General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Odds Against Tomorrow

Odds Against Tomorrow is a 1959 American film noir directed by Robert Wise, in which a disgraced ex-policeman recruits a racist white ex-convict and a Black nightclub singer and gambler to rob a small-town bank, and the plan collapses under the racial hatred between the two recruits. It stars Harry Belafonte, Robert Ryan, Ed Begley, Shelley Winters, and Gloria Grahame, and is often acknowledged as one of the last films of the classic film noir cycle, which reached its height in the post-World War II era.¹

Key fact	Detail
Release	1959, USA; 96 minutes, 35 mm black-and-white²
Director and producer	Robert Wise; executive producer Harry Belafonte³
Production company	HarBel Productions, Belafonte's independent company⁴
Source and screenplay	From a novel by William P. McGivern; screenplay by Abraham Polonsky (credited as John O. Killens) and Nelson Gidding²
Music	John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet²
Genre position	One of the last films of the classic film noir cycle; a heist film centered on racial tension¹
Filming	New York City and Hudson, New York, with location work and Gold Medal Studios in the Bronx²^•¹

Spoilers

Plot and structure

Dave Burke (Ed Begley), a former cop fired from the force for illegal activities, needs money and organizes a payroll heist from a small-town bank. He recruits Earle Slater (Robert Ryan), an embittered white ex-convict supported by his girlfriend Lorry (Shelley Winters), and Johnny Ingram (Harry Belafonte), a nightclub singer and compulsive gambler whose debts to the loan shark Bacco (Will Kuluva) leave his ex-wife and daughter threatened.¹^•⁵ Slater loathes Black people, and the tension between the two men mounts until the plan implodes.⁵

The film departs from the heist formula in where it places its attention. As the BFI program notes put it, most heist movies examine the mechanics of a spectacular robbery; Odds Against Tomorrow shows little interest in planning and concentrates on what goes wrong beforehand, so much so that the robbery occurs only at the very end of the film.³ The robbery fails for what the notes call "personal" reasons, the racism of one recruit, rather than a breakdown in the plan or detective work.³

The ending. The heist leads to a shootout in a petrochemical plant and an explosion the BFI notes compare to Raoul Walsh's White Heat (1949), but without Jimmy Cagney's gleeful defiance; the notes describe it as total obliteration.³ The film scholar Robert Miklitsch, author of I Died a Million Times: Gangster Noir in Midcentury America, reads this apocalyptic conclusion as a negative critique of both the heist picture and the social-problem film, and applies Jonathan Munby's term "civil rights noir" to it.⁶

Production and the blacklist

Belafonte financed the film through his own company, HarBel Productions, which gave him complete creative control over the conception and let him handpick the cast and crew.¹ He served as executive producer, with Wise as producer.³

The screenplay carried a front credit. Abraham Polonsky, blacklisted as a communist during the McCarthy-era Hollywood investigations, could not take screen credit, so it went to the writer John O. Killens, a co-founder of the Harlem Writers Guild and a friend of Belafonte, alongside Wise's regular collaborator Nelson Gidding.²^•³ In 1996 the Writers Guild of America restored Polonsky's credit, ruling that it should read "Screenplay by Abraham Polonsky and Nelson Gidding, Based on the novel by William P. McGivern."⁴

Wise completed the film between his Oscar-winning I Want to Live! (1958) and West Side Story (1961).¹ The crew included the cinematographer Joseph Brun and the editor Dede Allen, who later edited Bonnie and Clyde (1967).³

Race and genre

The film's treatment of racism set it apart from comparable 1950s studio pictures. In a panel discussion on "race understanding" films of the mid-1950s, the editor John Schultheiss, who prepared Odds Against Tomorrow: The Critical Edition (Cal State, 1999), explained how the film differed from The Defiant Ones (1958): in earlier films a plea for racial tolerance came at the cost of the Black character, who is sacrificed, while Sidney Poitier's escapee turns the other cheek as Tony Curtis's convict abuses him. Belafonte explained that he wanted to depict a Black character who would not stand for any humiliation, and to tell Hollywood he would not kowtow to its idea of how a Black character should behave.⁷ The UMBC exhibition notes call it one of the most progressive "race movies" of its time, with an uncompromising representation of the destructiveness of racial hatred outside the South that was unparalleled in mainstream films of the 1950s.²

Belafonte himself framed the character against stereotype. In a New York Times article he said the character was not there "for a racial thesis" but because the robbers need a man who can enter the bank as a delivery man; Robert Ryan's character hates everybody, and "no brotherly love saves everyone here. Their hatred destroys them both."¹ Ryan, a liberal activist off screen who supported causes such as SANE and the ACLU, was often cast as angry, violent characters, and the BFI notes observe that his bigot is no cardboard cutout: the film understands his desperate circumstances without granting him sympathy.¹^•³ In the plot as summarized by UMBC, Slater's rage consumes him even at the cost of sabotaging the robbery and forfeiting his $50,000 share.²

Style and music

The film's look comes from extensive location shooting, described by the BFI notes as pioneering, using infrared film stock that makes the streets look real yet out of kilter. Its images run from windswept New York opening shots, through industrial wastelands and debris-choked waterways where the robbers wait, to the final conflagration.³

The score was written by the Modern Jazz Quartet's pianist, John Lewis, and the AFI catalog notes that a large orchestra performed it, with Milt Jackson playing vibes, Percy Heath bass, Connie Kay drums, Bill Evans piano, and Jim Hall guitar.²^•⁴ The BFI notes describe the music as vibrant and aggressive, following events and at times leading them, while capable of switching into something more subjective and soul-searching.³ Belafonte also performs vocals on the song "My Baby's Not Around," and in one scene hijacks the song "All Men Are Evil" from Mae Barnes's character onstage.⁴^•⁸

Reception and legacy

The film's reputation has grown since its release. Both Belafonte and Wise claimed it was the most enjoyable film of their careers, and the BFI notes call it a neglected masterpiece that was ahead of its time in its treatment of race and its African-American star.³ The French noir director Jean-Pierre Melville named it his favorite film.³ On Rotten Tomatoes it holds an 88% Tomatometer from 16 reviews, with critics describing it as a pointed critique of race in America that remains tense and relevant.⁹

Its position in film history is as a coda. Commentators treat it as marking the end of the initial noir cycle and the transformation of noir into something harsher that emerged in the 1960s.¹⁰ Miklitsch contrasts its ending with The Asphalt Jungle, which looks backward to the nation's agrarian past, arguing that Odds Against Tomorrow instead evokes the lunar landscape of its final images and, by implication, the promise of the "new frontier" of space travel and civil rights.⁶

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Crime, thriller, and mystery films (individual works) › 1950s films

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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