Friday, February 26, 2021 at 3:07:00 P.M. EST
TCM’s Film Noir of the Week is a recycling of Robert Wise’s Odds Against Tomorrow (1959), Saturday Night-Sunday Morning at Midnight ET and 10 A.M. ET. Eddie Muller featured this one in 2018, and is showing it again for black history month.
By David in TN
Friday, October 5, 2018, 11:10 a.m.
Odds Against Tomorrow stars Harry Belafonte and Robert Ryan as members of a racially mixed gang planning a bank robbery in upstate New York.
Ed Begley is an ex-cop kicked off the force as a crook who recruits Belafonte and Ryan's characters.
Belafonte plays a poor black man who has debts he can’t pay. Ryan, a big lefty in real life, plays his favorite type of role--a White bigot. See also Crossfire (1947).
N.S.: Odds Against Tomorrow was yet another triumph in Robert Wise’s relentless march through the genres. Wise remains one of the directors most underrated by critics.
5 comments:
Anonymous said...
Directors who work in a variety of genres-and whose films are consistently popular-tend to be ignored by the critics (not that anyone should care!). Richard Fleischer and Mike Curtiz are similar to Wise in that regard- absurdly under-appreciated!
Sunday, October 7, 2018 at 1:15:00 A.M. EDT
David in TN
Would a bank heist crew have a black guy as the getaway driver?
The only real-life black-and-white criminal gang I can think of is the Onion Field killers, Gregory Hood (white) and Jimmie Lee Smith (black). They were relative small-timers.
Briefly, as it is a very long story, Hood and Smith perpetrated a series of armed robberies in 1963 Southern California. They were pulled over by two plain clothes cops, whom they abducted and took to the Onion Field. One was shot dead, the other escaped.
After years of legal maneuvering and trials, Hood and Smith were sentenced to “life” in prison. Guess which one was paroled in 1982? Smith.
Hood died in prison in 2012. Smith was in and out of jail the rest of his life as a habitual drug offender, dying in a treatment facility in 2007.
The story was told in Joseph Wambaugh’s 1973 book and the 1979 film.
Monday, October 8, 2018 at 11:08:00 A.M. EDT
Anonymous said...
The dirt poor negro and the bad racist whitey. Of course. That is how it is all the time, isn't it?
Tuesday, October 9, 2018 at 4:19:00 A.M. EDT
2 comments:
jerry pdx
How many times in TV/Movies do we see "diversity gangs" and the white guy is almost always portrayed as the "mastermind", or the "more" evil one whereas the black guy is often in some kind of subservient role, not subservient in the sense he is still some kind of slave, but in a way that makes him seem "less evil" and being lured into doing something bad by the more evil whitey. Seen that so many times....
TCM's Film Noir of the Week Saturday Night-Sunday Morning at Midnight ET and 10 am ET is Stanley Kubrick's Killer's Kiss (1955), with Frank Silvera, Jamie Smith, and Irene Kane.
Film Noir Guide: "Produced, directed, edited, photographed, and written by the legendary Stanley Kubrick, Killer's Kiss doesn't have much of a plot. A down-and-out boxer (Smith) wants to marry a taxi dancer (Kane) after knowing her for only two days, but a lecherous small-time hood (Silvera) doesn't appreciate being horned in on and sends some goons to work the boxer over. His bungling henchmen, however, mistake an innocent bystander for Smith and wind up killing the unfortunate man. Trying another ploy, they grab Kane and wait for Smith to show up looking for her. The acting is so-so, but the photography is excellent (especially during the boxing match, which is shot from every imaginable angle), and the enjoyable jazz score fools you into believing something's really happening."
Contra Film Noir Guide, I think Killer's Kiss is pretty good. It was Kubrick's second feature, short at 67 minutes. Frank Silvera was a fairly busy character actor. Smith was an unknown, almost his only credit. My understanding is Kane was a writer under a different name. We'll see if Eddie Muller fills us in.
Kubrick filmed it on New York's streets, sometimes shooting from a car without people knowing they are on camera. Some shots were at Penn Station. The scenes of Smith and Kane's apartment were shot in the Bronx. you see what New York City looked like in 1954-55.
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