Odds Against Tomorrow (HarBel Productions, United Artists, 1959)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Two nights ago (Tuesday, November 21) I watched two films on Turner Classic Movies, both part of a “Star of the Month” tribute to actress Gloria Grahame, a troubled woman with a pretty wild life off-screen. In 1950, while she was married to director Nicholas Ray, he caught her having sex with his 13-year-old son by a previous marriage – and years later Grahame and the son, Tony Ray, actually got married themselves. The films were Odds Against Tomorrow and Not As a Stranger, and I was especially interested in Odds Against Tomorrow because it was the first of two films produced by HarBel Productions, Harry Belafonte’s production company, and I had just seen and been quite impressed by HarBel’s second film, The World, the Flesh and the Devil. Odds Against Tomorrow was an odd quasi-noir directed by Robert Wise and written by Abraham Polonsky (who’d been blacklisted and had to work through Black writer John Oliver Killens, a friend of Belafonte’s, as a “front”) and Nelson Giddins based on a novel of the same name by William P. McGivern. (McGivern was best known for writing the source novel for Fritz Lang’s 1953 film noir The Big Heat and for an early-1970’s novel called Night of the Juggler, about the tensions within a big-city police department as they go after a serial killer.) The film’s music score was by John Lewis, jazz pianist, composer and leader of the Modern Jazz Quartet, and jazz critic Martin Williams – reviewing a concert in which the MJQ played two selections from the Odds Against Tomorrow music – called the film “a very skillful, very entertaining, essentially trashy thriller, with an either naïve or corrupt moral which I can only interpret to say that race prejudice prevents bank robberies.”

Odds Against Tomorrow is basically a knock-off of The Asphalt Jungle in which a corrupt ex-cop, David Burke (Ed Begley, Sr.), plans a big bank robbery in a small New York upstate town which has a major oil refinery. The workers are still being paid in cash and the bank is flush with cash on Thursday afternoon, so Burke’s plan is to hit the bank after 6 p.m. (it stays open that late on Thursdays) and get in through a side door guarded by a watchman who gets a sandwich order for dinner every night at 6. The two men Burke recruits to commit the robbery with him are ex-con Earl Slater (Robert Ryan), a thoroughgoing racist – we learn that about him almost immediately when a Black kid gets in his way as he’s on his way to see Burke and he says, “Get away, you little pickaninny” – and Johnny Ingram (Harry Belafonte), a Black nightclub singer and gambling addict who’s into Mob enforcer Bacco (Will Kaluva) for $7,500 in bets he lost on horse races. Odds Against Tomorrow is basically what The Asphalt Jungle would have been if Sterling Hayden’s character had been a racist and one of the other crooks had been Black; at different times both Belafonte’s and Ryan’s character drop the “N-word” and at the end of the movie Johnny and Earl end up in a shoot-out, not with the cops (though that happens too) but with each other. Frankly, the racial angle of this film seems forced and not too convincing; Stanley Kubrick and Jim Thompson said more against racism in one scene in The Killing (another “caper” film with Sterling Hayden in the lead), in which the elaborately worked-out timetable for the robbery of a horse-race track is thrown off by a Black parking attendant who thanks one of the crooks for not being racist – and then the crook has to pretend to be a racist to get the Black guy to get lost, than the makers of Odds Against Tomorrow manage to say in 95 minutes of running time.

Odds Against Tomorrow is a mediocre film with some great moments, and Ryan’s performance in particular is quite strong: he had been a boxer before he got into acting, and his sheer physicality and hair-trigger temper (his previous crimes include assault and manslaughter: he’s never before participated in a crime that actually stood to make him some money!) are powerfully portrayed. In case you’re wondering where Gloria Grahame fits into all this, she’s Helen, a neighbor of Slater’s girlfriend Lorry (Shelley Winters, who was starting to put on the pounds on her way from her former sexpot roles at Universal-International to what she looked like in The Poseidon Adventure) and she more or less non-seriously flirts with Slater, though why two women would be so interested in this jerk is something we keep wondering about and never quite believe. Odds Against Tomorrow draws to a didactic and rather sorry close when the crooks are fleeing past the oil refinery (ya remember the oil refinery? It’s the reason the bank they targeted was so flush with cash in the first place!), only Johnny and Earl decide to have it out with each other with long guns. In the process they set the refinery ablaze – apparently McGivern, Polonsky and/or Giddens had seen the spectacular ending of the 1949 gangster film White Heat, which ends with gangster Cody Jarrett (James Cagney) on top of a blazing oil tank yelling “Top of the world, Ma!” – and when the cops come on the scene and find the refinery totally destroyed and Johnny’s and Earl’s bodies incinerated, they try to decide which body was which. One of the cops says, in an anti-racist statement that manages to be both powerful and silly, “Take your pick.”

Odds Against Tomorrow also features two musical numbers performed by Belafonte in his job as a nightclub singer, in which he also plays vibraphone (though his playing was almost certainly dubbed by the MJQ’s ace vibes player, Milt Jackson); “My Baby’s Not Around,” his solo feature; and “All Men Are Evil,” which is supposed to feature Black woman singer Mae Barnes but which Belafonte ruins by adding scat vocals and clanging away at the vibes until Barnes walks off the stage in disgust. He’s supposed to be doing that because he’s just come back from a disastrous pre-crime meeting with Burke and Slater. Odds Against Tomorrow is the sort of movie you want to like better than you do; as Herbert Hoover said about Prohibition, it was “an experiment noble in purpose,” and yet you can’t help thinking of other, better movies that involved the same people: Robert Wise’s I Want to Live! (a much greater movie about lowlife criminals that featured a major jazz score), Harry Belafonte’s The World, the Flesh and the Devil, Robert Ryan’s The Set-Up and Gloria Grahame’s The Big Heat.