Odds Against Tomorrow
is a heist movie, a noir movie, and a racial parable all wrapped up in one. Ed Begley is the disgraced former NYPD
detective. Robert Ryan is the
hard-bitten ex-con who’d prefer to stay clean, but doesn’t mind a little
dirt. Harry Belafonte is the
degenerate gambler who owes a lot of money to some very bad people.
Begley works out the score and recruits his accomplices, but
there’s a problem: yan is a vocal racist and won’t trust Belafonte. How will they work together when things
inevitably veer off plan?
It’s a great premise, but it suffers in execution. The film spends all but the last
fifteen minutes setting up the characters and heist, but this leaves very
little time for nuance when things go wrong. I’d have appreciated more time in the crime, more reversals
and counter-reversals. As it was,
I could see right off how things were going to go, and after that it was just
waiting for the gears to turn. I
wanted to love Odds Against Tomorrow,
but I found myself spending most of the film wishing it’d hurry up and the
last few minutes wishing it would slow down. Ah, well.
...
In Crime Wave, Gene
Nelson is an ex-con trying to stay clean.
Ted de Corsia and a young Charles Bronson (as Charles Buchinsky) are
escaped cons looking for a hideout and a big score. Sterling Hayden is the police lieutenant out to get them
all. This is film noir, so there’s
no telling what’s going to happen.
While Crime Wave
counts as minor noir (Definition: anything I haven’t heard of before a friend
turns me on to it), it’s successful.
Filmed almost entirely on location in ‘50s Los Angeles, it takes us to a
place we can never (re)visit and makes us feel at home. It gives us menacing villains,
conflicted, heroes, and hard-boiled cops, and it puts them in a story with
enough tension and surprise to keep us on edge and delight us to the end.
Crime Wave is a
B-side to films like The Maltese Falcon
and Out of the Past, but it’s a solid
B-side. If you have a hankering
for a new noir, Crime Wave will scratch
the itch nicely.
...
Decoy comes as
part of a double bill on the same DVD as
Crime
Wave. Unlike
Crime Wave, which is tense and
rewarding,
Decoy is dull.
Here’s the deal: some guy in a suit shoots a dame. Why? Hey, why not?
It’s ‘50s: everybody wears a suit.
The film goes on to tell us why he shot the dame, but we don’t really
care. Why not? Because we don’t care about the dame. Sure, she’s good-looking enough, but
she lacks that star quality, that indefinable something that makes us wonder
what she’s thinking and what she’s going to think about next, that the part
requires.
Sure, there’s another hard-boiled cop (Sheldon Leonard, hamming
it up), an innocent, a devilish plot, and perhaps the most fatale femme in the
history of the genre. But the
cop’s a jerk, the innocent is a terrible actor, the plot is simplistic, and the
femme makes you wonder if she got the part by sleeping with somebody (right up
‘til you learn that she was married to the director).
Ultimately, Decoy
just isn’t very good, and that’s too bad.
I was all set to like it.
