Noir Diary # 8: Odds Against Tomorrow (Robert Wise, 1959)

So here’s a question for you: when did Film Noir – in its original, American iteration - end?

Many fans and critics understandably regard Orson Welles’ masterful ‘Touch of Evil’ (released in April 1958) as the big full stop separating the genre’s core canon from the more self-conscious revivals and reinventions which began almost immediately after its demise, and indeed, the sight of Marlene Dietrich in her final screen role, striding off toward those looming Texas oil wells after delivering her concise final words on Welles’ Hank Quinlan, feels not only like the perfect epitaph for the noir world, but a darkly poetic kiss off for the Golden Age of Hollywood as a whole. Adios, indeed.

Nothing in culture is ever quite that neat and tidy though, and some filmmakers clearly missed the memo, leaving us with a few fascinating, transitional stragglers to try to awkwardly cram into noir’s core time-frame, Robert Wise’s ‘Odds Against Tomorrow’ (released November 1959) foremost amongst them.

Before we begin discussing the film itself, a quick word on the title, as coined by William P. McGivern for his 1955 source novel. I’ve spoken before about how much I love the raw pulp poetry of these generic, one-size-fits-all crime story titles, and ‘Odds Against Tomorrow’ is one of my absolute favourites in this regard. Hopefully I won’t need to elaborate too much on why that’s the case – it speaks for itself pretty well, although knowledge of the fact that one of the central characters is a compulsive gambler adds some helpful context.

Combine it with the poster image of a desperate-looking Harry Belafonte, raising his revolver toward the heavens with gritted teeth, and you’ll appreciate that the film has long been high on my “must watch” list, be it a noir, a modern crime film, or whatever else. It’s just a stunning word/image combo, irrespective of how you’d care to classify it.

In truth, most classic noirs from the mid/late ‘50s were to some extent aware of the genre/style they were working within, and in some cases, aware of the need to bend and reshape its conventions to reflect the uncertain socio-political realities of their era. By the end of the decade, making a film in black & white, in 4:3 academy ratio, was a conscious choice, rather than the default, for an American film. (In retrospect, it’s strange to reflect on the fact that such key late period noirs as ‘The Big Combo’ and ‘Kiss Me Deadly’ were actually shot widescreen.)

By keeping the action in ‘Odds Against Tomorrow’ monochrome, confined to the tight limitations of a ‘square’ frame, Robert Wise and executive producer Belafonte seem to have been making a deliberate statement - we’re doing this one the old fashioned way. No fancy business, no bells n’ whistles – just a simple, blue collar crime flick with a minimal cast and a straight-forward, grab-the-money-and-run storyline.

This proposition is immediately confused however by the fact that ‘Odds Against Tomorrow’s credits sequence simultaneously takes a strikingly modernist stance, suggesting a film that’s setting out to get progressive in more ways than one. A veritable riot of animated, Saul Bass-esque text and kaleidoscopic, abstract imagery, the credits are cut to an impeccably sharp jazz score, composed by John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet and recorded by an ensemble including such luminaries as Bill Evans and Milt Jackson.

Such stylistic choices may not raise too many eye-brows these days, but in the context of a ‘50s Hollywood crime film, they scream MOD as clearly as a Small Faces reunion in a Lambretta factory, immediately placing the film in the same envelope-pushing category as Hitchcock’s ‘Vertigo’ or Preminger’s ‘The Man with The Golden Arm’.

Once the story itself gets underway however, the approach is defiantly old school. Our setting is Upper Manhattan, and our characters exist in a world of cramped tenement apartments, down-at-heel bars and ill-lit back offices, with only the occasional bit of early morning location shooting in central park allowing them a breather. None of them are exactly what you’d call professional criminals, but they’ve all had their run-ins with the criminal underworld, skirting its perimeters like losers and misfits have since time immemorial - and when we join them, they’re each sufficiently desperate to take the plunge full time.

An ex-cop who got nailed on corruption charges at some point in the past, Burke (perennial ‘cop actor’ Ed Begley, whom we last encountered on the blog playing an unlikely Dr Henry Armitage in AIP’s The Dunwich Horror) now finds himself living in reduced circumstances in a pokey one-room office/apartment, trying to figure out a way to improve his lot and avenge himself against his former colleagues in the process.

