MATTHEW HAMMER

Though in retrospect it was a tame decade, it seems that there were many things to be afraid of in the fifties. Most of these things were Communism. So what if that sentence isn’t grammatically correct, I stand by it. All three of our films this week seemed to illustrate in some way how Americans were gripped in fear of the “Red Menace”, from the silly cautionary “You could be next!” in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, to the obviously unjust persecution of David Merrill in Guilty by Suspicion. I believe that the issue of Communism will be covered extensively in the blogs of my classmates, so in the way of Brian Fullerton’s trying to write about Bamboozled without mentioning race, I will try to talk of the fear shown in Bad day at Black Rock without mentioning Communism.

Before I do this I would like to say how funny I thought Invasion was. First off, weren’t they mind snatchers, and not body snatchers? Replicant bodies were barfed out of big brussel sprouts, and then absorbed your mind, right? I love the sequence in the leads friends house where the first snatcher is found when Al(?) says to the doctor, “Can you forget for a minute that you’re a doctor?” then a few seconds later when the doctor asks how the body died he says, “You tell me, you’re the doctor!”

I’m sorry if the character names aren’t correct; I stopped taking detailed notes on this one pretty quickly. The notes I did take consisted more of, is the Psychiatrist in the opening scene Al from Dick Van Dyke? Ass shack spoon bennnd (I think it says this, sometimes I can’t read my own writing), the bartender has premade martinis? He must’ve seen them coming, and Ahhhhh, the doctor was the bad guy in UHF!!!

A Bad Day worked for me on more levels. There were themes of anti isolationism, anti facism, anti racism, and age supremecy. There seems to be an underlying feeling of out with the old and in with the new. The doctor and Sheriff are the old guard, rendered ineffective by age. They try to help McCready (and do with help from the young buck in the end), but are overpowered by the powers that be. This power is held by the middle aged men; they are the ruling class, and they rule with an iron fist, like facists of the time. They might not be as wise as the old guard, but they're stronger. Along comes McCready seemingly representing the new way, with his strong talking big city dress, and high falootin ways. We think that he might be a mobster, or a hitman, or an FBI agent. He's certainly not from around there. We find out that he's a military man, and it all comes together, the United States is the new way. McCready represents the USA in the town that is any Facist or Communist country in the world, and he has got to clean house. Out with the old way of thinking, in with the "American Way!".