Odds Against Tomorrow | Harry Belafonte, Robert Ryan

Odds Against Tomorrow | Harry Belafonte, Robert Ryan | Between 1950s Film Noir and 1960s Social Conscience Films.

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Odds Against Tomorrow

	Odds Against Tomorrow Harry Belafonte, Robert Ryan MGM (Video & DVD), 2003 average customer review:based on 15 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Nerve-snapping tension, gritty style and an unsparing look at racial tension unite in this 'thunderbolt of a film (Los Angeles Examiner) from four-time OscarÂ(r) winner* Robert Wise and writers Abraham Polonsky and Nelson Gidding. Harry Belafonte, Robert Ryan, Shelley Winters and EdBegley deliver 'superb (Hollywood Citizen Herald) performances in this absorbing'taut crime melodrama (Variety). One hundred and fifty thousand dollars, ready for the taking. It's too much to resist for bigoted ex-con Earl Slater (Ryan). He agrees to take part in a bank robbery with former cop Burke (Begley)but hesitates when he finds out that one of his partners (Belafonte) is black. As tensions mount and the men get closer to their biggest score ever, Earl's hatred erupts, resulting in violent consequences for the heist and their lives. *1965: Best Picture, Director, The Sound of Music; 1961: Best Picture, Director (with Jerome Robbins), West Side Story

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Odds Against Tomorrow

This nail-biting noir features the estimable talents of Ryan, a progressive in real life who plays a noxious bigot to the hilt, and handsome singer-actor Belafonte, showing a decidedly less wholesome side here. Director Wise and writer Abraham Polonsky add complexity to both characters, detailing the gnarled emotions Slater has for well-meaning girlfriend Lorry (Winters) and sexy upstairs neighbor Helen (Gloria Grahame), while depicting Ingram's barely concealed desperation, as he attempts to revive a marriage that's crumbled due to his gambling habits. It's all downhill from there, as everything goes awry on the day of the job. Considered one of the last bona-fide noirs, those in the mood for a tense, intelligent crime caper will like these "Odds."

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Between 1950s Film Noir and 1960s Social Conscience Films.

"Odds Against Tomorrow" is based on the novel by William P. McGivern and was adapted for the screen by Abraham Polonsky, who was blacklisted at the time, so he wrote under novelist John O. Killens' name. The film is sometimes cited as the last film noir of the classic era. Moving into the 1960s, it's a crime film with a social agenda. In contrast to film noir, the most striking visual aspect of "Odds Against Tomorrow" is that it is white. Joseph Brun's cinematography often includes large areas of white or near-white, which I found unusual for black-and-white cinema and quite beautiful at times. The cinematography also tends to open spaces and wide lenses, avoiding the claustrophobia associated with film noir.

During a cold, windy winter in New York City, ex-cop Dave Burke (Ed Begley) has plotted the heist of a bank in the town of Melton, but he needs 2 men to help him pull it off. He turns to an ex-con named Earle Slater (Robert Ryan) who, like Dave, is frustrated by being penniless so late in life. For the other man, he wants jazz singer and gambler Johnny Ingram (Harry Belafonte) who is up to his eyeballs in debt to a bookie. Earle has never stolen anything in his life, and he at first refuses to work with Johnny because he's black. Johnny won't agree to the job until his bookie threatens him. Eventually one pathetic criminal mastermind and his two reluctant accomplices -who hate each other- set out to rob a bank.

"Odds Against Tomorrow" is a classic story of fools doing foolish things with predictable results. The film draws attention to the issue of racial bigotry by making Earle an unabashedly racist Southern farm boy, while Johnny is a suave, stylish, middle class man whose gambling habit compels him to deal with unsavory characters. But that is not the film's overriding theme. It's a character drama with three notable performances. Robert Ryan is a more 3-dimensional bigot here than he was in 1947's "Crossfire". Earle isn't a bad man, but he's an angry, egotistical hick. Robert Ryan had the extraordinary ability to evoke absolute sympathy or total hatred from his audience. Ed Begley makes his pitiful nice-guy crook sympathetic. Harry Belafonte sings (once), and Johnny is driven to desperation by his own flaws. "Odds Against Tomorrow" is a visually interesting film and a picture of doom and gloom among the desperate and criminal, which had become rare at the movies by 1959. No bonus features on the MGM DVD (2003). Subtitles are available in English, Spanish, and French.

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Noir with a social conscience

Three desperate men--a racist Southerner (Robert Ryan), a gambling nightclub singer (Harry Belafonte), and a disgraced ex-cop (Ed Begley)--plot to pull off a bank robbery in a small town. In the tradition of classic film noir, luck turns against them and they wind up being in way over their heads. Director Robert Wise uses his black and white photography to great advantage. The film is fascinating as it shows us the pressures that work on the initially reluctant Ryan and Belafonte to force them into cooperation on the heist. Unfortunately, this otherwise nearly flawless film becomes too heavy-handed with its anti-racist theme in its final moments. Still, it's well worth watching.