The net result of Burke’s figurin’ is what he considers a fool-proof plan to turn over a bank in a small upstate industrial town, making use of an unguarded side door and a regular 6pm coffee delivery to swipe the entirety of the local factory’s weekly payroll whilst the doddering old clerks are busy counting it. Why, it’ll be like taking candy from a a baby etc etc, but naturally he still needs a couple of guys to help him out with the job. For obvious reasons, he can’t call on the services of any professional crooks, but… he’s got the number of a couple of schmucks who just might fit the bill.

Say hello then to Earl Slater (Robert Ryan), a middle-aged WWII vet with crippling anger management issues and an inability to hold down a legit job, who’s just served a stretch in the slammer for accidentally killing a man in a bar fight, and also to Johnny Ingram (Belafonte), a wild-living nightclub musician whose addiction to gambling has led him to a separation from his wife and child and left him heavily in debt to a local mobster.

Initially, both Slater and Ingram turn down Burke’s proposition cold after he invites them to his ‘office’ for a quiet chat. But, as their own individual circumstances deteriorate further over the coming days, they both feel they have no other choice but to slink back and reluctantly declare themselves ‘in’.

For a clearly delighted Burke, the game is on, but although the robbery he has in mind is one of the simplest in crime fiction history, this wouldn’t be a heist movie if inter-personal conflict didn’t threaten to bring down the whole operation before it’s even begun, and this is certainly telegraphed loud and clear in ‘Odds Against Tomorrow’.

Both Slater and Ingram are inexperienced, unpredictable and hate each other’s guts. Burke however is so enthused by the prospect of pulling off his big job that he turns a blind eye to this obvious problem, putting the plan into action with a bare minimum of preparation. What could possibly go wrong…?

So far then, we have a quintessential hard-boiled crime yarn – exactly the kind of solid, low budget programmer which could have emerged from RKO or Warners ten or fifteen years earlier. What sets ‘Odds Against Tomorrow’ apart however, justifying the film’s painfully hip opening credits, explaining Belafonte’s interest in the material and shifting the action definitively toward the milieu of the late ‘50s, is the reason why Slater and Ingram hate each other’s guts.

As you will no doubt have observed, Harry Belafonte is black, which means that Johnny Ingram is also black. Earl Slater meanwhile is a dyed-in-the-wool, card-carrying racist, who has only consented to work with “a coloured boy” on the job with extreme reluctance. (Ryan voices Slater with a thick, southern twang that speaks of an ugly Confederate upbringing before war and/or marriage (we presume) eventually washed him up on the shores of the Hudson.) So, you can see where this train is headed.

For all that film noir may have purported to expose the ugly underbelly of American life during the the ‘40s and earlier ‘50s, issues of racial prejudice and inequality were rarely, if ever, allowed to intrude upon the genre’s exposure of an ugly white underbelly. Whilst I’m sure there must be exceptions, off the top of my head I find it difficult to come up with any examples of pre-1955 noir in which black characters play a larger role in the narrative than that of servants, sidekicks or one-scene-wonder bit players.

(Admittedly, noir did sometimes touch upon the travails of immigrants or ethnic minorities [see ‘Cry of the City’ (1948) or Thieves’ Highway (1949) for instance], but these stories tended to concern Italian, Irish or variously European characters; all groups which modern American viewers will no doubt consider as having been fully integrated into a more monolithic demographic of undifferentiated whiteness.)

Meanwhile, the only noirs I can think of in which racism features as a plot point are other self-aware, late period examples of the genre, made by directors known for their liberal / humane beliefs, and falling comfortably within a post-Civil Rights Movement timeframe.

(Specifically, I’m thinking here of Captain Quinlan’s victimisation of his town’s Mexican populace in the aforementioned ‘Touch of Evil’ – a brilliant depiction of the kind of ‘soft’/oblique racism that has made such a regrettable comeback in 21st century political discourse, incidentally - and Timothy Carey’s memorably nasty use of a racist insult to dismiss an over-attentive parking attendant in Stanley Kubrick’s ‘The Killing’ (1956).)

