ODDS AGAINST TOMORROW

Robert Wise may have won his Oscars for those elephantine musicals about street gangs and singing nuns but everyone knows he did his best work in a number of terse black and white noirish thrillers and dramas that reminded you he once edited "Citizen Kane" and "The Magnificent Ambersons". He made "Odds Against Tomorrow" in 1959 and it's a classic heist movie as well as one of the more forthright films of its period to deal with racism which, in this case, is the principal cause of thieves falling out. The 'bad guys', in that they are forced to steal for a living, are Harry Belafonte, Robert Ryan and Ed Begley and it's Begley's idea that they should rob a small-town bank. The problem is that Belafonte is an African-American and Ryan is a racist and we know it can only end in tears. Others in a good cast include Shelley Winters and Gloria Grahame, (both given too little to do), and if you pay attention you might spot Zohra Lampert and Cicely Tyson amongst others. Joseph C Brun did the superlative cinematography and the blacklisted Abraham Polonsky worked on the screenplay.