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Odds Against Tomorrow
First Published: 1957
212 pages
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About The Movie
Director Robert Wise´s vastly underrated 1959 film of Odds Against Tomorrow is perhaps the last true film noir, a lacerating tale of deceit among desperate men and a brilliantly concentrated film. Wise is best-known for the two films that won him Oscars, both musicals -- West Side Story and The Sound of Music. But his prodigious skill as a director of a wide range of films harkens back to the fact that, as a film editor, he cut Citizen Kane and Cat People at RKO in the early 1940s. Odds Against Tomorrow was Wise´s first film (he also produced it) after directing Susan Hayward in her Oscar-winning performance in I Want to Live!
In Odds Against Tomorrow, Wise assembled a superb cast that captures the unique racial tensions in the story, which, even in 1959, was daring material for a commercial American film. The film is a final statement of genuine film noir bleakness and nihilism, retaining the look and feel of films of the 1940s; even the finale recalls Cagney´s "Top of the world, Ma!" fate in Raoul Walsh´s White Heat.
Robert Ryan plays the embittered Earl Slater, with Harry Belafonte as Johnny Ingram and Ed Begley as Dave Burke. The cast also includes Shelley Winter and that film noir stalwart Gloria Grahame. In smaller roles, Wayne Rogers (of TV´s MASH) makes his screen debut, and Richard Bright -- later unforgettable as Al Pacino´s silent enforcer in the Godfather films -- plays the hood Coco. One of Wise´s most inspired choices was hiring John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet to create the musical score, which includes performances by jazz piano legend Bill Evans.
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