Odds Against Tomorrow
Dedicated to Carmina, a special woman.
After his great success with I Want to Live! — which earned Susan Hayward the Oscar for Best Actress in 1958 — Robert Wise produced and directed in 1959 Odds Against Tomorrow, an adaptation of a crime novel by William P. McGivern. Racism is the central theme of this thriller, which actor Harry Belafonte himself proposed to Wise; Belafonte had purchased the rights and already had a rough screenplay, which was later reworked. The ending of the original script, like that of the novel, preached reconciliation between the two protagonists — Black Harry Belafonte and white Robert Ryan — but Wise felt the story would resemble too closely The Defiant Ones, which Stanley Kramer had made the year before with Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier. What he decided to change was the denouement: in this crime story built around the well-worn theme of a bank robbery, Robert Wise manages to give it a highly original tone, both in its content and in its staging choices — always in service of the narrative, efficient but without grand showboating.
The film painstakingly traces the origins and professional lives of its characters, along with the personal and sentimental frustrations that lead them to accept an offer to pull off a heist in a small town near New York. Both Robert Ryan, as a violent, racist ex-soldier — a white man out of work — and Harry Belafonte, as a young seducer and gambler with a debt to the mob, are presented by Wise as endearing losers.
More than outright gangsters, they are two men pushed toward crime almost in spite of themselves. The magnificent black-and-white photography with which Wise portrays not only racial prejudice but attitudes as elemental as violence, old age, loneliness, and love. Wise affirms himself once again as a great filmmaker, one uniquely capable of filming the dead stretches of time — as in that sequence of the three men waiting just before the robbery, where he manages to transmit to the viewer all the unease his characters feel.
It is worth recalling that this was the favourite film of French director Jean-Pierre Melville, master of French film noir and forerunner of the Nouvelle Vague, who boasted of having seen it 120 times and paid it clear homage in Le Deuxième Souffle in 1966, with a scene very like the one that precedes the heist.
Enjoy the screening.