Odds Against Tomorrow

Plot synopsis:
David Burke (Ed Begley) is a former policeman who was ruined when he refused to cooperate with state crime investigators. He has asked hard-bitten, racist, ex-con Earl Slater (Robert Ryan) to help him rob an upstate bank, promising him $50,000 if the robbery is successful. Burke also recruits Johnny Ingram (Belafonte), a nightclub entertainer who doesn’t want the job but who is addicted to gambling and is in debt.
Slater, who is supported by his girlfriend, Lorry (Shelley Winters), finds out Ingram is black and refuses the job. Later, he realizes that he needs the money, and joins Ingram and Burke in the enterprise.
Tensions between Ingram and Slater increase as they near completion of the crime. Burke is seen by a police officer leaving the scene of the raid, and is mortally wounded in the ensuing shootout with local police, so he commits suicide by shooting himself. Slater is insensitive and cavalier about the death of Burke which incenses Ingram. Slater and Ingram begin to fight each other as they try to evade capture by the police. Ingram and Slater escape and run into a nearby fuel storage depot. They chase after each other on the top of the fuel tanks. They exchange gunfire and ignite the fuel tanks and cause a large explosion. Afterwards, their corpses are indistinguishable from one another. The last scene focuses on a sign at the entrance of the fuel storage depot saying, "Stop, Dead End".

Tags: neo noir

Review:
Other things of interest: it's written by black-listed Abraham Polonsky under a pseudonym (check out his great "Force of Evil"); Cicely Tyson appears in a bit part; Richard Bright portrays a pretty overt homosexual for the time; early use of a zoom lens and infrared photography; edited by Dede Allen; some interiors shot at the old Gold Medal Studios in the Bronx..
Nowadays Robert Wise has been restored to critical favor.It was about time.An eclectic talent,he tackled sci-fi (the day the earth stood still),musicals (west side story) ,social topics (I want to live),film noir (this one),horror("haunting" is better than any horror film I can think of).He invented the movie "in real time":"the set-up" occurred more than ten years before "Cleo de 5 à 7"."Odds against tomorrow" is one of these films that seems better today than before.Influenced by John Huston (the asphalt jungle),it did influence French director Jean-Pierre Melville(le samouraï,le cercle rouge).Wise's movie represents the twilight of film noir,the dead end (check the last picture),the terminus of the genre.It's the story of a hold-up,but action aficionados will not be satisfied.Wise wants to communicate a whole context,he wants to detail his characters to a fault.How many directors would dare that today?Robert Ryan's part is very complex.First he seems friendly,but further acquaintance shows a lack of self-confidence (he's getting old,he's a washout,he wants to go for broke) .And he is a racist.Rarely,this obnoxious feeling has been depicted with such wit.Why is he so?No answer,no explanation,he's racist,period.The ending which I will not reveal of course demonstrates (watch out for the two last lines of dialogue,they are simply fantastic!),the absurdity of this cancer of our societies.Harry Belafonte is on a par with Ryan:he's a gambler down on his luck,and he,too,is enduring personal turmoil:his wife wants to break off communication with him,not only because he lives in a dangerous world,but,because he sticks with his black brothers(the songs in the cabaret are telling;and the way Belafonte uses the xylophone as drums is too)This wife ,like Sarah-Jane in "imitation of life" (released the same year),is dreaming of a "white" life.Their couple is doomed whatever they may do.Ed Begley,always smiling,beaming ,is the threesome's troubleshooter.In his own way,he seems wise (no joke intended),the good guy that wants to retire after the hold-up.Then,just before the action scenes,suddenly,the earth stands still(again,no joke intended)The atmosphere becomes unusual,poetic,almost pastoral:Belafonte watches the river flow and finds a broken doll in the sludge:he certainly thinks of this life he could have lived with his little girl.Besides,children shots frame the movie as a symbol of a long gone innocence;at the beginning,Ryan meets some on them on his way to Begley's flat;and just before the bank scene,some of them are playing cops and robbers with toy revolvers.While Belafonte is wandering along the river,Begley looks at a statue (a Christ?)and reads a strange and sadly unprophetic inscription carved into the stone.Ryan watches a rabbit,he aims at it,we hear a shot:it's only a tin can.THe hold-up does not interest Wise.Like the true auteurs,it reduces it to another event,not more important than Ryan's fight with the soldier.
And all these pastoral vignettes echo to the urban,almost abstract set where the drama is resolved.There's something apocalyptic here,recalling Walsh's "White heat",the main difference being that James Cagney's character was psychotic and Ryan's and Belafonte's are "ordinary".This peak of the film noir ,not necessary appealing because drifting too far from the shores of gangsters' paraphernalia,should not be missed.Like most of Wise's movies ,it will still improve with time..
There is no doubt that Ryan was a far more talented actor than Hayden, he gives his character real depth, you almost feel sorry for him although that character is really disgusting."Odds against tomorrow" precedes "The French Connection" with its truly breathtaking documentary style photography, the use of music and sound effects to heighten the tension (the soundtrack is just terrific, Harry Belafontes talents were put to good use in a very sensible way) and in the way the characters are shown just waiting out in the cold.It is really a film about men in winter, where there is no hope left.
