Odds Against Tomorrow

 HarBel is the name of the production company founded by Harry Belafonte around 1959 to make the movie Odds Against Tomorrow, a pungent little heist picture.  Belafonte had become rich, flashing his million watt grin and singing calypso songs.  By 1959, after acting in Carmen Jones, Belafonte was hoping to broaden his range by becoming a movie star.  He hired Abraham Polonsky, the blacklisted director of 1948's Force of Evil, to write (under a pseudonym) Odd Against Tomorrow, based on a recent novel.  Robert Wise was engaged to direct the movie.  Wise is known today as a avuncular Hollywood liberal who edited Welles' Citizen Kane and directed The Sound of Music and West Side Story.  But as a young man, he made some notable noirs including a well-received picture starring the monstrous Lawrence Tierney in Born to Kill and directed Robert Mitchum in Blood on the Moon as well as the iconic boxing picture The Set-Up.  Accordingly, he had all the credentials to make a serviceable crime picture and, in fact, Odds Against Tomorrow is successful and compelling in those terms.  A little less successful is the implied plea against racism embodied in the clash between a White bigot played by Robert Ryan with a snarl on his face and Harry Belafonte, performing against type, as a hair trigger Black man with his own form of bigotry.  This part of the picture seems a bit contrived, but, generally, works well enough so as not to be offensive.  The movie is bleak and grim, shot on locations that have the debauched appearance of rural and small town desuetude.  No one's tending the store in these ruinous places and the picture looks like a cross between Elia Kazan (On the Waterfront) and the ultra-tough film noir directed by Don Siegel and Anthony Mann.  Another obvious influence is John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle made nine years earlier.  

The premise of the film is that an ex-cop who has served time for contempt (apparently a refusal to rat out his equally corrupt colleagues) is recruiting a team for a heist at a bank in a backwater named Melton a hundred miles north of Manhattan in New York State.  The cop lives in a hotel in Harlem and, after some misadventures, he enlists Harry Belafonte playing the role of a Calypso singer with a jazz combo and Robert Ryan, a bitter veteran of World War II and an avowed racist.  In the opening scene, Ryan's character (Earle Slater) picks up little Black girl playing on the sidewalk at the cop's place and calls her a little "pickaninny" -- his racial discourse goes down from there.  Belafonte's character, Johnny Ingram, despises Earle and, of course, the feeling is mutual.  However, Ingram has to be Black because the scheme for the robbery involves busting into a Bank when a colored counter-man delivers, as he does every Thursday night, a meal to the workers doing overtime in the Bank -- they are counting money for deposit from corporate employers who are going to make payroll in cash on Friday.  The scheme developed by the cop (played by the enthusiastic and depraved Ed Begley) is implicitly racist.  It seems to rely on the notion that the White Bank officers won't be able to distinguish the lightly disguised Johnny Ingram from the actual Black counterman who delivers the meal each Thursday.  The African-American cafe worker is essentially an invisible man, known only by his color, and, therefore, thought to be fungible with Belafonte's character.  

Of course, the scheme goes awry, primarily because of the racial hatred between Earle and Johnny.  The two men, both armed, end up hunting one another through tank farm full of volatile fluids with predictable dire results.  The movie is mildly didactic.  A couple of nonchalant coppers looking at the charred remains of the two protagonists asks:  "Which is which?"  The other cop shrugs his shoulders:  "Who knows?"  The White man and his Black counterpart are indistinguishable in death.  The theme that racial hatred leads to mutually assured destruction in a towering fireball sparks some ill-advised (to my mind) allusions to the nuclear bomb and the arm's race.  There is a subtext of nuclear holocaust in the film that seems somewhat non sequitur -- a sop apparently to those who want to find a meaning in the picture but might reject the implication that racial animus is unwarranted; after all, the movie was made in 1959, before the March on Selma.  

The picture is full of interesting characters.  Earle is sleeping with a sad, somewhat bedraggled prostitute or call girl, played by the hapless Shelley Winters.  This poor actress was always playing women who were pretty but not that desirable -- she gets dumped in favor of Elizabeth Taylor in An American Tragedy; she gets rejected in favor of Sue Lyons, playing her own daughter in Stanley Kubrick's Lolita.  In this picture, Winters' character is desperately clinging to Earle who is brusque, brutish, and not that great of a catch.  Furthermore, in a puzzling little interlude in the middle of the film, Earle seduces (or gets seduced by) his downstairs neighbor, another desperate woman who speaks as if she's full of lithium, seems to be mentally ill, and who comes to see him in a house dress that  can be easily pulled open to display her lacy black brassiere -- if I'm not mistaken, this part is played by Gloria Graham who was, at the time, Nick Ray's wife and, apparently, having sex with his teenage son.  Johnny Ingram has a sexy barroom girlfriend and an ex-wife.  The ex-wife is an upright righteous woman who still loves the disreputable Johnny and seems willing to tumble for him if the opportunity is right.  When he comes to drop off his son whom he has taken to the park and zoo, she's hosting a meeting of the local PTA in her small apartment, consorting, Johnny later says, with the "ofays", a word I haven't heard for years.  Johnny,  who is no saint, accuses her of not being Black enough.  Johnny is in hock to a mean loan shark named Bacco; it's interesting that Bacco has a henchman who is obviously gay although in an insinuating sinister manner.  There's a stationwagon that's equipped with a super-duper high-powered engine.  This is something of a cheat because the stationwagon never is used as a get-away car.  

This is a good picture, notable mostly for the documentary style photography of New York City and the down-at-the-heels environs of Melton, New York.  Some of the camera work looks like Walker Evans.