BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK (1955)
One-armed, middle aged John Macreedy (Spencer Tracy) gets off a train in a tiny, decrepit desert town and is immediately blitzed with hostility, suspicion and fear from the handful of locals. He's there to look up the family of a Japanese-American farmer who served with him in Italy and gave his life protecting him. Macreedy is soon fighting for his life. It's one of Tracy's best roles. The cast is first-rate, including Robert Ryan (one of my favorite actors of that period) as the head honcho; Ernest Borgnine and Lee Marvin, as his two thugs (both in career-making roles); Walter Brennan as the town doc and undertaker; Dean Jagger as the hopelessly drunk sheriff; and Anne Francis as a perky, conflicted gas station operator. They're all complicit in murder, most wracked by guilt. The movie is enlivened by Macreedy in a one-armed karate beating of Borgnine, who is sensationally brutal and evil, as well as taut, crisp direction from John Sturges and vivid Technicolor filming. A classic Western brought up to contemporary relevance.