Abraham Polonsky’s script for ‘Odds Against Tomorrow’ however is consistently, and unapologetically, preoccupied with issues of race, as is made clear from the film’s very first scene, which finds Slater jovially employing a racist epithet to refer to a little girl who bumps into him on the street as he approaches Burke’s office.

In throwing together a black man and a southern racist and ostensibly forcing them to work together, ‘Odds Against Tomorrow’ has sometimes found itself labelled as the hard-boiled crime genre’s answer to Stanley Kramer’s ‘The Defiant Ones’ (1958) – a label presumably applied by writers who have never actually seen the film, given that, in true noir tradition, it actually presents nothing less than a cruel, pessimistic reversal of Kramer’s ode to mutual respect and co-operation.

Here, our two central characters embody the masculine traditions of their respective cultures at their craven, self-destructive worst; right from the outset, there is ZERO prospect of Ingram and Slater coming together and settling their differences. When these men have been so twisted and chewed up by the socio-political dead-ends they were born into that they can’t respect themselves, Polonsky’s characteristically schematic script seems to be asking us, what chance could they possibly have of learning to respect each other?

(Still blacklisted on account of the socialist beliefs he articulated so clearly in his pre-HUAC one-two punch of ‘Body & Soul (1947) and ‘Force of Evil’ (1948), Polonsky pulled off a neat irony by using the name of a genuine black writer, John O. Killens, as his ‘beard’ on the ‘Odds Against Tomorrow’ script.)

Structurally, the film’s pacing is deliberately uneven, with the first hour taking the form of a long, leisurely slow-burn, as we follow Ingram and Slater through their respective daily routines and dilemmas in the days leading up to the robbery, sticking so closely to the characters that we soon feel as if we know their lives inside out.

Once they leave the city and head upstate to carry out the robbery however, the pacing tightens up considerably, Robert Wise flexing his well-oiled ‘thriller’ muscles as the shit quickly, inevitably, and fatally hits the fan, from the worst possible combination of angles.

At this point, we have no expectation that Slater and Ingram will manage to cooperate for more than a matter of seconds before they’re at each other’s throats, and indeed this turns out to be the case. If the conclusion, which sees Ryan and Belafonte blasting away at each other whilst almost literally dancing on top of a powder keg, seems fairly heavy-handed in allegorical terms, the breathless fatalism of the film’s crazed, maniacal final minutes still stuns.

It is during the long, slow build up which precedes all this however that the film’s most compelling drama is really played out; as in his earlier scripts, Polonsky’s systematic demarcation of the social and financial pressures which have driven the film’s characters into a corner is both detailed and exhaustive.

A forerunner of the kind of battle-scarred, emasculated males who would stalk their way through cinema of the post-Vietnam era, Earl Slater is tormented by his inability to earn an honest living, and feels humiliated by the fact that his younger wife (a fairly thankless role for the great Shelley Winters) is effectively ‘keeping’ him, having just won a promotion in her uptown office job.

Earl’s only outlets are drink and violence, and when – in one of the film’s best scenes – he finds himself combining the two by clobbering a feckless young solider in a neighbourhood bar, we feel as if he signs on for Burke’s robbery scheme more just to keep himself busy before depression and idleness land him back in prison than anything else.

Few American actors have been able to convey a sense of disappointment and self-disgust quite as convincingly, or with as much subtlety, as Robert Ryan, and his performance here is one of his very best (which is saying something), managing to almost wordlessly draw out the sympathetic, human side of what by any yardstick is a singularly dislikeable, wrong-headed character.

Belafonte’s character meanwhile is equally pathetic in his own way, functioning as a case study in how the proud rebellion of an urban, black male can so easily be detourned into futile self-destruction. In a key scene, Ingram mocks his wife (Kim Hamilton) for hosting the “ofay” attendees of a local PTA meeting at her apartment, sneering at what he sees as her attempts at social climbing, and the accompanying dilution of her black identity.

