"BAD DAY" IS A GREAT FLICK:

Millard Kaufman, 92, a Creator of Mr. Magoo, Dies (WILLIAM GRIMES, 3/19/09, NY Times)

Millard Kaufman, who wrote Oscar-nominated screenplays for “Take the High Ground!” and “Bad Day at Black Rock,” helped create the cartoon character Mr. Magoo and made a belated debut as a novelist at 90, died in Los Angeles on Saturday. [...]

The taut, punchy screenplay for “Take the High Ground!” (1953), in which Karl Malden and Richard Widmark play drill sergeants whipping raw recruits into shape during the Korean War, earned Mr. Kaufman the first of two Oscar nominations.

The second came with “Bad Day at Black Rock” (1955), a racially charged drama, part western and part film noir, about a desert town whose residents have murdered a Japanese immigrant. Spencer Tracy, as the one-armed World War II veteran who comes to give the Japanese man his dead son’s war medal, encounters duplicity, hatred and moral cowardice in a film credited with helping to change the depiction of Asians in Hollywood films.