Robert Wise's Odds Against Tomorrow grinds along to an inevitable conclusion, but offers a great performance by Ed Begley as Dave Burke, an ageing ex con looking to set up one last job.
Robert Ryan plays racist small-timer Earle Slater, who must team up with Johnny Ingram (Harry Belafonte) a jazz singer/vibraphonist who owes gambling debts to mobster Bacco played by Will Kuluva.
Oscar-winning director Robert Wise ("West Side Story", "The Sound of Music") directs Harry Belafonte, Robert Ryan, Shelley Winters and Ed Begley to masterful performances in this grounbreaking, revelatory film.
This is an incredibly clear-eyed, no holds barred look at the kind of segregation that was alive at the time, with superb performances by all, including Gloria Grahame as Ryan and Winters' love-starved neighbor, Helen, and Kim Hamilton as Belafonte's ex-wife, Ruth.
Indeed, director Robert Wise had made crime movies before, and had worked with Robert Ryan before, too, on the excellent The Set-Up. This one was filmed mostly on location in New York, and nicely reflects life at the lower but not quite lowest depths of that city.
Harry Belafonte produced and starred in "Odds Against Tomorrow," a 1959 film also starring Robert Ryan, Ed Begley, Gloria Grahame, and Shelley Winters and directed by Robert Wise.
For all of them it represents a last chance.A gritty, black and white film that takes place on lonely streets, barren roads, cheap apartments, and cheap night clubs, what makes it interesting is that at the end, there is very little dialogue and a big "Top of the world, ma," finish that is both splashy and ironic.Other than that, it's routine stuff.
In New York, the former cop Dave Burke (Ed Begley) summons the veteran Earle Slater (Robert Ryan) and the jazz musician Johnny Ingram (Harry Belafonte) to heist a bank in a small town.
"Odds Against Tomorrow" is still a great film, thoroughly ensconced in the tradition but something even a little bit more.From the opening highly stylized credits to the lonely figure of Robert Ryan walking the empty streets of New York we know that we are in store for something unsettling, something special.Each character in the film is tightly drawn with at least some level of complexity and interest.
It stars Harry Belafonte, Robert Ryan, Ed Begley, Shelley Winters and Gloria Grahame.
The racial tension is palpable, Earle Slater (Ryan) is a venomous racist, which obviously doesn't go down too well with Johnny Ingram (Belafonte), their scenes together crackle with electric tinged hatred, which in turn gives the whole pic its ism factors.
I love the hallucinatory opening credits to this noir/ heist flick, seeing it in a cinema on a big screen.Three men (one of them with several thousand dollars in gambling debt) conspire to steal $200.000 from a small town bank in upstate NY.Robert Ryan is alternately racist and cowardly, watch how quickly he runs away when he gets his feelings hurt.
Harry Belafonte as an in-debt horse player, Robert Ryan as a southerner with a temper living off a suitably blowzy Shelly Winters, Ed Begley as a bitter ex-cop--all come together in a tightly planned bank hold-up in a small NY town upstate.
One of the last of the 1950's noir films to be made, "Odds Against Tomorrow" tells the story of ex-cop Dave Burke (Ed Begley) who recruits two other men for the purpose of robbing a bank in upstate New York.
This relationship really results in some amazing chemistry.Other very notable performances come from Shelley Winters as the long-suffering girl who keeps waiting for Ryan to make good and Ed Begley as the mastermind behind the bank job.Combining all this exceptional acting and writing with top-notch direction from Robert Wise, and you've got a real winner!!
I do think that the aura of doom and gloom that Wise envelops his work with here is definitely something Polonsky would have done.If professionals like Dr. Reifenschneider and Cody Jarrett could fail, what chance did Ed Begley have with his help?Odds Against Tomorrow is one crackerjack noir film recommended highly for fans of the genre..
When older Robert Ryan takes out Wayne Roger's younger soldier demonstrating his karate moves with one punch he's one of many older or smaller movie protagonists who take out a potential threat with "the snap of a finger" like Bogie as Sam Spade taking the pair of .45s away from Elisha Cook Jr. in the Maltese Falcon or Indiana Jones shooting the large turbaned Arab with the swinging scimitar in Raiders of the Lost Ark. And if you have seen the characters of Ingram and Slater as being consumed by hatred, be that hatred based on racism or something else, than the final irony is so deservedly perfect as to be almost laughably funny.
Odds Against Tomorrow gives us a triple dose of the latter but breaks the familiar mold by offering up sympathetic women like Shelley Winters, as the caring girlfriend who'll do anything legal to keep her man (Robert Ryan) and Kim Hamilton, as Harry Belafonte's exasperated ex-wife.