Whites can’t be trusted, seems to be his essential point; they’ll never share their shit with us, the only thing we can do is smash through and take it in the only way we can [for which read: crime and associated pursuits]. In this, Ingram is restating an already age-old argument which continued to echo through black American culture in the coming decades, from the startlingly heartfelt monologue delivered by Antonio Fargas as Pam Grier’s brother in Jack Hill’s ‘Foxy Brown’ (1974), to Paul Benjamin’s similar justification for the robbery he’s carried out in Barry Shear’s brilliant ‘Across 110th Street’ (1972), right through to the self-image projected by Ice T, N.W.A. and host of other gangsta-inclined MCs in the ‘90s and beyond.

The irony here of course is that Ingram’s attempts to battle the white system lead him straight into all the pitfalls The Man has left in wait for him. Certainly, this defiant hipster’s track record at the point at which we meet him offers little to be proud of – a debilitating gambling addiction, unpayable debts owed to an Italian mobster, estrangement from his family, and a tendency to work out his frustrations by getting drunk and clowning around on stage, humiliating his fellow musicians and potentially earning him the bums-rush from the one decent gig his talent actually has brought him. In his own way, he’s just as much of a hopeless loser as his opposite number, the stubborn bigot and convicted killer Slater.

Interestingly, in both of these parallel character studies, it is the example provided by women that seems to offer the only glimmer of hope in a story which – no spoiler here, I’m assuming – leaves its troubled male characters unredeemed, unrewarded and stone-cold dead.

Within the schema of Polonsky’s script, Winters’ character seems to represent the potential of an upwardly mobile female workforce, whilst Ingram’s wife’s presumed attempts to build a better life for her children through education and racial integration are contrasted with her husband’s selfish and immature attempts at rebellion.

Even noir fan favourite Gloria Grahame (‘The Big Heat’, ‘In a Lonely Place’ etc), who makes the best of an enjoyable though narratively irrelevant cameo as a neighbour with whom Ryan enjoys an extra-marital tryst, seems to present an unusually positive portrayal of female sexual independence, highlighting the pointed absence from this story of the traditional “femme fatale” figure, ready to soak up male guilt like a sponge.

All in all, this makes for a surprisingly strong line-up of progressive female role models for a ‘50s crime movie, and, though underwritten, these characters all seem designed to provide an optimistic counterpoint to what is otherwise a relentlessly bleak tale of doomed masculinity oozing toward the plug-hole.

We may have focused more on Polonsky’s input thus far, but, if you’ve kept reading up to this point, chances are you’ll be equally aware of Robert Wise’s formidable talents. One of those directors who seems doomed to be perpetually under-appreciated, condemned to “journeyman” rather than “auteur” status, Wise was one of the most articulate technicians of cinematic language to arise from Hollywood’s golden era, and his contributions to the noir canon in particular were exceptional. (1949’s ‘The Set-Up’, also starring Robert Ryan, would definitely find a place on my All Time Top 10 Noirs list, should I ever bother to make one.)

Suffice to say, Wise (who completed ‘Odds Against Tomorrow’ shortly before getting to work on ‘West Side Story’) is at the top of his game here, whilst Joseph Brun’s photography is sharp and stark as it gets - probably veering closer to the ‘realist’ as opposed to ‘expressionist’ end of the noir spectrum, but certainly not lacking in style – the set-bound scenes in particular have all the angular shadows, venetian blinds and confining vertical lines a film studies class could ask for. Dede Allen also deserves a shout-out too for her impactful editing, which in turn is perfectly matched by the rhythms of Lewis’s flawlessly cool score.

For all that it stands out as a superior piece of film artistry however, and in spite of the exhaustive length at which I appear to have written about it, I must confess that, at times, ‘Odds Against Tomorrow’ still somehow left me cold. Like ‘Force of Evil’ [which I wrote about as part of this post] before it, it’s a film I appreciated more than loved.

Though Polonsky’s script here lacks that earlier film’s indigestible, Brechtian dialogue (thank god), something about the systematic, almost bullet-pointed, way in which he defines his characters based upon their social and economic circumstances threatens to leave them lacking individual agency, curiously drained of some essential spark of humanity. Fine performances from the cast can always help to mitigate this of course, and god knows, Polonksy’s work certainly offers actors more to chew on than most Hollywood screenwriters, but another thing that didn’t quite work for me here, sad to say, is Harry Belafonte.

Don’t get me wrong here, I have great regard for Belafonte as an actor and human being, but I just couldn’t shake the feeling that he’s not quite right for the part of Ingram, despite of the fact that he provided the main impetus for actually getting this film off the ground.