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Cultural Shift

Watch those early city scenes, they foreshadow a cultural shift then underway. The cool jazz score, the hip sports car, the dominant racial theme-- all suggest the urban chic of the Kennedy years, no longer Eisenhower's small-town middle America. Noir enthusiasts peg this film as the last true noir of the era. Certainly there are the icons: Robert Ryan, Gloria Grahame, Ed Begley, and blacklisted scenarist Abraham Polonsky (Force of Evil; Body and Soul). But it's not classic noir.The usual light and shadow give way to a gritty gray look, the calculated result of winter filming. The bleak landscape is heavy with machinery gone to rust, mirroring the desolation of the plotters as they reach for the big score.

Given the talent involved, the results are surprisingly uneven. Gloria Grahame's role is intriguingly kinky, but dangles like a loose appendage-- a favor to someone I suppose, her looks fading now as quickly as her skills in a badly performed part. Belafonte too looks the part, a frustrated yuppie, yet he deadpans his way through the crucial robbery sequence. And whose idea was that final `message" scene . They should be forced to sit through a hammer blow, the same way as that piece of obviousness slugged the audience. Director Wise's lacklustre pacing doesn't help eirher, draining the film of much needed snap and suspense.

Nonetheless, the film has the great Robert Ryan in a tailor-made part. Who else could smoulder anger or distance alienation better than this gangly near-forgotten performer. The bar scene alone is worth the viewing. Watch the subtle tics flicker across an anguished face as the rage builds. His despairing Old South confederate remains a scary symbol of decades of Jim Crow, not about to give up without a fight. There's also the telling reaction in Begley's apartment after Belafonte comes up with a clever solution. Ryan looks away, the disgust all over a pained visage-- shouldn't it be he, the white man, who solves tricky brain problems. It's just one more frustration for a man emasculated now by a wife earning a living for the two of them. Blacks and women!-- between them, he's dying inside. And underneath it all is the feeling of "the natural order betrayed", a very contemporary grudge that lives on in the likes of call-in radio.

This may not be a very good caper film, nor a very compelling example of film noir. But as a reflection of a society in transition, the powerful sub-texts endure and are well worth a look-see.

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Dated period piece

An ex-cop, a chronic loser, and a lounge singer with a serious gambling problem join forces to commit a crime. Ed Begley plays the ex-cop, who is also an ex-con and the mastermind of a robbery planned against a bank in a small city in upstate New York. To pull it off Begley recruits two accomplices. The first is Robert Ryan, an aging, two-bit hood who views the job as his last, best chance to make a big score. Presently he's a `kept' man, tenuously attached to Shelley Winters. The second is Harry Belafonte, a jazz singer whose addiction to the ponies has put him deeply, and dangerously, in debt to Bacco, the local loan shark.

Robert Wise directed the black-and-white ODDS AGAINST TOMORROW on the mean streets of New York City in 1959. The movie is appropriately seedy and run-down looking, a quality that is enhanced by the kool jazz scoring of pianist John Lewis. There's a certain ragged edginess to the look and music which, unfortunately, is undercut when the `message' of the movie hijacks the plot.

You see, Robert Ryan's character is a racist, Belafonte's character has some tolerance issues of his own, and what looks like a juicy heist movie loses itself somewhere along the way, forgets about the crime and turns its attention to its two lead characters. What ought to be five minutes of backstory is brought to the front and consumes most of the movie. Ryan's wife/girlfriend Shelley Winters has a job - he doesn't - and she has afternoons full of housewife-y tasks for him to do. One of which she should have kept off the list was having upstairs neighbor Gloria Grahame come knocking when she needs a baby sitter. Typically Grahame plays the ripely seducible Other Woman, and ODDS AGAINST TOMORROW is not an exception. I'm not complaining. Well, not much, anyway. No actor was better at going from faux charm to sincere menace than Robert Ryan, and Grahame always had a tough fawn quality about her. Their scenes together are very good, but... they feel false, superficial, and melodramatic. The movie really didn't have to keep telling me the many ways Ryan was a creep. At least Belafonte's character, who we spend roughly the same amount of time with, is more three-dimensional. Divorced from his wife yet still a devoted and doting father, his intolerance is more subdued, more reactive, and more understandable.

ODDS AGAINST TOMORROW isn't a bad movie, but it's a little too preachy for my tastes. I enjoyed it more as an example of the treatment of race relations in the late `50s than anything else.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3

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