Odds Against Tomorrow: Robert Wise

Odds Against Tomorrow is a rare heist film that works on two distinctly different levels.  One the surface, it is a hard-hitting crime caper.  Three desperate men are forced by circumstances outside of their control to participate in a bank heist.  David Burke, the leader, is an ex-police man who refused to take part in a state investigation.  Earl Slater is an ex-con who has fallen upon desperate times and is determined to support his wife.  Johnny Ingram is a nightclub performer with such crippling gambling debts that the mob has begun to threaten his family.  However, there's just one big problem: Johnny is black.  Here is where the second level of the film comes in: it is a powerful racial commentary.  Earl is a nearly sociopathic racist.  It isn't just the way he treats Johnny that betrays his crooked emotions.  Watch how he acts around the black elevator operator at the start of the film and the black bank guard at the end.  It's subtle, yet extremely powerful.  Like most crime noir, their plot is doomed to fail.  But it is how their plan fails and the result of its failing that makes Odds Against Tomorrow such a great film.  Most of the time, when a film noir tries to do too much in terms of story and commentary, the results are lopsided and miscalculated.  Odds Against Tomorrow strikes just the right balance.

7/10