(‘Odds Against Tomorrow’ was shot independently for Belafonte’s HarBel production company after he personally acquired the rights to the book, and he retains an executive producer credit.)

It’s not that his performance is bad as such – indeed, he emphasises the essential gentleness and fragility of character extremely well, and portrays his blind fear very effectively. From a modern perspective though at least, Belafonte seems too squeaky clean, too polite, too eloquent to really convince as a young Harlem hipster with a gambling habit and a grudge against the white world.

In fairness though, what now seems like miscasting here was not necessarily the fault of either Belafonte or his collaborators. Lest we forget, ‘Odds Against Tomorrow’ dates from an era in which merely putting a black actor centre stage in a straight drama was considered extremely daring.

Belafonte, like Sidney Poitier, may seem to project a mannered, rather quaint screen presence to us these days, but we must remember that as a fully-fledged black movie star during the ‘50s, he was stepping up to fill a space that previously didn’t even exist. Things would change immeasurably over the next few decades, of course, but it’s 1959 here folks, and realistically, getting a guy who was anything other than well-scrubbed with a nice smile in for this part was just NOT going to happen.

Though movie fans may have had a lot of good reasons to mourn the passing of the era of dark, monochrome glamour of which ‘Odds Against Tomorrow’ represents perhaps the very last gasp, by presenting viewers with a provocative amalgam of the American movie’s past, present and future, the film simultaneously succeeds in drawing our attention to at least a few reasons for dancing on the Golden Age’s grave, marking it out as both a key transitional moment in the history of the American crime film, and a uniquely progressive and provocative addition to the noir canon.

Noir Diary # 3: He Ran All The Way (John Berry, 1951)

Within the grand index of blunt-poetic film noir / pulp fiction titles, I think “HE RAN ALL THE WAY” ranks as a pretty good one. Perhaps not quite up there with the abstract magnificence of ‘Blast of Silence’ or ‘Kiss Me Deadly’, but it definitely fits in nicely alongside ‘Everybody Had a Gun’ or ‘They Drive by Night’ in the “slightly more literal” category.

It’s a shame then that the film itself finds indolent small-time hood Nick Robey (John Garfield) running only as far as his nearest swimming pool, after he finds himself holding the bag when a botched payroll robbery leaves both his more experienced partner (Norman Lloyd) and a cop bleeding out somewhere behind his departing heels.

Desperately trying to concoct a short term survival strategy whilst literally treading water in the crowded public pool, Robey strong-arms himself into an uncomfortable “meet cute” situation with Peggy Dobbs (Shelley Winters), an insecure young woman so startled by Robey’s amorous attentions that she is persuaded to let him accompany her back to her family’s brownstone apartment -- where he proceeds to spend the rest of the movie, holding Peggy’s mother, father and pre-teen brother at gun-point in what modern viewers will swiftly identify as an early example of the now familiar Home Invasion sub-genre.

I suppose it must have been decided at some point that “HE BASICALLY STAYED IN ONE PLACE” or “HE REFUSED TO LEAVE” just didn’t quite cut it as titles, but no matter; where sprinting enthusiasts may find themselves disappointed by ‘He Ran All The Way’, fans of the more socially conscious / gritty realist strand of early ‘50s film noir are in for an absolute treat. In every sense other than the lack of running, this one is about as good as it gets.

As you may be aware, John Garfield stands as about the closest thing ‘40s/’50s Hollywood ever got to a martyred saint. After a career largely spent bucking the demands of the studio system and instead championing radical theatre and progressive social causes, Garfield found himself blacklisted with immediate effect after he refused to “name names” when called before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1951. It has since been widely assumed that the stress caused both by this and by the simultaneous collapse of his marriage were the main factors which led to his sudden death from a pre-existing heart condition in May 1952, aged just 39.

Shot at around the same time that Garfield was called to testify before HUAC, ‘He Ran All The Way’ represents the star’s final film appearance, and, in retrospect, it provided him with one hell of a way to go out.

