odds against tomorrow – FilmsNoir.Net

Mister Buddwing (1966): A neo-realist astringency

Mister Buddwing is a late monochrome portrait of amnesia played out in almost surreal fashion on New York City streets. There is only a tenuous connection with noir, and this relates more to the loss of identity trope than a broader concern with alienation in the modern metropolis.

James Garner wakes up in Central Park with amnesia. The only clues to his identity are a couple of pills, a phone number scrawled on a slip of paper, a train timetable, and an engraved cygnet ring. He is well-dressed in a suit and tie, and well-polished brogues. The opening scenes are from the protagonist’s POV, as in Dark Passage and The Lady in the Lake, until Garner sees himself reflected in a glass door. Embarking on a search for his identity he rings the telephone number and begins a day and night spent traversing the city and encountering a series of women he strangely mistakes for a woman called Grace. Meantime he gives himself the moniker of “Sam Buddwing”. The encounters and the city’s streetscapes grab your attention. Overall the script is uneven with the overarching story weaker and less convincing than the episodic vignettes that propel the action. It is these episodes that entertain, with some rally sharp absurdist humor, and great cameos from the actresses who variously portray the women Sam pursues.

The film is best described as a crazy dream disturbed by waking moments of lucidity and lapses into banality. Garner as Sam has a certain charm but his less than stellar performance means the heavy load is carried by the other players. The first encounter is with the scruffy dame who answers Sam’s phone-call, played nicely by an ageing Angela Lansbury, who “puts out” offering the guy coffee, a hug, and some lucre; and sends him on his way. A hungry Sam then has an hilarious breakfast with the Jewish owner of a hash-house. Followed by a taxi-ride – a deftly written and sharp New York cabbie vignette – with Sam pursuing a female college student (Katharine Ross), who he thinks is his wife Grace. This interlude is the weakest with an overly long and overwrought fantasy sequence, but is redeemed by a coda that brings together a menagerie of Greenwich Village types; a hapless cop, nascent hipsters and beats, a gay guy, and a vagrant who thinks he is God – “really Kooksville”. Sam then hooks up with a quirky young off-broadway actress payed beautifully by Suzanne Pleshette. She breathes real life into the picture at this point with her beauty, her charm, and her street-smarts. While the fantasy episode this woman provokes tends to melodrama, Pleshette invests the sequence with a real pathos. Finally, Sam encounters a wealthy lush who likes to slum it in taxis, played with relish and boozy charm by a blonde Jean Simmons. The best scene in the picture then follows when Garner and the blonde crash a high-stakes crap game in a low-rent gambling den. This is a darkly-lit bravura sequence where the camera of DP Ellesworth Fredericks goes into contortions. The bit-players do a sterling job in creating the emotion and rising delirium of being on a roll.

The movie has received a bad rap from critics, including a withering review in the New York Times on its release. There are deep flaws, yes. The direction could have been tauter and the screenplay less melodramatic – the final scene is overly cliched and a let-down. But what director Delbert Mann and cameraman Fredericks have done is created a memorable portrait of a great city with both its grandeur and its desolation, together with a cavalcade of worthy denizens that give a real flavour of the zeitgeist. There is certainly also a high degree of elegance and craft in the intelligent use of close-ups, tracking, aerial, and low-angle shots that command and sustain visual interest. The outside deep-focus scenes have a neo-realist astringency and sad beauty, and many compositions linger in the memory. An edgy minimalist jazz score by Kenyon Hopkins adds a nice contemporary feel.

A must-see portrait of New York on the cusp of the Swinging Sixties, which follows in the tradition of films like The Naked City, Odds Against Tomorrow, and Sweet Smell of Success.

Thanks to Cigar Joe for the heads up on this recent Warner Archive DVD release.

Robert Wise’s Odds Against Tomorrow (1959): A Work of Art

UK film writer Philip French in the Observer in 2009 related that Odds Against Tomorrow (1959) “was the favourite film of Jean-Pierre Melville, who saw it 120 times before directing his noir masterwork Le deuxième soufflé [1966]”. I can share this enthusiasm…

Odds Against Tomorrow (UA 1959) – 96 min.

