By Nicholas Stix
(Spoiler alert; then again, what’s there to spoil?)
During the 1950s, there was a sub-genre of the crime movie, the Sterling Hayden movie. Granted, nobody called it that. They called it a “heist” picture, but if it was to be any good, it had to star Hayden (1916-1986), who was a huge figure (in every way—he stood 6’5”) at the time, even though he never became a matinee idol.
The first two heist pictures supposedly came out on the same day, in 1950. One is relegated to obscurity (I couldn’t find its name), while the other was a masterpiece: The Asphalt Jungle.
It was directed and written by John Huston (1906-1987), based on W.R. Burnett’s (1899-1982) eponymous, 1949 novel.
Hayden also made Crime Wave (1953) and The Killing (1956), which was a re-make of The Asphalt Jungle, by Stanley Kubrick, though Kubrick fanatics will never admit that he re-made anything.
The movie in question was Odds against Tomorrow (1959). It was directed by Robert Wise (1914-2005), written by Abraham Polonsky (1910-1999), and produced by Harry Belafonte (1927-2023). It starred Belafonte and Robert Ryan (1909-1973), and featured Ed Begley (1901-1970), Shelley Winters (1920-2006), and Kim Hamilton (1932-2013) as Harry’s wife.
(I had planned on writing a section on communist screenwriter Abraham Polonsky, but chief communist/racial socialist imdb commissar Jon Hopkinson stuffed Polonsky’s bio page with so many outrageous lies that I’m going to have to write a separate essay about him.)
So, why did Belafonte make a Sterling Hayden movie without Sterling Hayden?
The first thing you have to understand is that while Harry Belafonte was one of the prettiest men in Hollywood (he had quite a bit of White blood, and Stanley Dunham, who would later give birth to the John Doe calling himself “Barack Obama,” thought he was the world’s most handsome actor), he was also the most vain. Thus, he cast as the criminal mastermind, the homeliest actor he could find, Ed Begley.
In the other lead role, Belafonte cast Robert Ryan (1909-1973), because Ryan was also homely, although not nearly as ugly as Begley.
Director Robert Wise would also have wanted Ryan. Wise and Ryan were old colleagues from RKO, where Ryan started out as an actor, and Wise as a film editor (Wise got his first Oscar nomination for editing Citizen Kane, 1941). Ryan had starred in what at the time had been Wise’s masterpiece, The Set-Up (1949), about a washed-up prizefighter who has one last fight. He’s been ordered to take a dive, but decides, “The hell with it.” He sees that he can take the youngster he’s up against, and does so. But going against the mob comes at a steep price.
Ryan had actually been an amateur boxer. He was a college champ at Yale, and then when he shirked his patriotic duty during The War, he worked as a boxing instructor stateside.
There would have been at least three reasons why Belafonte made a Sterling Hayden movie without Sterling Hayden.
Although Hayden was working on destroying his looks with booze and cigarettes, in 1958 he was still handsome. When Paramount signed him as a young man, it promoted him as “The Most Beautiful Man in the Movies!” (imdb)
Shelley Winters, Gloria Grahame, and Kim Hamilton were all unobjectionable, because none of them was as pretty as Harry.
Like Ryan and Belafonte, Hayden was a communist, but unlike them, he had actually joined the Party. (imdb fudges this, as part of Jon Hopkinson’s strategy of exaggerating the number of non-communists who were blacklisted. Nobody “flirted” with the communists; you either joined or you didn’t. Later, Hayden named names, in order to avoid being blacklisted. Belafonte would never have tolerated an informer.)
And third, Odds wasn’t a Sterling Hayden movie at all. It was a communist message movie, on the evils of “racism.”
The first and most important lesson Odds against Tomorrow must teach the audience is to hate the Robert Ryan character, because he is a “racist.”
When we first see Ryan (Earle Slater), he is in Harlem for the big meeting with Begley (Dave Burke) and Belafonte (Johnny Ingram). On the street outside Begley’s apartment building, a little black girl of eight or nine years of age playing with her friends, accidentally runs into Ryan. He picks her up, holds her high above him, smiles at her and says, “You little pickaninny.” She sees only the smile, and he puts her back down. (Did any Northern White still talk like that? I doubt it.)
In the building, Wise keeps reminding us. The young, black elevator operator cracks a joke; Slater ignores him.
Now, Ingram takes the elevator up to Burke’s apartment. When the black elevator operator cracks a joke, Belafonte laughs, and throws one back at him.
Thus do we see Ingram’s moral superiority to Slater. Although Harry is going to rob a bank, he’s a sympathetic bank robber, unlike that loathsome Rob, who is a racist bank robber!
At the meeting between Burke, Slater, and Ingram, we learn that Burke’s character is a disgraced ex-cop who was caught engaged in corruption and fired. We also learn (yet again!) that Slater is an incorrigible racist.
Slater’s character had done time for manslaughter. He hit a man, and the latter died. Evil!
