In celebration of Noirvember, MovieJawn is collaborating with Erik Kreffel of Noir Crazy! Each week we will walk down the dark alley for a different theme within the genre to peek between the blinds and showcase some of Erik’s work that he created specifically for MovieJawn. Read all our Noirvember articles here.

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by Kevin Murphy, Staff Writer

Heists in film noir are doomed before they begin; this is one of the rules of the genre. Human failings undo all the meticulous work spent planning them, and the threads pulled by these weaknesses unravel the entire scheme. Sometimes it’s over a woman like in The Killing, sometimes it’s greed like in The Asphalt Jungle, sometimes it’s an inescapable vice like in Bob le Flambeur. But what happens when the human failing is something less relatable?

Odds Against Tomorrow was released at the tail end of the main noir cycle, and just before the start of the Civil Rights movement in the ‘60s. It sees a disgraced ex-cop, Burke (Ed Begley), hoping for one last heist, an easy job that’ll net up to $200,000. To pull it off, he hires two other criminals looking for a break. Slater (Robert Ryan) fits the profile perfectly and predictably, but Johnny Ingram (Harry Belafonte) comes as a little bit of a surprise until you find out what’s making him tick. Each of these men has their vice: the seemingly-polished Ingram is soon revealed to be deep in debt to a mob boss because he’s hooked on the horse races; Slater is a career hood who’s angry at the world, and especially black people–like Ingram. And Burke is too weak and optimistic to effectively keep the peace, hoping that the promised payoff can overcome deep-seated bigotry and ultimately setting all three of them on a collision course.

As for the heist, it seems too easy to be true. The bank has one old guard, the manager’s got a weak heart, and getting in requires a simple bit of subterfuge. There’s enough that can still go wrong that it seems like any piece of it can unravel the whole thing, but things hit very few snags until it’s time to get away with the loot, and Slater insists that Burke get the car rather than the disguised Ingram as planned, since he just can’t trust a black man. Burke, leaving out the back door carrying bags laden with cash, is suspicious to the cops passing by, and things devolve into a shootout, first between the cops and crooks, and then between the two figures who have been on this path since they first met.

The first time I watched this I was left with the distinct feeling that I was too clean for it, that the room needed to be filled with smoke and dimly-lit in order to match the tone. The two principal characters we spend all this time with are unpleasant, with discontent seeping out of every pore except when they can distract themselves from it. They’re angry, desperate, and self-destructive, and the break they are hoping for will give them a brief reprieve from their immediate situation by providing them the means to dig themselves in deeper. It’s such pure noir to have characters who are not just doomed to fail, but who are so because their problems stem from their own personal demons rather than their circumstances. 

This is so plainly seen even outside of their interactions with each other, which carry an animosity thick enough that it seems ready to drip from the screen. Ingram plays music at a nightclub, and after his boss refuses to loan him the money to get the mobster off his back, he goes on a bender, disrupting another singer until she leaves the stage. He also loses his temper with his ex-wife when she reveals that the reason why he’s only got visitation rights to see their daughter on Sundays is because the racetrack is closed–and he’d take her along if it wasn’t. Slater isn’t just racist but has a chip on his shoulder about his age, among other things, and picks fights with his girlfriend, his neighbor, and a young soldier, the last of these a physical altercation that gets him shamed out of the bar he apparently haunts often. 

Robert Ryan provides a lot of the fuel that gives this movie its tense momentum. He was cast as the bigoted antagonist several times in films (like Crossfire and Bad Day at Black Rock), which ran distinctly counter to the progressive beliefs that he held. This disparity heightens these performances in my eyes because they show a willingness to portray the kind of social ills that he spoke out against, and a determination to help tell a story that he believed to be important. Harry Belafonte was also an outspoken advocate for civil rights, up until his death just last year; it was his company HarBel that produced the film, and helped find a workaround so that the screenplay co-written by the blacklisted Abraham Polonsky could be filmed.

Even though it has so many ingredients of the genre, Odds Against Tomorrow sticks out because it deals so openly with the racism that became focused on so soon after. It leverages those ingredients to heighten its tension and to throw these two men at each other, forcing them to clash. It is at best an uneasy alliance, this planned heist, between a white man who despises black people, and a black man who holds a righteous anger at how he’s been treated by white people–and this is the crucial element that brings takes a typical story and raises it into something more, with a moral lesson beyond the condemnation of crime. 

This isn’t a story that ends in reconciliation or any kind of racial harmony. Movies like The Defiant Ones and In the Heat of the Night seem to be mentioned alongside this in the discussions I’ve seen, but they don’t quite match, because the racists there learn that they’re wrong, taught by black men who are cleaner than they are (Sidney Poitier in both of these examples). There’s much less hope here–Ingram’s no saint nor any kind of teacher, and Slater’s racism shatters any chance of a better tomorrow for any of them. The distrust that Slater has for others, and particularly Ingram, is what undermines the whole thing and is what the first eighty minutes build up to. The heist is tense, and there’s so many things that seem to be on the verge of going wrong at any moment, but it’s one simple act of a racist refusing to trust a black man to do his job that makes it all fall down, and down, spiraling into an explosion that renders both into the same charred pile of remains.

The characters don’t learn anything, but the message, broadcast with a closing shot of a sign that reads “STOP–DEAD END,” is a clear one for us: white supremacy is a rejection of sense and logic–and even sometimes greed–that inevitably results in destruction.