing would become too obvious.
The other thing that led me to underestimate the movie is its score. Like Nick Ray and most of their wave of filmmakers, John Sturges had no feel for his films' soundtracks. Except when they lucked out and worked with a composer who knew how to enhance and comment on a movie's narrative, context and visuals without needing direction, most of those guys produced audio wallpaper instead of paintings. Andre Previn's score for BAD DAY is one of those staff-composerly [maybe stock-library composerly] shrieking, overwrought pieces of crap that doesn't have a dimmer switch; it's either all the way on or it's off. I'd like to think that Kurosawa saw a dubbed version that took out the score with the English dialogue.
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