Wim Wenders’s review published on Letterboxd:
An American, colorful, dusty film by John Sturges, in which everything is so right that you can hardly bear it. (...) It can be said of this film that it doesn't string images together, but sentences. Half a dozen or even a dozen of these sentences are written in the showcase of the cinema where you watch BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK. Film stills from old color films have a strange charm because they seem completely detached from the film and always bear more resemblance to old hand-coloured postcards than to the actual film scenes. The photos of BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK, however, are surprisingly recognizable during the film; you can even see the exact moment they capture. The film retains the impression left by the colorized photos, it's just AS PAINTED throughout.
The rigid images of the landscape that you see constantly through windows or doors have more in common with Magritte's paintings than with the real landscape, which can be seen in the exterior shots, but even there it only looks like a mile-wide, sky-high backdrop built in a giant studio. I was very confused by this infinite artificiality at the beginning of the film because I could only attribute it to the colours. It was only after quite a while that I suddenly discovered what was really going on in the film when I saw the tattered armchairs standing around in the lobby of the Black Rock Hotel: the armchairs weren't just there, they were there as exactly the armchairs that had to be there, the ashtray next to them was the only possible correct ashtray for these armchairs, the penny machine with the lever for triggering the rotating rollers next to the reception desk was the only conceivable penny machine in such a hotel in such a place in the Midwest. Everything in this film was for itself the most accurate and correct and fitting. Each object was so right that it could form a self-contained sentence, that it could stand apart from everything else around it, but for that very reason fit in with everything else. In this film, every detail was indeed a detail. (...)
Wim Wenders (excerpts from a review published in March 1970)