Trivia for
Bad Day at Black Rock (1955) More at IMDbPro »

• MGM's then president Nicholas Schenck was actively opposed to the film as he felt the storyline was subversive.
  
  
• According to director John Sturges' commentary track on the Criterion Laserdisc, this film was also filmed simultaneously in a standard 4:3 ratio version (as well as Cinemascope), because MGM executives were unsure of the wide screen version. It was never released.
  
  
• The opening shot with the train was added after preview audiences did not like the original version. The sequence was created by filming with a helicopter flying away from the train and running the film backwards. (Source - audio commentary by John Sturges on Criterion laserdisc.)
  
  
• The projectionist's records have revealed that over the years this has become one of the most frequently shown films in the screening room of The White House.
  
  
• According to one biographer of Spencer Tracy, the script did not originally call for the lead character to be a one-armed man. The producers were keen to get Tracy but didn't think he'd be interested, so they gave the character this disability with the idea that no actor can resist playing a character with a physical impairment.
  
  
• The script called for Tracy's character to light matches one-handed. Tracy had difficulty with this and convinced the director to let him use a Zippo lighter, as every veteran he ever met had one.
  
  
• Average Shot Length (ASL) = 10 seconds
  
  
• 'Don Siegel (I)' called 'Bad Day at Black Rock' the best screenplay he had ever read (to that point) and lobbied unsuccessfully to direct it.
  
  
• The suit that Tracy wears throughout the film was bought by him off the rack, at his insistence.
  
  
• In the original short story, MacReedy brandishes a Beretta and brags of his prowess with it, but in the movie, he uses judo - an idea meant to suggest that MacReedy is Japanese-American.
  
  

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