Odds Against Tomorrow

Moody noir style and nasty racial tension are combustible stuff in this taut (and unjustly overlooked) thriller, one of the last films of the classic noir cycle (it appeared more than a year after Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil), and the first to feature a black protagonist. Harry Belafonte is Johnny Ingram, a nightclub singer with a gambling problem. Dangerously in debt, he reluctantly agrees to joins disgraced ex-cop Burke (Ed Begley) in a bank heist. Burke’s other recruit is racist ex-con Slater (Robert Ryan), whose hatred of Johnny threatens to derail the scheme. Gloria Grahame (The Big Heat, Human Desire — both screening in this series) plays Slater’s mistress; she’s “the ultimate black widow femme fatale . . . [begging] Robert Ryan to excite her before they make love by relating how it feels to kill someone” (Robert Porfirio, Film Noir). The explosive finale recalls the climax of White Heat. The marvellous score is by John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet. Directed by versatile Robert Wise (West Side Story, The Sound of Music) and scripted (under another’s name) by blacklisted screenwriter Abraham Polonsky, Odds Against Tomorrow is “a sharp, hard, suspenseful drama” (New York Times). B&W, 35mm. 96 mins.