![]() ![]() One of the wonderful aspects about the film is that there is only one exchange that reveals the ugliness of this guy's beliefs, that there was no difference between Japanese-Americans and those who bombed Pearl Harbor or who tortured Americans on the Bataan Death March. ![]() It has the feel of classic westerns, but with a very different reason for the conflict. ![]() He's just one quiet man against a group of racist thugs, whose ringleader is played well by Reno Smith, and his own safety becomes seriously threatened. Tracy's character feels a debt to this man because his son died trying to save his life in Italy. The town has a secret surrounding a Japanese-American we never see, because he disappeared shortly after Pearl Harbor. He's met with rude behavior from the townsfolk from the start, and director John Sturges is brilliant in gradually ramping this up to outright hostility. Spencer Tracy is in the lead role of a lone, one-arm stranger who gets off a train in a dusty town in the middle of nowhere at the film's beginning. What an extraordinary thing that is, acknowledging a shameful injustice at a time when some considered it subversive to do so. In 1955, as the repugnance of McCarthyism raged in America, this film emerged, trying to come to terms with racism and the treatment of Japanese-Americans during the war.
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