Odds Against Tomorrow

Last Saturday night (6/12/99) I went to see "Odds Against Tomorrow" with my friend Paul Buhle. The audience included the screenwriter Abe Polonsky, who was one of the Hollywood 10, John Lewis, the Modern Jazz Quartet's pianist who wrote the score, and Harry Belafonte, who produced the film and was one of the co-stars. They were to speak on a panel immediately following the film.

Paul's book "Tender Comrades", a series of interviews with blacklistees conducted by various scholars, is now available in paperback from St. Martins Press and is a must for anybody interested in left cultural history. Paul did the Polonsky interview and prefaces it as follows:

"ABRAHAM LINCOLN POLONSKY, the son of a Jewish pharmacist, grew up in New York and graduated from City College and the Columbia Law School. He taught at City College and started writing for radio, scripting episodes of The Goldbergs, during the mid-1930s. By the end of the decade he was also writing for Columbia Workshop Theatre and Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre of the Air. As he continued working on plays and fiction, he visited Hollywood for the first time in 1937. But instead of immediately attempting a career there alongside so many other left-wing writers, he made a political choice. For two crucial years when the American labor movement was at the apex of both its influence and its collective idealism, he operated as educational director and newspaper editor of a regional ClO union north of New York City.

"Right before world War II, Polonsky had a novel serialized in Collier’s that attracted renewed attention from Hollywood. But military duty took precedence. After serving with the Office of Strategic Services, at times behind the lines in France, Polonsky resumed to Hollywood at last, in 1945. After a disappointing start at Paramount, he became the leading scenarist for Enterprise, the best of the new, small production companies. With the hit boxing film Body and Soul under his belt, Polonsky then wrote and directed Force of Evil, considered by critics to be one of the best films noirs of the era, an intensely poetic, radically stylized work that nonetheless managed to observe the conventions of the crime genre. A script for I Can Get It for You Wholesale, produced while Polonsky was out of the country, rounded out his Hollywood life before the blacklist drove him out of the industry."

"Odds Against Tomorrow" is a film of notable "firsts" and "lasts". Made in 1959, it was the last true 'film noir' and follows the form's conventions as strictly as Kabuki or Noh theater follow theirs. Filmed in black-and-white, it is the story of 3 men who set about to rob a bank since fate will permit no other solution to their collective economic woes. Most scenes are shot at night and include the mandatory rain-slicked streets, blinking neon lights observed from second-rate hotel windows, and smoky bars and nightclubs.

By the same token, it was the first film noir to feature a genuinely noir actor. The African-American actor and singer Harry Belafonte had formed his own production company out of frustration with the sort of roles he had been offered by white Hollywood. Playing Jimmy Ingram, a jazz musician with gambling debts he has no hope of paying off, he decides to participate in a bank robbery in upstate NY. He has been recruited by Dave Burke (Ed Begley), an ex-cop who was drummed off the force after 30 years because he "wouldn't talk" to the State Crime Committee. One can surmise that this was a form of rebuttal to Elia Kazan's "On the Waterfront," which glorified informants. Another first was John Lewis's score, the first jazz composition written for a film.

Burke has also lined up Earle Slater (Robert Ryan), a WWII veteran who has been released from prison recently after serving time on a manslaughter conviction. Slater has simply not been able to integrate into American society since the war and has failed at one job or another. Unlike the rosy vision put forward in publicity surrounding "Saving Private Ryan" and Tom Brokaw's "The Greatest Generation," noir films often depicted WWII veterans in bleak circumstances. In real life, Robert Ryan was a principled liberal who had spoken out for economic and racial justice during the 30s and 40s. Unlike many others, he had not backed down from McCarthy and defended the civil liberties of those in the industry--like Polonsky--who were under attack.

Slater is a diehard racist from Oklahoma, who in the opening scene of the film set on the sidewalk outside Burke's hotel, tells a young black girl who he has bumped into, "You lil pickaninny, you goin' to kill yourself flyin' like that, yes you are." Thusly, his conflict with Belafonte's character, who will not tolerate racism, creates the secondary tension that is sustained through the rest of the film. You watch the film wondering who will kill each other first. The cops and the robbers, or the robbers themselves.

Ingram has almost no use for white people. Although not political in any way, he rejects white society's values. In a scene with his ex-wife who is active on a PTA committee with white members, he challenges her belief in integration after she has reprimanded him as an inadequate father to their daughter. While Slater can't integrate into American society because of character flaws, Ingram won't because of flaws he perceives in society itself.

RUTH (flaring): "I am trying to make a world fit for Eadie to live in. It's a cinch you're not going to do it with a deck of cards and a racing form."

INGRAM: "But you are, huh? You and your big white brothers. Drink enough tea with 'em and stay out of the watermelon patch and maybe our little colored girl will grow up to be Miss America, is that it?"