As an early champion of the “method”, Garfield perhaps drew upon his own feelings of persecution and impending criminalisation to help transform Nick Robey into an unsettling, sweat-drenched case study in twitchy, working class delinquent paranoia. Simultaneously pitiable and self-pitying, feckless and sadistic, Robey is unpredictable and delusional enough to become genuinely frightening – the kind of guy capable of flipping out and doing just about anything in a moment of rage, only to breakdown and cry with remorse when it’s all too late. At the same time though, he is also weirdly sympathetic – the archetypical dumb, overgrown kid who was probably raised with a daily beating, and never got an even break.

Garfield delivers a powerhouse performance here that can’t help but dominate the film, and if Robey sometimes feels like a character we’ve met a hundred times before, that’s probably because we’ve seen variations of this kind of performance style refracted through the prism of subsequent generations of actors for whom Garfield’s example kicked open the doors, be it Brando, Pacino, Hoffman, Hopper or whoever.

Speaking of tragic heroes of the black-list era, I’m assuming that screenwriter Dalton Trumbo – who, strangely, used ‘Werewolf of Paris’ author Guy Endore as his “beard” on this occasion – needs no introduction. Although Trumbo has found himself re-evaluated in recent years as a dignified man of letters and the subject of bittersweet, Oscar-bait biopic, his work here serves to remind us that, at its best, his writing wasn’t merely hard-boiled in the conventional sense, but mercilessly cynical and – if you’ll forgive the neologism - dark as fuck.

Systematically assaulting the fragile fictions that his characters use to keep their self-identifies intact, Trumbo’s screenplay for ‘He Ran all the Way’ eventually leaves all of the principal players brutally exposed, with barely a hint of authorial sympathy to fall back on.

Robey’s dysfunctional background for instance is sketched in about as concisely as is humanly possible. When we first meet him, he is in the process of being woken from his slumber, late in the morning, by his dissolute, hard-drinking harridan of a mother (a wonderful bit part from Gladys George, whom you may recall from her turn as Miles Archer’s wife in ‘The Maltese Falcon’).

“If you were a real man, you’d be out looking for a job,” she scolds her son. “If you were a man, I’d punch your teeth in,” he snaps back, before making a cheap shot about her looking worse for wear for her hangover. Oof. It’s hilarious to observe such a comically dysfunctional mother/son relationship, but, when it comes to figuring out how our protagonist ended up as such a mixed up, deadbeat punk, what more could we possibly need to know?

(We only meet Mrs Robey once more in the film incidentally, when the police come calling after Nick is identified as the perpetrator of the robbery. She appears to be enjoying a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon for breakfast, and basically tells them that she doesn’t give a damn if her son lives or dies. Nice lady, huh?)

Through the remainder of the film, Trumbo’s obsessive unpicking of character dynamics helps generate uniquely grim sense of tension, as the five participants in the confined, hot-house apartment set-up flex and pull against each other like the strands of a cat’s cradle. As Robey’s destabilising influence intensifies, all of the component relationships that make up the Dobbs family – father/son, daughter/parents, husband/wife – find themselves compromised and turned upside down.

Wallace Ford in particular does great work here as the father, Fred (‘Treasure of the Sierra Madre’ reference, anyone?), and the scenes that depict his young son’s respect for him disintegrating as he sacrifices his masculine authority by taking a cautious, safety-first approach to dealing with the killer in their midst, are heart-breaking.

Perversely, even as he threatens and insults them, Robey also seems to become fixated with the idea of gaining the family’s acceptance. Presumably recognising their home as the kind of loving, mutually supportive environment that he has so lacked in his own life, he finds himself trying to insert himself into their daily routine as if he were some long lost eldest son, sub-consciously framing Ward as a substitute for his own absent father figure, even as another part of him viciously mocks the older man for his passivity and supposed cowardice. It is only when Robey realises that this acceptance will – obviously – not be forthcoming that becomes enraged and turns to violence.

In all cases though, the characters gain a real depth as their desperation increases. During the early part of the film – before Robey first pulls a gun on the family - we’re inclined to wonder why Peggy Dobbs would tolerate his already slightly unhinged, passive-aggressive behaviour, even to the point of inviting him back home to meet her folks after their first meeting.