The classic femme fatale role is given a nod by Gloria Grahame, who plays the saucy little tart who lives next door to Ryan and only drops by when she knows his girlfriend is out.What distinguishes this crime/caper film is the way the script takes its time to develop the three principals (Ed Begley, the disgraced ex-cop who never got his due; Robert Ryan, the aging failure and battler who has to prove himself and Harry Belafonte, the gambling addict whose debts have just come due with a vengeance) and shows how they are driven by greed and desperation to take on a bank heist - one they think will be a pushover - and how fate intervenes when they do.
Ryan, the rabid racist, makes a dangerous cohort when forced to work with a black man, as the ending shows in incendiary fashion.Also to watch for are Wayne Rogers' film debut as the brazen young soldier who likes to show off his fighting prowess in bars and the scenes where the three principals encounter very young kids.
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.
at times I go to these emotional places, and this moment I really wanted to share with you.Odds Against Tomorrow is one of those special films that really connects the viewer to a city which once had such sincerity, authenticity and character that you bonded with it like it was a living breathing being.
Only weak casting is Shelley Winters, who is given very little to do, and doesn't come off convincingly.My favorite scenes are, not in order of how they occur in the film: 1) Ryan has picked up the getaway car and decides to see how fast it can go, 2) Belafonte banging on the vibes after he's been slapped around by a mob boss, 3) Ryan shooting at a rabbit while killing time before the robbery, 4) Begley talking to the gangsters at a park, where he's referred to as the "clam himself", and 5) Ryan beating up Wayne Rogers in a bar.The ending is abrupt, a little frutrating, and a bit of a copout.
"You didn't say nothing 'bout the third man being a n*gger." That cold sun glares not only on the wintry New York streets, but also in the dialogues of Robert Wise's Odds Against Tomorrow, a noir implying to be about a bank heist.
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.
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).
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.
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.
brilliant shooting by wise, great low-key winters, truly searing robert ryan who carries the movie, intense offbeat begley, unfortunately bogged down by belafonte- pop singer who is a stick on screen; of course the main point is race relations, and that's the part you wind up feeling as a preachy intrusion that almost cripples a stunning film noir crime drama heist rivaling some of the best like rififi; didn't need the help but john lewis score also tops , though also didn't need the minor showcase of belafonte doing his bit in a nightclub, but his company put up the money so he got some cameos; if you have the time to read up, wise shot standard aspect ratio, used infra-red film in some scenes; interesting that variety had it right, and tactfully, after the opening: " "On one level, Odds against Tomorrow is a taut crime melodrama.
Harry Belafonte has produced just a few movies, but he sure proves he knows how to make good ones here.Great storytelling of a crime from its inception to execution,with fine performances from Harry and a top notch cast.On location filming gives it just the right touch of realism.
Their intense distrust of each other together with the racial intolerance which sours the relationship of two of the men creates an uneasy atmosphere which is complemented perfectly by Joseph Brun's wonderful photography and John Lewis' excellent score.Disgraced ex-cop Dave Burke (Ed Begley) plans to rob a small bank in upstate New York and recruits bigoted ex-convict Earle Slater (Robert Ryan) and compulsive gambler Johnny Ingram (Harry Belafonte) to assist him.
However the commentary from the ambulance guy regarding the inability to distinguish between a black and white man after being immolated was a clever way to state that underneath, we're all just human beings trying to make our own way in the world.What distracted me from the flow of the story was when Ed Begley's character tried to diffuse the tension between Slater (Robert Ryan) and Johnny (Harry Belafonte) by stating that they both served in the same war.
I suppose "Odds against Tomorrow" can be classified as film noir or as a caper movie, but, whatever it is, for me the excitement of this film has to do with the characterizations, Abraham Polonsky's fine screenplay, Joseph Brun's cinematography and location shooting, and the fine jazz score by John Lewis.
Here too, as with Robert Ryan's Earle Slater, what counts is character exploration, with action put off until the very end.There are fine performances by Shelly Winters and Ed Begley.
He plays Johnny Ingram, a gambler who's been on the outs for months so he reluctantly agrees to deal with Dave Burke (Ed Begley Sr.) to pull a bank robbery along with Earle Slater (Robert Ryan) who is openly bigoted when confronting Ingram.
Wanting to get back into the big bucks of bank robberies Burke had mapped out this bank in upstate New York to knock off but needs a colored, or African/American in todays lingo, hood to pull the whole thing off.Getting the heavily in debt, due to his playing the ponies, nightclub entertainer Johnny Ingram, Harry Belafonte, to be the key player in the robbery in that a black delivery man is the only person who's allowed to enter the bank at closing time doesn't go too well with the other hood Burke hired Earl Slater, Robert Ryan.
Of all these movies, "Odds Against Tomorrow" was the most ham-handed, presenting a case against racism so simplistic that it is only suitable for Sunday School, provided the children in that Sunday School class have not yet reached the sixth grade.There are two main characters: Johnny Ingram, who is black, and Earle Slater, who is white.
There were some good things in the movie too - all the Melton material was great - but the writers, the director (Robert Wise) and the players (Ryan, Begley, Winters and Belafonte) drove the audience away beforehand.
Such is the case in "Odds Against Tomorrow." Robert Ryan, Harry Belafonte, and Ed Begley are the minds in question.