Almost 70 Years Later, Unfairly Forgotten 97%-Rated Western Still Kills It (With Zero Horses on Screen)

There is no doubt that the genre of Western movies is often associated with cowboys riding their horses through the deserts of the Wild West. A person who is not into this type of films can even be unaware of the fact that they don’t necessarily have cowboys as the leading characters, and that sometimes a Western hero is not a hero at all.

There are still various discussions regarding the limits of the genre and what kind of movies can be definitely considered as Westerns, as some of the most conservative veterans of the genre are sure you can’t make a Western film without horses.

However, those doubts can be resolved with a classic Western that breaks the canon while appearing to be a good old Western in terms of its hidden meanings. Its plot revolves around John J. Macreedy, a one-armed war veteran, who is unwelcomed in the small town where he arrives while searching for a man named Komoko.

Macreedy faces disdain and hatred from almost every person he meets there, and the more his investigation progresses, the more locals turn against him. Thus, his trip turns into a violent battle against the town’s relentless outlaws and the heat of the desert.

Starting as a crime movie about the mysterious case, it then delves more and more into exploring personal drama and socially important issues. By combining elements of the revisionist Western genre, it questions the boundary between good and evil.

You’ll definitely like it if you’re a fan of modern neo-Western gems, such as the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men (2007) and Quentin Tarantino ’s The Hateful Eight. This movie can be regarded as the very origin of all contemporary genre’s flicks.

Titled Bad Day at Black Rock, this Spencer Tracy and Robert Ryan’s movie was a huge success back in 1955 and has acquired the golden status since then. That is why it gained an almost perfect critical score of 97% on Rotten Tomatoes.

“It's a hybrid between Western and paranoid film noir, <...> between bare-bones action cinema and existential psychological drama,” says Redditor @cotardelusion87 about it.

Check out this ground-breaking Western, as Bad Day at Black Rock is available for watching on Prime Video .