In honor of Tuesday night’s Bedford Playhouse screening of Bad Day at Black Rock, HE is re-posting (second time within the last 12 months!) a riff about Anne Francis‘s Liz Wirth character not (heh-heh) getting any, or at least being indifferent to the concept, due to where she lives.
The original HE posting appeared on 11.15.24:
Bad Day at Black Rock (‘55) is a good, strong John Sturges film except for one thing. Nobody in that tiny little desert backwater is doing Anne Francis.
It makes no sense that Francis would even be there, as a woman this fetching would never settle for a grim existence in a dinky little ghost town like this. Life is short — you have to go for the gusto and the goodies.
But even if you accept that Francis’s “Liz Wirth” would be content to live in this dusty hell hole, human nature dictates that someone in that miserable hamlet would’ve stepped up to the plate and said to her, “I’m your man…really. We can make beautiful music together and have all kinds of nice plants on the patio.”
Someone always steps up and seals the deal in these situations. It happened in each and every cave settlement in prehistoric times, in every village in ancient Judea, in every clay-hut, grass-roof settlement in medieval Europe. Not that a knockout like Francis would’ve rubbed shoulders with everyday European villagers or Judeans or cave-dwellers.
The fact that director John Sturges never addressed this reality — Francis not only being unattached but none of the dudes even applying for the position — tells you something about the funny-looking Sturges, who might’ve been an egghead brother of Richard Kiel except shorter, and with a high forehead. It suggests he wasn’t much of a hound in his youth or that he tried his luck with women but wasn’t very successful.
If I was Spencer Tracy, I would’ve sized things up and sauntered over to Robert Ryan or Lee Marvin or Walter Brennan or Wirth’s brother Pete, who works at the hotel, and said, “Are you telling me that no one’s giving Anne the high, hard one, or at least trying to? Because that really goes against basic human nature.“
Anne Francis passed in 2011 at age 80.
