Bad Day at Black Rock (1955)

The template for the modern western starts here: a stranger steps off a train into a desert town in 1945, and the town closes ranks. Spencer Tracy plays a one-armed veteran asking after a Japanese American farmer, and the hostility he meets turns a simple errand into a reckoning with what the town buried. John Sturges frames the empty landscape so wide that every building looks exposed, and the story moves with no wasted scenes. It is the first stop for anyone who wants to see the western's lone-man-against-the-town shape moved into the twentieth century and pointed at a real American shame.