Director – Robert Wise

Writing credits:
William P. McGivern – novel
Abraham Polonsky (front John O. Killens) and Nelson Gidding – screenplay

Cast:
Harry Belafonte – Johnny Ingram
Robert Ryan – Earle Slater
Shelley Winters – Lorry
Ed Begley – Dave Burke
Gloria Grahame – Helen
Will Kuluva – Bacco
Kim Hamilton – Ruth Ingram
Mae Barnes – Annie
Richard Bright – Coco
Carmen De Lavallade – Kittie
Lew Gallo – Moriarty
Lois Thorne – Edie Ingram

Produced by:
Phil Stein – associate producer
Robert Wise – producer
Harry Belafonte – co-producer (uncredited)

Original Music -John Lewis

Cinematography – Joseph C. Brun

Editor – Dede Allan

Film filmed on location in the town of Hudson in the Hudson River Valley, New York City, and at the Gold Medal Studios in the Bronx.

“There is no idea, no theory, no way of life that cannot be reshaped, illuminated and
made more human by being subject to the imagination and criticism of the artist.”
– Abraham Polonsky

UK film writer Philip French in the Observer in 2009 related that Odds Against Tomorrow (1959) “was the favourite film of Jean-Pierre Melville, who saw it 120 times before directing his noir masterwork Le deuxième soufflé [1966]”. I can share this enthusiasm.

Odds Against Tomorrow is a work of art: truly the culmination of film noir and deserving of much greater recognition not only as a consummate film but as the harbinger of the re-invention of noir in the 60s by Sam Fuller in Hollywood and Melville in France. Most commentators see Orson Welle’s Touch of Evil (1958) as the valedictory film noir of the classic cycle, but to my mind that film’s cross-border setting and non-urban locale do not truly reflect the big city alienation that distinguishes the classic noir cycle. In Odds Against Tomorrow, New York City and its industrial fringe are quasi-protagonists that harbor the angst and desperation of life outside the mainstream – sordid dreams of the last big heist that will fix everything. But as always in the noir universe the relentlessly deterministic metropolis in cahoots with capricious fate kick those dreams out of the ring.

A disgraced ex-cop on the cusp of old-age plans a ‘dream’ heist that will see to his retirement, and he needs two desperate men to help do the deed. The ex-cop, Dave Burke, played by Ed Begley, moving from wild optimism to a quiet desperation, does his research well and identifies two guys that are hungry enough to take the bait. Robert Ryan is Earle Slater, a moody violent veteran who after killing a man is just out of stir, and living with a loving woman played by Shelley Winters, who supports them both. But Earle can’t stomach being supported by a woman, he is no longer young, and he is going nowhere. Harry Belafonte plays a young black jazz musician, Johnny Ingram, with a betting addiction, and who is in hock to a local hood and can’t find the dough. Burke particularly needs a black guy as the hijacking and impersonation of a black café delivery waiter is essential to his plan. Earle is unsure about the job, but his frustration and circumstances bring him round. Johnny sees the plan as wobbly, and anyway his creditor, a hood named Bacco, who has a soft spot for him, is taking instalments for the interest. But in a particularly mean act of treachery Burke convinces Bacco to play hard-ball and demand immediate payment, by guaranteeing the debt. Belafonte gets himself in deeper by playing fast and loose with a gun when pressed for payment, and alienates Bacco big time.

The scene where Burke propositions Bacco is nicely crafted by director Robert Wise. Bacco is in central park feeding pigeons on an open expanse of grass against the city skyline as Burke approaches. After some small-talk as Burke also feeds the pigeons, Burke makes a sudden movement towards Bacco which spooks the birds and gets Burke up-close to Bacco so that he can sotto-voce hatch his stratagem.

Both Earle and Johnny are angry men. Earle a racist at every opportunity denigrates Johnny, who is estranged from his middle-class black wife and young daughter. She wants a life for the child and Johnny will only put her aspirations in jeopardy. Although they still love each other, she won’t take him back. Johnny betrays a seething resentment against an excluding white society triggered by a visit to his wife’s apartment when she is hosting a school PTA meeting, which includes white parents:

Ruth Ingram (flaring): I am trying to make a world fit for Edie to live in. It’s a cinch you’re not going to do it with a deck of cards and a racing form.

Johnny Ingram: But you are, huh? You and your big white brothers. Drink enough tea with ’em and stay out of the watermelon patch and maybe our little colored girl will grow up to be Miss America, is that it?

The suppressed rage of these two men and their mutual antagonism have explosive consequences.

