“Odds Against Tomorrow” (1958)

Released at the tail end of the classic film noir years “Odds Against Tomorrow” is a largely unknown and uncelebrated gem.  Its relatively obscure reputation is even more surprising when you consider that it was made by two time Oscar winner Robert Wise.

Perhaps audiences in 1958 had a problem with its racial themes.  It plays like a strange hybrid of conventional film noir and the type of earnest, well meaning parables about racism made around the same time by Stanley Kramer.  Everyone in it is cast to type, from Robert Ryan’s psychopathic war veteran, to Shelly Winter’s needy wife to Gloria Graham’s wonderfully realised nymphomaniac.  Harry Belafonte more than holds his own in this company as a musician in deep trouble with the mob, his edgy demeanour and womanising ways far removed from the idealised African Americans played in the era by contemporary Sidney Poitier.

The plot has to do with a perfectly planned heist that, of course, goes horribly wrong.  If that much is true to the genre the location shooting, great jazz sequences and score, razor sharp editing and cynical ending mark it as something special.  A blackly comedic tone offsets any Kramer style melodrama or didacticism as flawed characters implode under the weight of their own prejudice.