I'm not sure HOW Bad day at black rock slipped through the fingers of the censors, but apparently, it did. Or maybe I am just over-interpreting it, but the story seems to be quite politically controversial from the point of view of post-WW2 50's in the US. I know the film is about a thousand other things, but one dimension here seems to be the hatered agains Japanese people during and after the war, even those Japanese people living in the US (as you remember, internment camps were erected). But what do I know: perhaps this was discussed during the fifties? Some have read the film as an allegory for contemporary Hollywood blacklistings (not far-fetched).
The story in the film: a man arrives by train in a shabby-looking town in the middle of the desert. Right from the start, he is treated with hostility by the locals, ranch-owners, thugs, hotel-owners - all with a very masculine demeanour. They suspect he is in the business of poking his nose into local affairs. It turns out that the man wants to contact a certain Japanese farmer. And here the trouble begins.
The story of the film is told with due economy. Some scenes get a bit heavy on words in the sense that the film becomes too stagey. But most of the time, the actors manage to create just the right atmosphere of antagonism and a secret that is not to be revealed. The downside of the film is that it is badly structured, so that some things are obvious at the wrong time, and that, for this reason, a necessary level of suspense fails to develop.
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