Odds Against Tomorrow (1959)

Robert Wise may have won his Oscars for those elephantine musicals about street gangs and singing nuns but everyone knows he did his best work in a number of terse black and white noirish thrillers and dramas that reminded you he once edited "Citizen Kane" and "The Magnificent Ambersons". He made "Odds Against Tomorrow" in 1959 and it's a classic heist movie as well as one of the more forthright films of its period to deal with racism which, in this case, is the principal cause of thieves falling out. The 'bad guys', in that they are forced to steal for a living, are Harry Belafonte, Robert Ryan and Ed Begley and it's Begley's idea that they should rob a small-town bank. The problem is that Belafonte is an African-American and Ryan is a racist and we know it can only end in tears. Others in a good cast include Shelley Winters and Gloria Grahame, (both given too little to do), and if you pay attention you might spot Zohra Lampert and Cicely Tyson amongst others. Joseph C Brun did the superlative cinematography and the blacklisted Abraham Polonsky worked on the screenplay.

The worst part of Odds Against Tomorrow is the very end. I want to get it out of the way now before I press ahead to what I liked about it (and there are a few good things to say about it). It involves the aftermath of the fate of two of the main characters, Robert Ryan and Harry Belafonte as Earle and Johnny respectively, two guys who have no business working together (Earle is a good-ol' boy from Oklahoma and sees Johnny as, well, 'Boy' just about sums it up, maybe without the capital in 'b'), but are thrown together by ex cop David Burke (Ed Begley, being his, uh, Begley-ist) to pull a bank heist on a weekday night when 200 grand is up for grabs in a brief window of time. In this climax the two men end up running away from the cops (oh, spoiler, the heist goes bad, sorry), and because they're running around by some giant tankers, their gun shots make everything around them explode, burning them to beyond recognition.Cut to the ending of the film when the cops are looking over the corpses and one of them says to the other, "Can't tell em apart now" or something to that effect. I get why the message is there - hey, at the end of it all, you're still dead and racial hatred doesn't mean a thing - but the bluntness of that message is much too hard, especially from what has come before. This isn't The Defiant Ones, where it's about how the white and black people of the world can set aside their differences through literally being tied to one another. Odds Against Tomorrow has a more cynical worldview, that, this is a world of MEN and how they have to appear MANLY to the people around them, and part of that is a feeling of racial superiority (though I believe Robert Ryan's character is the only out-n-out racist in the film, there's an air of uncertainty at times when Johnny is playing music at the club or with the guys he owes money to, it's subtle but it's there I think). So the ending robs it of what is already a potent enough image of these two guys being blown up in the midst of their hopeless and nihilistic end.Indeed while of course it's easy to see the important of it being the first film noir with a black lead (though there was No Way Out with Poitier I'm not sure that counts like this does), and, strangely enough, considered by some to be the *last* of the "classic" era of film-noir before neo-noir would begin some years after, it's really less a movie about racism than it is about masculinity. Johnny and Earle each have paths in life that have brought them to the desperate points they're at to rob a bank, and a lot of it revolves around being flawed as men, whether it's to the women or children around them as with Johnny (he has a woman and a young child, but is in for $7,500 to people over some debts - by the way a great scene where he has to confront them and things are fine until Johnny pulls out a gun, then he's in real trouble), or with the dames in Earle's life (Shelley Winters and Gloria Grahame).A key scene to me seems to not have much to do with the main story, and is just Earle in a bar. Some younger people are screwing around tossing themselves around the bar and one of them by accident knocks over Earle's drink. Earle is mad but tries to calm down, but the guys and gal attempt to toss themselves again, and Earle pipes up to one of them. S*** gets real, one of the guys (in an army outfit - by the way, as per a quasi-noir tradition of down-n-out toughs, Ryan's Earle is a WW2 vet), and the threat of violence escalates... with Earle doing some special kind of punch that puts this kid in pain. Earle is proud of himself, for a moment, and then feels ashamed at this, and the others are like "why did you have to do that?" He leaves quickly with his suit.I wonder about this scene as being sort of an encapsulation about this movie, or this world where GUYS have to be TOUGH and do things THEIR way (sorry for the caps, but you know, it's for emphasis), and I think that's the skill Abraham Polansky and Robert Wise get with this material. Even the ex cop Begley plays is doing this "one last score" cliché in a way to prop himself up - he claims he wasn't dirty, on the force for decades, but, you know, never said a wrong word (i.e. rat on the wrong people) - and it gives him something to live for. He needs these guys perhaps more than they need him, money aside, so there's ego there too I think. Meanwhile for Johnny being a man is being able to provide for his family and not be a total screw-up as he has been. He'd rather just keep playing his music - Belafonte has a couple of good numbers in the film, one of them ties in story-wise to what's going on as it's post back-room argument over the money owed as stakes rise - but that's not going to last.If it only hadn't been for the ending, and a couple of creaky moments in the writing, it would be really special instead of simply being... good. Actually, Belafonte is better than good, and I wish he'd acted more. 7.5/10

More of a character study than a heist film, the story builds on the shaky foundations of three desperate losers, whose lives and relationships are carefully fleshed out for 75% of the film until the actual robbery. The performances are top-notch all around, especially Ed Begley, whose enthusiastic optimism eclipses any second thoughts he might have about robbing a bank. The photography is gorgeous, from the brutal closeups of cramped apartments and seedy New York nightclubs to great, sweeping vistas of wilderness, rolling hills, and rivers. From the beginning you get the sense that these people are destined for failure; Wise's subdued existentialism runs throughout the film with all the cynicism of French new wave. The characters almost seem carved into the film. This is the rare film that I would watch more than once, and it was a happy accident that I stumbled across it tonight on TCM.

This is a pretty good thriller created by the great Robert Wise, featuring excellent performances from Harry Belafonte and the great Robert Ryan.A comment on the state of race relations in America at the time, Ryan plays an ex-con bought in to do a bank job with debt-ridden jazz musician Belafonte. Ryan's Earle Slater is the clichéd backward southern racist, whilst Belafonte's Johnny Ingram is a sophisticated northern African American. The movie plays out the tensions between the two, concluding in a downbeat ending. The score by MJQ pianist John Lewis is excellent, and Wise's use of locations and studio shots gives the film an independent film making feel to it.Watching the film I could see the potential influence on later film makers such as Scorcese and De Palma on their heist/gangster movies, but more specifically I felt an influence on the early work of Tarantino. An excellent little film that is high on my list of Wise's best work.