A later scene between Peggy and a co-worker at her bakery job however clarifies for us that she feels so starved of male attention, and is so lacking in the self-confidence to go out and find any herself, that, when Robey initially comes on to her at the pool, she’s so taken aback that she deliberately overlooks the atmosphere of violence and suspicion dripping off her new suitor, and, once their physical attraction to each other has been established, finds herself willing to do just about anything to stop him leaving without her… even though that is the very thing upon which her family’s safety depends.

In her own way, Peggy is revealed to be as desperate and self-deluding as Robey. Torn between the bosom of her family and the desire to break away and establish an independent life for herself, she represents something very different from the procession of femme fatales, wronged wives and dilettante daughters we normally encounter in film noir, and Winters – a consistently underrated performer who went on to play a long series of these “doomed, mixed up floozy” roles – makes her into just as much of a fascinating and unpredictable piece of work as Garfield does his character.

If ‘He Ran All The Way’ has one weakness, it is probably it’s tendency to veer toward one of those “filmed stage play” type movies that became all the rage on the more cerebral side of Hollywood during the 1950s, as the kind of resurgent theatre so beloved of Garfield began to exert a greater influence upon the industry. (You know, ‘All About Eve’, ’12 Angry Men’ - that sort of thing. Actually, Robert Aldrich’s 1954 film of Clifford Odets’ scabrous Hollywood bridge bonfire ‘The Big Knife’, with a thinly veiled analogue of John Garfield as its central character and Winters in a supporting role, is a perfect example too.)

Unlike some films in this vein however, ‘He Ran..’ rarely suffers too badly from its limited scope, and never feels anything less than thoroughly cinematic. Which brings us neatly the third corner of this movie’s black list triangle – the considerably less feted figure of director John Berry.

Unlike Garfield and Trumbo, Berry was only just beginning to establish himself as a Hollywood ‘name’ when the Feds came knocking (he directed the highly regarded noir ‘Tension’ in 1949), and as a result he seems to have struggled to make much headway after he returned from exile in France (where he directed several of the Eddie Constantine Lemmy Caution movies) in the ‘70s, working only intermittently on a decidedly odd bunch of projects through until he slipped out of the industry in the ‘80s.

This is a shame, because, on the basis of his work here, Berry certainly had the necessary chops to have done some really great work, had circumstances been different. The opening scenes depicting the robbery and Garfield’s flight to the swimming baths are great examples of the kind of down-on-the-street location shooting that started to bring a new energy to noir and crime films from the late ‘40s onward, and his approach to blocking the action within the cramped apartment set within which the latter two thirds of the film take place remains novel and involving throughout.

Taking a few notes perhaps from John Huston’s old “power relationships expressed through the framing” jive in ‘The Maltese Falcon’, Berry manages to keep the lid pushed down tight on the movie’s pressure cooker plotting, giving his actors enough space to let rip whilst never allowing things to boil over into melodrama.

The film’s quality is further enhanced meanwhile by some superb photography from the legendary James Wong Howe. Though he has relatively little to work during interior scenes, the few nocturnal exteriors we get to see, as the increasingly paranoid Robey sneaks glances through the blinds, seeing sinister figures passing in the night, look absolutely fantastic. Minimal lights gleams like liquid gold off the bonnets of pitch black automobiles as they slide through gaps in the deep, inky blackness, highlighting stark silhouettes lurking on the corners of the screen. It’s pure noir, and pure brilliance – a beautifully expressionistic method of shooting urban environments that Howe would go on to perfect a few years later in a similarly talky movie with a few rogue strands of noir lurking in its DNA, Alexander Mackendrick’s ‘The Sweet Smell of Success’ (1957).

All of these strengths – Howe’s sleek visual poetry, Berry’s dynamic direction, Trumbo’s writing and a set of feverishly intense performances from the central cast - come together for what I believe has to be one of the greatest and most devastating ironic finales in all of film noir. I won’t spoil it for you here though, so instead let’s talk about the political undercurrents that – somewhat inevitably, under the circumstances – can be found lurking beneath the surface of this ostensibly simple story.

In view of the personnel involved, it’s not surprising to discover that ‘He Ran all the Way’ attracted the attention of our old friend Thom Anderson, who included it on the list of films he considered key exemplars of what he termed film gris - a short-lived trend of the late ‘40s and early ‘50s that saw a small group of left-leaning filmmakers using the tropes of the low budget crime thriller to offer a critique of American capitalism, and to explore collectivist alternatives to Hollywood’s usual brand of heroic individualism.