Ingram is a gambler, and thus has an ever-growing mountain of debts to his bookmaker. That cost him his marriage, which he’s seeking to rescue, because he loves his wife and daughter to death. See, he has a vice, but he’s no racist or killer!
Why, in one scene at the Harlem club where Ingram is performing on the xylophones, a pretty girl singer complains that although he has her apartment key, he has stopped using it. See, he’s no dog!
That’s a big scene for Belafonte. He performs on the xylophone, but in a crazed fashion, which tells you something’s wrong with him. And just in case the viewer doesn’t get the obvious point, the blacks at the bar comment on the matter.
(It’s hard to speak of Belafonte’s role as “Ingram,” because he wanted viewers to think of him as himself.)
Meanwhile, Ingram’s White bookmaker and the latter’s enforcer visit the bar, to remind him of his debt. The huge, black bouncer sees what’s afoot, warns Belafonte, and offers him a sleek, little semi-automatic, in case he needs the help. Harry thanks him, and takes it.
In the owner’s office, Harry pulls the pistol on the Whites, but the goon easily takes it off of him. This underscores Harry’s inherent goodness. He’s not a man of violence.
The dirty ex-cop has warned the bookmaker that he seeks to enlist Harry for a job, and the bookmaker tells Harry/Johnny he’d better do it.
On the night of the last meeting to prepare for the job, Ryan shows up late. While his shack job (Shelley Winters) is off at work, the sexy, attractive, married lady from the apartment just above them (Gloria Grahame) drops by to complain about her husband, who’s off bowling. Ryan gets the message, closes the door she left open, kisses her, and it’s on.
So, he’s not just a racist, but neither his girlfriend nor his crime partners can count on him!
Comes time to pull the job, Slater is supposed to give the car keys to Ingram, who is to serve as getaway driver, but he refuses to give him the keys. Instead, he gives them to Burke, who then has to toss them to Ingram.
(This cinematic “thing” lectures us that White racists have no concept of their own enlightened self-interest, as opposed to black criminals. This is the diametrical opposite of the truth.)
Not only does Slater wreck the job, but two cops have turned up, due to a newsstand operator selling one a lottery ticket. The cops sniff out the job, and shoot it out with Burke, who ends up dead on the sidewalk, along with the keys.
Slater isn’t interested in completing the job; he just wants to kill Ingram, whom he starts firing on. Belafonte shoots back. One chases the other onto the top of a huge oil storage tank, where they continue shooting it out, and where the inevitable happens. (Could they both be that stupid?)
After the holocaust is extinguished, the police and firemen find the two robbers’ corpses indistinguishable. To which, Red Eddie Muller, in his “outro” remarks, “the symbolism is obvious.”
Well, it wasn’t obvious to me.
Was it supposed to mean that we all look alike, below the skin? Or that black bank robbers could do just fine, if not for racist, White bank robbers?
In case you think I’m stretching, in 1990, tenured CUNY/Queens College communist/racial socialist empty professor of political science, Andrew Hacker, wrote a race book called Two Nations (1990), in the first paperback edition of which he argued, in the course of two pages, that: 1. racist Whites in the law enforcement and criminal justice systems were railroading innocent black men; 2. that the same White racists ought to stop railroading blacks, and instead issue them free crimes, while: 3. blacks need to commit more violent crimes, but follow affirmative action guidelines (harming White men, but not White women), and: 4. need opportunities to commit better-paying crimes.
The story to Odds against Tomorrow is really stupid. Had Burke done his homework, he would have learned that Burke had a murderous hatred of blacks, and either avoided taking him on, or avoided taking on Ingram. Ditto for after the first meeting, when the two almost come to blows.
Then again, as I noted above, this is not a Sterling Hayden movie, it’s a communist/black supremacist message movie.
As stupid and propagandistic as Abraham Polonsky’s script was, I’m sure he delivered exactly what Harry Belafonte ordered.
Noir Alley: Odds Against Tomorrow (1959) intro 20181007, with Harry Belafonte
Noir Alley: Odds Against Tomorrow (1959) outro 20210228
black stars like Harry Belafonte were causing White studio bosses headaches (paraphrase of Red Eddie).
How could black actors be causing White studio chiefs headaches, when it was the White executives and producers who made stars of the blacks? This is the same logic you get from feminazis, who declare that women (once Hillary Clinton, now Kamala Harris) “broke through the glass ceiling.” Women never broke through any “glass ceiling”; men groomed them for advancement, in many cases their fathers, in others their husbands or lovers.
“More timely than ever”?! It wasn’t even timely in 1959. Belafonte and Red Eddie are such liars. They know damned well that HUAC wasn’t falsely charging people with being Reds. And when they say, “progressive,” as if it meant something different, you have to be aware that it’s a euphemism for communist.
1 comment:
And now the propaganda is more obvious--and widespread. I see no scenario that it does not continue onward and upward.
--GRA
Post a Comment