The day of the heist dawns and the gang heads up-state to an industrial town on the Hudson river. The robbery goes down but goes horribly wrong. Burke is dead at the scene, and in a chase that culminates in an oil refinery, Earle and Johnny blow themselves to smithereens in a final shoot-out atop a gasoline silo. There is no romanticism and the scene is reminiscent of Raoul Walsh’s White Heat (1949)only in its technical aspects. When the bodies are recovered at the refinery in the final scene, race is a ‘dead’ issue:

Cop to another cop: Well, these are the two that did it.

Morgue attendant: Which is which?

Cop: Take your pick.

Abe Polonsky’s impressive screenplay takes William P. McGivern’ s basic story and adds deeper characterisations, while removing McGivern’s dramatic and poetically redemptive ending. Polonsky’s denoument is harshly final and without sentiment or pity, but he adds more depth to the Dave Burke and Johnny Ingram characters. In the book Dave Burke is thinly drawn and is not in on the actual heist, and Johnny Ingram is not fully drawn until after the heist. Polonsky had to use a front as he was still blacklisted 10 years after the punks at HUAC destroyed his career. Robert Ryan himself was an activist committed to liberal causes such as SANE and the ACLU.

In June 1999 film writer Louis Proyect attended a screening of Odds Against Tomorrow. After the screening Polonksy, Belafonte, and composer Tom Lewis spoke on a panel hosted by John Schultheiss, a critical contributor to Polonsky’s ‘Odds Against Tomorrow: The Critical Edition’ (Cal State, 1999). Proyect reported:

In a montage of ‘race understanding’ films from the mid 1950s, Schultheiss [explained] how unique Odds Against Tomorrow was. In prior films such as The Defiant Ones, there is a plea for racial tolerance but the black character is always sacrificed in the process. Chained to white racist escaped convict Tony Curtis, fellow escapee Sidney Poitier constantly goes out of his way to show the audience that he will turn the other cheek, while Curtis keeps slapping it. Belafonte explained that he wanted to depict a black character who would not stand for any humiliation. It was also a way to tell Hollywood that he would not kowtow to their idea of how a black character should behave. [Note by Tony D’Ambra: Schultheiss apparently did not mention Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s noir No Way Out (Fox 1950), starring Sidney Poitier, which pre-dates The Defiant Ones, and could be seen to have an empowered black protagonist.]

Belafonte had put his own fortune and reputation on the line. Waiving his fee as an actor, and fronting a quarter-million dollars, he sought to break new ground cinematically. In Schultheiss’s commentary on the film, Belafonte is quoted, “My own personal desire was to put things on the screen that reflected the deeper resonance of black life, things that had never been approached before, even within the United Artists realm.” His partnership with United Artists was a reflection of the special role of the company in Hollywood, which was to be obliterated by corporate ownership a decade or so later. Formed by Charlie Chaplin in the 1920s, United Artists was cooperatively owned by actors, screenwriters and directors who wanted to make uncompromising films…

Schultheiss posed a provocative question to Polonsky. How did his belief in progressive politics square with his decision to write a film with criminals as central characters, who had no socially redeeming qualities? Was it difficult to make what was essentially an entertainment about hardboiled criminals, when his stated beliefs revolved around transforming American society? Polonsky, never one to mince words, practically spit [sic] out his reply. He said that American society itself was criminal and that the film’s characters were just trapped within the system…

Belafonte made two decisions that reflected his own uncompromising beliefs. He hired Abraham Polonsky to write the film, who was still blacklisted. Belafonte’s connections to this world was rooted in his own experience as a blacklistee. What enabled him to break free of McCarthyite repression was his unique folksinging talent, which attracted the support of Ed Sullivan who featured Belafonte regularly on his popular Sunday night television variety show. [Writer Paul] Buhle told me that despite this, Sullivan was a run-of-the-mill red-baiter, who had viciously attacked Polonsky in a newspaper column in the same year Odds Against Tomorrow was being filmed.

The cast is uniformly strong, with a young Belafonte holding his own with veterans Begley and Ryan. Belafonte in a nuanced portrayal convincingly captures the contradictions of a man the prisoner of a gambling habit who loves his family dearly. Begley is pitch perfect as the desperate yet naïve mastermind. Ryan is brilliant as the moody troubled veteran with a rampant anger and racial hatred, who yet manages a tenderness that attracts and holds a decent woman, then cheats on her in vengeful anger when they fight. Gloria Grahame as a young mother and neighbor, who is memorable in a small role, is perversely attracted to this seething violence. The seduction scene is packed with a fierce eroticism.

