WHILE the New Wave (The Lovers—from France) and Nouvelle Vague (The Magician—from Sweden) have been hatching record-breaking lines in front of art theaters, a touching drama goes on alongside, involving numerous old Hollywood pros who are trying to keep pace, or at least regain their youthful vigor. One of these pros is Robert Wise, the director. Wise has fared better than most as Ponce de Leon trying for a new Hollywood youth. Wise has evolved an elongation of the Fritz Lang expressionism that he used briefly in the grimy, brutal 1949 sleeper, The Set-Up, and never again. He uses a trip-hammer technique that is fun to watch and brings into play his rather odd talents, which mostly have to do with shock-connections inside and between episodes.
From his earliest and best study of middle-class mediocrity (Born to Kill), Wise has had trouble giving his inflexibly acted, shrewdly terrored films an “identity.” Now, in a late stretch drive against the anonymity that has piled around his career as a hard-boiled specialist on the shabbier seams of life, and an economical director of dowdy, middle-aged derelicts (such as the nearly punch-drunk prelim fighter in The Set-Up), Wise has thrust himself so far into style that on a clear screen almost anyone in the last row of the balcony can recognize the film as his.
Before his new film, Odds Against Tomorrow, springs its trap too quickly into a pat ending and a last staccato note (a shot of a street sign that reads, “stop—dead end”), Wise has run through a catalogue of sadism including wild contrasts, odd transitions (a rabbit’s nose twitching before a menacing rifle), and a camera that does a rhythmic up-and-down jabbing. He has such strange effects as a diesel train honking through the center of a head-on argument, cruel weather reports, a James Cain type of romantic meeting shot mostly around the hips, and a zooming camera that carries on a “dialogue” of white supremacy between two people spaced a block apart. The result is a tricky but tough movie about a bank robbery that has a lot of insights into the decrepit, nearly hopeless life, and, like all Wise films, needs only a good story.
The robbery involves an integration-among-criminals dispute between a chronic Negro-baiter and a tough colored singer who has trouble with the jungle outside his door—with most of Wise’s comments on the Race Problem too easily come by. While he does some credible by-play with an embittered colored wife and her playboy husband (Harry Belafonte), these domestic strife scenes in a neat “project” apartment are much too tepid for Wise’s virile, anger-spun art. Nevertheless, throughout this quick, heated story of a crime arranged by three amateurs, there are moments of exciting accuracy.
The main point in all Wise films is that the human being is a luckless, often furious, figure in an imprisoning city which, unlike its inhabitants who seem almost rigid with frustration and broken hopes, is shatteringly alive, interesting, complicated and, in its more sordid areas, unbearably photogenic. With his orthodox notion of an offbeat cast (Shelley Winters, Robert Ryan), a passive handling of actors that makes for stone-like people or strangely neutral ones, and a quiet wizardry in connecting technical gimmicks with a shrewdly selected environment, Wise is inordinately suited to bringing his pessimistic impression of mankind into credible shape.
Even with a pro-arty cameraman who makes every blast of sunlight on white clapboard, every stiffness in an aging ex-cop’s walk, seem a bit rich and special, Wise is almost unequaled in post-silent films for his brooding around ugly Eastern city hotels and rooming houses. Perhaps the best Wise trait is his unshowy respect for unimportant scenes. Whether it is the lights of a main street turning on, a sad hallway wrapping itself around a tightly elegant singer, or a heavy-fisted punk reacting with meager, ungiving admiration to someone else’s ingenuity, Wise gives the effect a chance to exist with all of its sensitivity intact and without the wild pointing found in most films of decadence.
Part of the trouble with Wise’s films is that he is unable to break the cage of conservative casting and imitative stories. Here he has Harry Belafonte, who is a bit too comfortable and unmarked for a man caught in a soul-shaking financial bind. As Harry’s nemesis, Robert Ryan is somewhat more persuasive, at least when Wise bridges Ryan’s thoughtfully static acting approach and grooved responses with some silent, near-newsreel documenting. In these fine moments, a homely obscurity seems to sag from every crevice of Ryan’s face, and sometimes, when he is musing grimly on his gigolo life with a waitress (Shelley Winters), it is hard to tell where the homely environment stops and Ryan starts. The fact that this film is at all commendable is the result of Wise’s ability to transform a melodrama into something that mixes terror, geography and truth.
November 23, 1959