Odds Against Tomorrow

This post is part of the Back in Black: Another Film Noir Blogathon 

hosted by Hamlette's Soliloquy and The Midnight Drive-In

It’s 1959 and America is on the cusp of what presidential candidate John F. Kennedy calls The New Frontier – a time of great challenge and even greater opportunity. But some realities continue to lurk in the country’s darkest corners. Institutionalized racism abounds. The possibility of a nuclear disaster hangs over everyone’s head.

The underrated post-noir classic Odds Against Tomorrow (1959) is set before this backdrop as executive producer Harry Belaftone assembled a Hollywood A team to make it happen.

With a potential payoff of $50,000 just waiting to be taken, Burke (Ed Begley), a disgraced cop, recruits ex-con (and unrepentant racist) Slater (Robert Ryan) and nightclub singer Ingram (Harry Belafonte) to pull off a bank robbery in a sleepy New York State burg.

A combustible mix 

The bank job feels like a last chance for all three. Burke wants to get away from his past, Slater is unhappily living off his girlfriend (Shelley Winters) and Ingram is a gambler in serious debt to the mob.

Slater is a volatile hothead, one very much aware that the world is passing him by, mocking the Russian satellite Sputnik as an enemy and not the Nazis he fought. And he establishes his bigotry bona fides early on, calling a black child a “little pickaninny,” then ignoring a black elevator operator’s small talk.

When Slater learns that Ingram will be part of the team, he refuses to work with him (“You didn’t say the third man was a nigger!”) but the money is a powerful lure. Having brewed this combustible mix, Burke works to keep Slater and Ingram on point and to not kill each other. During a tense meeting of the trio, he clamps down Slater:

"Don't beat out that Civil War jazz here, Slater! We're all in this together, each man equal. And we're taking care of each other. It's one big play, our one and only chance to grab stakes forever. And I don't want to hear what your grandpappy thought on the old farm down in Oklahoma! You got it?"

Ed Begley tells it like it is

Ingram, meanwhile, acts like a cool breeze but bears the scars of a lifetime of racial insults. He and Slater are more alike than either would care to admit.

Harry Belafonte: A cool breeze

As the heist plan is about to go down, Slater suddenly tosses the keys to the getaway car to Burke rather than Ingram. When the robbery goes south, Burke, now carrying the keys and the stolen money, is gunned down by police, leaving Slater and Ingram – as it’s been for seemingly their entire lives – with nothing.

Time for a kumbaya ending, with the two forgetting their differences, forging a bond and escaping together?

It wouldn’t be noir if they did.

Instead, their private Cold War goes into overdrive, and they begin shooting at each other. With the police in pursuit, they chase each other to a fuel storage depot, where a stray bullet hits a tank and causes a mini-apocalyptic explosion.

In the smoking rubble afterwards, Slater’s and Ingram’s corpses are burned beyond recognition. “Which is which?” asks one cop. “Take your pick,” says another. The film ends with a shot of a sign at the entrance of the depot reading "STOP—DEAD END.”

A not-quite subtle statement on nuclear proliferation and racial tensions.

Director Robert Wise, whose credits run from science fiction (The Day the Earth Stood Still) to noir drama (The Set-Up, also with Robert Ryan) to family musicals (Best Director Oscars for West Side Story and The Sound of Music) lets Odds Against Tomorrow unroll slowly, with attention to character details.

Much of the filming was done outdoors on location in Manhattan and in the upstate Hudson River Valley. The black and white cinematography by Joseph C. Brun captures a New York City suffused with natural light – there were less tall buildings in 1959. The night scenes are bold with neon, and the upstate countryside looks as bleak as the Kansas of In Cold Blood (1966).

Except for Belafonte, Ryan, Begley, Winters and Gloria Grahame, with a small but memorable role as an awkward seductress, all had prior film noir credits, plus five Oscars and nine nominations between them. Over his career, Belafonte was the rare performer who received Emmy, Oscar, Grammy and Tony awards. A young Wayne Rogers and Cicely Tyson also have brief roles.

It doesn't get more noir than this shot

Belafonte’s social activism influenced much of Odds Against Tomorrow, casting Robert Ryan who, despite carving out a career playing cynical and menacing roles, was a pacifist and an active opponent of McCarthyism and nuclear escalation.

He also brought in the blacklisted Abraham Polonsky to write the screenplay, with black novelist John Killens fronting as the credited screenwriter, and had John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet compose the score, making him one of the first black musicians to do so.

When the film debuted in October 1959, the Cold War was still mounting, and one of its headline-grabbing tenets was Mutual Assured Destruction, in which two nuclear-armed countries each possess the capability to destroy the other. It’s a theory given the ultimate test in Odds Against Tomorrow by Slater and Ingram. And as in real life, there’s no winner.