What makes Odd Against Tomorrow a work of art? Undoubtedly it is the result of a synergy grown from the craft and commitment of a talented film-making team. I have spoken of the screenplay and the cast, and now I need to address the polished achievements of those that put the movie together. Together with DP Joseph C. Brun, Wise re-casts New York as the noir city, with a deep focus, canny lighting, and killer perspectives. As a cinematic city of a haunting cold beauty, a brooding realm where its denizens tread bright boulevards in a bleached-out bizarre dream dreamt by ‘mad men’. The AFI informs us that in an interview Wise said: “I did something in Odds Against Tomorrow I’d been wanting to do in some pictures but hadn’t had the chance. I wanted a certain kind of mood in some sequences, such as the opening when Robert Ryan is walking down West Side Street…I used infra-red film. You have to be very careful with that because it turns green things white, and you can’t get too close on people’s faces. It does distort them but gives that wonderful quality—black skies with white clouds—and it changes the feeling and look of the scenes.” [Robert Wise On His Films (Silman-James, 1995) p. 157]. Those stark monochrome compositions are wonderfully evident in scene after scene. The framing and lighting is stunning. Indeed, the picture has a sort of late-period neo-realism with a French noir patina. The photography shows a city in the throes of a radical re-invention that is adopting the angular mood evident in the new model cars on its streets – all thrust, sharp angles, and fins. The doomed protagonists stand out as anachronisms in this bold new world, and only Johnny puts on a brave front with a flashy white sports-car and dark glasses.

Composer John Lewis’s edgy modern jazz score, played by an ensemble that included Milt Jackson on vibraphone, Percy Heath on bass, Connie Kay on drums, Bill Evans on piano, and Jim Hall on guitar, is demanding and intrusive in a way that gives it an unprecedented role in proceedings. It takes on the role of a Greek chorus that exceeds its mandate by persistently and loudly challenging the protagonists’ actions. Though the soundtrack has quiet piano interludes and significant long silent scenes where nothing much happens – particularly an extended sequence in which each gang-member waits out the afternoon before the heist alone in a desolate industrial landscape on the banks of the Hudson river, its calm beauty sacrificed to the garbage strawn in the water along its shores, and to an overcast desolation. In one scene, Johnny sitting on a dock spies a disturbing object in the water – it turns out to be a ‘white’ doll entangled in kelp and garbage. A commentary by Ted Farlow for a 2008 MoMA screening of the movie nicely conveys the artistry at work: “Bill Evans [on piano], harmonizes beautifully with Dede Allen’s taut editing—with its stretches of haunting silence and its use of shock cuts in place of traditional fades and dissolves—and with Joseph Brun’s stark black-and-white cinematography”.

In the December 31, 1958 issue of Variety, a staff writer deftly encapsulates the movie’s strengths: “Director Robert Wise has drawn fine performances from his players. It is the most sustained acting Belafonte has done. Ryan makes the flesh crawl as the fanatical bigot. Begley turns in a superb study of a foolish, befuddled man who dies, as he has lived, without knowing quite what he has been involved in. Shelley Winters etches a memorable portrait, and Gloria Grahame is poignant in a brief appearance. Joseph Brun’s black and white photography catches the grim spirit of the story and accents it with some glinting mood shots. John Lewis’ music backs it with a neurotic, edgy, progressive jazz score.”

I am edging towards seeing Odds Against Tomorrow as greater than Wise’s other noir masterpiece The Set-Up (1949).

A must-see, Odds Against Tomorrow will screen at the NY Film Forum Wednesday August 17 at 1:00pm, 4:45pm, and 8:30pm. It is available on DVD.

Race and Film Noir: Black and Noir

Mauri Lynn in The Big Night (1951)

If during the 1940s and 1950s Hollywood was not actively racist, it still largely ignored race. Some academics have gone so far as saying that film noir was essentially a manifestation of a transference of a fear of blackness, the other, to a noir nether world of ambivalence and sublimation. But my view is to the contrary. If you look at noir movies over the classic period from the early 40s to the late 50s, a significant number of progressive writers and directors made noirs that deal sympathetically with race as important elements of the story. This is more than can be said of the body of Hollywood output for the period.

Here I would like to cover some of these noirs from 1941 through to 1956. The Harry Belafonte produced Odds Against Tomorrow (1959) is not included in this discussion, as we are dealing here with white Hollywood’s portrayal of blacks.