Whereas pictures like Thieves Highway and Force of Evil were explicitly polemical in this regard however, ‘He Ran All The Way’ is a lot more circumspect, keeping things sub-textual for the most part. Indeed, it is easy to watch the film without even considering the possibility that it is trying to make a political point; I know that I certainly did. It was only later, noting that the film made it onto Anderson’s list and considering the background of the people who made it, that it got me thinking about just how well the hard-boiled crime idiom lends itself to an anti-capitalist message.

This isn’t exactly a new idea of course, and wouldn't have been in 1951 either. After all, the Warner Bros gangster films of the 1930s provide about as savage a critique of free market capitalism as could possibly be wished for, whilst many of Dashiell Hammett’s genre-defining stories explore the human cost of greed and civic corruption. Specifically in terms of film noir though: where there is money, there are guns, and where there are guns, there is death (and sex, but that’s another story). It ain’t exactly a subtle equation, but what more could an aspiring socialist filmmaker need to get the ball rolling?

In ‘He Ran All The Way’, the Dobbs family seem happily devoid of any of these things when we first meet them. Although they clearly struggle to make ends meet, for the most part they seem satisfied with their lot in life, and I don’t think any family members mention money (or a lack thereof) at any point. They function as a tight-knit, collective unit, with each member keeping the well-being of the others in mind at all times.

When Nick Robey crashes into their life however, he brings money – loads of it. Flashing it around, boasting of how much he got away from the robbery with, he tries his best to revel in the status it confers. He also brings his gun of course, wielding it with all the shaky-handed, phallic substitute ‘certainty’ you’d expect. He mocks the family for their lack of ambition, for the drudgery of their dead-end jobs and for their failure to pursue their individual dreams (and, through his hold over Peggy, he brings the dangerous promise of sex into the picture too of course). Under the stress of his assault, the functionality of the family unit begins to deteriorate, as long repressed resentments and independent desires begin to surface.

In one of the film’s most memorable scenes, Robey attempts to win the family’s gratitude by ordering in a lavish banquet for them. Like the sainted peasants in some revolutionary melodrama however, they take a united stand and refuse his food, recognising it as the fruit of his ill-gotten gains and returning to their own simple fare instead.

This of course sends Robey into a calamitous rage which sees his supposed gesture of kindness transformed into a weird new form of torture, as he forces his prisoners to eat the luxury food at gun point; a reflection perhaps of the way that, for all its promises of benevolent progress, American capitalism countenances no alternatives, having essentially spent the entire modern era refusing to take ‘no’ for an answer from the rest of the world.

Admittedly, it could be argued that the psychological complexity of the film’s characters makes such a straight allegorical reading problematic, but it’s certainly there if you want it, and it adds a particularly dark caste to the Dobbs family’s prospects of future unity after their trauma ends and the credits roll, given the nature of the circumstances that eventually lead to Robey receiving the tarmac-and-lead-based reward we know lays in store for all such independently motivated, overgrown J.D. psychopaths.

Looking back with almost seventy years-worth of retrospect, it seems deeply ironic that, whilst the McCarthyite assertion that Hollywood movies were subliminally spreading dangerous communist sedition has generally been judged by history as wrong-headed, paranoid hysteria, close textural analysis of a film like ‘He Ran all the Way’ might have helped give credence to all of HUAC’s worst fears.

As the final film on Anderson’s chronological list, ‘He Ran all the Way’ can be seen to represent the last gasp of ‘film gris’ before the blacklist shutters slammed down. As Nick Robey’s fist grabs at the air and his wild eyes close for the last time, it also bids farewell to one of the best – and certainly one of the most influential – actors of the noir era.

That’s quite a weight of historical significance for a quick n’ nasty low budget thriller to shoulder, but the movie itself is more than solid enough to take the load. Standing alongside ill-starred classics like ‘Gun Crazy’ (1950) and Ida Lupino’s ‘The Hitchhiker’ (1953), it is one of the very best crime movies to have emerged from this particular time and place.