The gang of three proceeds to the town of Melton, about a hundred miles north of NYC on the Hudson River, where they will rob a bank in a plan that Burke assures them can not go wrong. Of course, by film noir conventions, we are prepared to expect the worst. Hudson, NY provided the locale for the final scenes of the movie. As a tableaux of honest, hard-working villagers lifted from a Norman Rockwell painting, it provided a dramatic contrast to the violent, cunning, and cynical NYC home of the gangsters.

The panel discussion was chaired by John Schultheiss, the editor of "Odds Against Tomorrow: The Critical Edition" (Cal State, 1999), who provided valuable historical context for the making of the film.

In a montage of "race understanding" films from the mid 1950s, Schultheiss explains how unique "Odds Against Tomorrow" was. In prior films such as "The Defiant Ones," there is a plea for racial tolerance but the black character is always sacrificed in the process. Chained to white racist escaped convict Tony Curtis, fellow escapee Sidney Poitier constantly goes out of his way to show the audience that he will turn the other cheek, while Curtis keeps slapping it. Belafonte explained that he wanted to depict a black character who would not stand for any humiliation. It was also a way to tell Hollywood that he would not kowtow to their idea of how a black character should behave.

Belafonte had put his own fortune and reputation on the line. Waiving his fee as an actor, and fronting a quarter-million dollars, he sought to break new ground cinematically. In Schultheiss's commentary on the film, Belafonte is quoted, "My own personal desire was to put things on the screen that reflected the deeper resonance of black life, things that had never been approached before, even within the United Artists realm." His partnership with United Artists was a reflection of the special role of the company in Hollywood, which was to be obliterated by corporate ownership a decade or so later. Formed by Charlie Chaplin in the 1920s, United Artists was cooperatively owned by actors, screenwriters and directors who wanted to make uncompromising films.

Belafonte made two decisions that reflected his own uncompromising beliefs. He hired Abraham Polonsky to write the film, who was still blacklisted. Belafonte's connections to this world was rooted in his own experience as a blacklistee. What enabled him to break free of McCarthyite repression was his unique folksinging talent, which attracted the support of Ed Sullivan who featured Belafonte regularly on his popular Sunday night television variety show. Buhle told me that despite this, Sullivan was a run-of-the-mill red-baiter, who had viciously attacked Polonsky in a newspaper column in the same year "Odds Against Tomorrow" was being filmed.

Once Belafonte became a powerful show business figure in his own right, he told his blacklisted friends and acquaintances that he would do everything he could to piggyback them out of the witch-hunt. Just jump on his shoulders. Receiving $35,000 for his screenplay, Polonsky was one of the first. Even the selection of a "front" for Polonsky was carefully thought through for its political impact. John Oliver Killens was an important black writer, who was active in the civil rights movement along with Martin Luther King Jr., Belafonte and others. (Killens eventually became a black nationalist and a supporter of Malcom X.)

Schultheiss posed a provocative question to Polonsky. How did his belief in progressive politics square with his decision to write a film with criminals as central characters, who had no socially redeeming qualities? Was it difficult to make what was essentially an entertainment about hardboiled criminals, when his stated beliefs revolved around transforming American society? Polonsky, never one to mince words, practically spit out his reply. He said that American society itself was criminal and that the film's characters were just trapped within the system.

This raised for me an interesting line of investigation. It would appear that film noir would represent for left-wing screenwriters the same sort of appeal as Nathaniel West's novels. West, a Communist sympathizer, wrote what were effectively noir novels. In "Miss Lonelyhearts", a bitter, bleak story about the impossibility of breaking though economic and personal limitations, West offered no pat, socialist solutions to the misery of his characters. One would assume that film noir allowed the film writer the same artistic latitude.

Belafonte offered his own thoughts on the question of progressive politics and entertainment, which I found particularly profound. He said that one of the worst things about conglomerate transformation of popular culture was the way it cheapened the notion of entertainment. For Belafonte, entertainment is akin to engagement. A film like "Odds Against Tomorrow" might disturb you, but it would also captivate you and make you think. Today's notion of entertainment seems designed to dull the thought and make one less than fully human. Back when Belafonte made the film and until the present moment, he had no such intentions. As he told Schultheiss in a 1998 interview:

"But Hollywood was no more than a reflection of the nation. It was saying no more and doing no more than America was saying and doing. If Hollywood was to change, then America had to change. We had to then change the way America was doing business: to let Hollywood understand that it had to do business on different terms. The upheaval took place and the struggle took place, and in that climate Abe and I then saw the opportunity to put a point of view on the screen that was very different from any of the others around. This would be Odds Against Tomorrow."

Louis Proyect