Blues in the Night (1941) An unusual melodrama cum musical with a leftist heart and a killer performance by Betty Field as cheap femme-fatale. Blues in the Night is a fascinating musical noir melodrama about a budding white jazz band scripted by Robert Rossen, directed by Anatole Litvak, and atmospherically lensed by Ernest Haller, with a b-cast, including a very young Elia Kazan, as a dizzy jazz clarinetist. These impeccable leftist credentials are reflected in the plot and the resolution which talk to personal integrity and the values of solidarity and loyalty. Amazingly for the period an establishing scene in a police lock-up respectfully credits the music’s black roots. A black prisoner is given a lot of screen-time as he sings a blues number and the white cast listen awe-struck.

Body and Soul (1947) This masterwork from Robert Rossen is a melodramatic expose of the fight game and a savage indictment of money capitalism. The powerful screenplay by Abraham Polonsky is brought to the screen with an authority and beauty that is still breathtaking. From the editing to the photography and direction, the film is a work of art. The black actor Canada Lee has a substantial role as a damaged ex-boxer, whose tragic death following a brutal betrayal by a crooked white promoter is one of the film’s central elements and perhaps the most affecting scene in the film.

The Reckless Moment (1949) Max Ophuls takes a blackmail story and infuses it with a complexity and subtlety rarely matched in film noir. Ophuls’ last Hollywood picture is a great film. It is a brilliant example of the dynamics of the auteur working inside the studio system. Ophuls’ long and fluid takes and subtle mise-en-scene infuse the movie with a rare subtlety. Joan Bennett as the threatened middle-class housewife, Lucia Parker, and James Mason as the Irish blackmailer Donnelly, are both impeccable, but it is Joan Bennett as the wife and mother plunged into a noir world of criminality that carries the drama forward. She struggles to defend an idyllic domesticity against a rising tide of darkness that would engulf her family. Lucia’s black maid, Sybil, plays a central role in the film. The Canadian film critic Robin Wood has written: “Sybil, and the splendid actress [Frances E. Williams] who plays her, deserve comment… The film’s presentation of her represents a drastic break with the conventional demeaning stereotype of the devoted black maidservant. Sybil’s hovering presence is a recurring leitmotif throughout the film, Ophuls taking every opportunity to show her watching and listening in the background of scenes in which (because of her social position) she is denied active participation. The empathy she manifests for Lucia is altogether different from the servile devotion to family of the stereotype she superficially resembles but from which she so drastically departs: it is essentially the concern of a woman who is fully aware of her oppression for another who is equally oppressed but unable to recognize the fact… In certain ways she resembles John (Art Smith), the mute servant of Letter From an Unknown Woman, the point being that their very exclusion from participation in the affairs of their employers (John by his handicap, Sybil by her colour) gives them a distance that makes possible a heightened awareness.”

Juano Hernandez in Young Man With a Horn (1950)

Young Man with a Horn (1950) A fine melodrama with true pathos, great jazz, and an intelligent screenplay by HUAC blacklistee Carl Foreman. Young Man with a Horn is loosely based on the biography of jazz trumpeter Bix Beiderdecke: the story of how a lonely white kid in LA learns the trumpet from a black musician, who becomes his close friend and mentor. His shift to New York in pursuit of a career is the stuff of melodrama; young guy makes good, marries the wrong woman and abandons his friends, and after tragedy finds a kind of redemption. There is great jazz played by Hoagey Charmichael and Harry James, nice songs from a young Doris Day, solid acting from Kirk Douglas in the lead, Lauren Bacall as the wife, Juano Hernandez as the black trumpeter, and Charmichael as Douglas’ piano-playing buddy. The strength of the film is in the script by Carl Foreman (who during filming of his script for High Noon in 1951 appeared at HUAC and was later blacklisted by Hollywood studio bosses). Redemption for the young man with the horn comes from a realisation – triggered by the tragic death of his black mentor – that a great artist’s obsession with his craft is not the only requirement for artistic fulfillment – it cannot come from a sterile wedding of player and instrument but ultimately from a deeper maturity which comes from embracing human relationships and commitment – a responsibility to and for others. The mentor’s death and its immediate precedent lend a true pathos to the melodrama, and the prominence given to the black father-figure in a film of this era is a revelation.

