Gambling on the future in late 50s New York City
It’s beyond me why 1959’s Odds Against Tomorrow isn’t heralded more as a groundbreaking piece of cinema. Not only does the Robert Wise film bear the accomplished filmmaker’s unmistakable stamp, but it a masterful piece of work, existing as a sterling example of post-noir filmmaking which retained many key elements from the genre’s heyday. Seeped in a gritty realism, Odds Against Tomorrow remains a watershed moment in filmmaking through its revolutionary look and feel, at times coming off like a thrilling documentary rather than a traditional narrative. But the ultimate strength of Odds Against Tomorrow remains the way it tackled racial politics of the day in a manner so probing and poetic that it was nominated for a Golden Globe in the now-defunct category of Best Film Promoting International Understanding, losing (understandably) to The Diary of Anne Frank. Yet Odds Against Tomorrow remains waiting to be rediscovered and lauded once again for it’s cutting edge style and telling ideology.
Odds Against Tomorrow focuses on Earle Slater (Robert Ryan) and Johnny Ingram (Harry Belafonte), two men from different sides of the track in late 50s New York. Both sporting a need to get out of their respective debts, the two strangers accept roles in a heist job masterminded by aging criminal Dave Burke (Ed Begley), who promises they will all walk away clean and rich following the execution of what promises to be the perfect bank robbery. However the troubles in both Earle and Johnny’s personal lives, coupled with their own prejudices towards each other, threaten the success of the heist.
Odds Against Tomorrow may have been billed as a thriller when it first came out, but looking at the film today, it’s the trajectory of the two central characters which make the film so compulsively watchable. It’s interesting that the film took place during the shifting of two decades known for such distinct social changes since Odds Against Tomorrow is about the mixing of the past and the future. In Earle we see a character from a bygone era, who on some level knows his day has come and gone, but is still clinging to the only way of life he knows. Earle suspects that life has his fate already sealed and is simply waiting for the final card to be played. Johnny meanwhile is firmly in his prime; someone who has a limited number of chances thanks to his race and his past, but whose chance at prosperity represents something far greater for his position as a black man in the city. When Odds Against Tomorrow needs to switch gears from character study into thriller mode, the stakes are raised even higher thanks to the audience’s personal investment in the characters. The extended sequence featuring the actual caper itself are as thrilling as can be, filled with a tension and suspense that would be palpable on its own, but made even moreso by the trio of men attempting to pull it off.
The social setting of New York in the late 50s couldn’t have been a more perfect setting for a story as Odds Against Tomorrow, showing how race relations were still just a hot button issue there, even if it wasn’t the deep south. It’s not hard to see how daring and bold of a film it was to make, especially in a pre-civil rights America where watching a black man and white man on an equal playing field couldn’t have sat well with certain white audiences. At the same time, black audiences couldn’t have been thrilled with seeing an iconic representative of Belafonte’s stature playing a thief on the big screen. But Odds Against Tomorrow was never a film meant to play it safe by any means whatsoever. The film is populated with homosexual side characters and couples living in sin, ensuring the censors were standing right at attention. The introduction to the “n-word” is one of the film’s starkest moments and takes away from the fact that this is a Hollywood production. However, perhaps the biggest risk the film takes is in the journey of Johnny as he struggles to hold onto his African-ness and asserts himself in the outside world, while trying not to get swallowed up by it.
The performances of Odds Against Tomorrow are also something of a marvel to behold. It’s as if each actor themselves felt the shifting in times as much as their characters. This is especially true in Ryan’s scenes with a standout Shelley Winters who plays his character’s blousy, but devoted, girlfriend and Begley’s knockout turn as a character driven so much by greed and prosperity, he has no time for issues of race. The fact that Belafonte produced the film as well as starred in it, says a lot about the entertainer’s level of social consciousness. Apart from turning in his finest screen performance, there’s something incredibly powerful, not to mention significant, about his taking hold of a very real affliction in the country and exploring it on his own terms.
Odds Against Tomorrow is so incredibly well-written in terms of both story and plot while remaining rich in the texture which symbolized New York in the late 50s through two distinct, yet powerful vantage points. Both of the protagonists are so diverting in their own right, that no one minds that the two of them don’t share screen time until an hour into the film. This allows both men to be explored in the context of the changing times around them and their transformative social experiences that are resulting from it. In the end, the film reduces the two men down to almost relic-like figures; products of two vastly different pasts which neither can escape, and who are both terrified of the future awaiting them.
Odds Against Tomorrow is available now on Blu-Ray and DVD from Olive Films.