The Set-Up (1949 ) Robert Ryan is great as washed-up boxer in Robert Wise’ sharp expose of the fight game packed into a lean 72 minutes. From RKO and filmed at night on a studio lot, this movie is brooding and intense, with Robert Ryan, as the aging boxer, “Stoker” Thompson, in perhaps his best role. The boxers’ dressing room, where Stoker’s essentially decent persona is established from his interactions with the other boxers, is beautifully evoked. Each person in that room is deeply and sympathetically drawn, and these scenes are enthralling. To the movie makers’ credit, remember this is 1949, there is a black boxer, who responds to Stoker’s friendliness, with a heart-felt wish of good luck, after winning his own fight.

The Big Night (1951) Joseph Losey’s last American movie is a powerful and affecting drama of a white boy crossing into manhood one big noir night. During the young man’s dark journey, he confront his own racism, when he encounters a young black woman after being moved by her beauty and soulful singing in a night-club. A close-up of the singer renders her pain as important as the central protagonist’s bewilderment and regret.

The Well (1951) This movie deals explosively with race and mob hysteria. Up there with Fritz Lang’s Fury (1936) and Cy Endfield’s The Sound of Fury (1950). The seeming tolerance of small town is shattered when a white mining engineer is accused of abducting a 5-yo black girl. The girl’s family is given equal billing in this adventerous picture, which received AANs for the screenplay and editing. The reconciliation at the end is idealistic but fragile.

The Killing (1956) Kubrick’s heist movie has a bloody savage climax. ‘Individuality is a monster, and it must be strangled in its cradle… ‘ In a pivotal scene a black parking attendant confronts the reality of prejudice when push comes to shove.

POSTSCRIPT:
To these films should be added No Way Out (1950) and The Breaking Point (1950). In No Way Out a young black intern’s struggle against the prejudice of a deranged criminal confronts the issue of race head-on. A white woman is redeemed by her decent self opening to the other: black people who show her a path to a life of decency free of prejudice and self-loathing. In The Breaking Point the death of a black man is for society of little consequence, his despairing boy ignored and left to discover the fate of his father alone – completely alone – a closing scene that is the most subversive and poignant in all of film noir.

Blood on the Moon (1948): Quintessential Noir Western

A drifter becomes embroiled in a violent dispute between an Arizona cattle rancher and local homesteaders. (1948 RKO. Directed by Robert Wise 88 mins)

Cinematography by Nicholas Musuraca
Screenplay by Lillie Hayward and Luke Short (adaptation of his novel “Gunman’s Chance”)
Film Editing by Samuel E. Beetley
Art Direction by Albert S. D’Agostino and Walter E. Keller
Original Music by Roy Webb
Starring Robert Mitchum, Barbara Bel Geddes, and Robert Preston
Filmed on location in Arizona and the RKO Ranch California
Robert Wise also directed: The Set-Up (1949) and Odds Against Tomorrow (1959)

“A bevy of late ’40s RKO talent, including ace cameraman Nick Musuraca, combine to make an intriguing noir Western. A complex tale of duplicity and split loyalties is played out against a noir backdrop of low-ceilinged bars and rain-soaked windswept darkness. Mitchum delivers his customarily immaculate, stoned performance as a reluctant hired gun duped into heading a trumped-up homesteaders’ revolt, and Bel Geddes plays the spunky cowgirl who engages him in erotic gun-play.” – By NA for the Time Out Film Guide

Blood on the Moon: what a great title for a noir western from a dream RKO film noir team! Steven H. Scheuer in his Movies on TV guide rates this movie as only 2½ out of 4 stars, but his terse write-off, to my mind perversely establishes its noir credentials: “Murky, violent, post-war western”.

The film weaves a classic noir scenario into a western with all the motifs of the genre: the mysterious drifter with divided loyalties, the virginal rancher’s daughter in britches, the conniving proto-gangster, the crooked Indian-Reservation agent, hired-guns, shout-outs, bar-room brawls, and the Arizona backdrop, while organically integrating the noir elements of the redeemed noir protagonist, doom-laden atmospherics, outbursts of violence, and vengeance into the story.

Mitchum as the drifter is classic Mitchum, and Barbara Bel Geddes truly engaging as the rancher’s younger daughter, with Robert Preston delivering a competent bad-guy, who in a neat twist is the homme-fatale to the rancher’s older daughter. The wonderful Walter Brennan is great as an old homesteader, who as an active protagonist personifies the moral underpinnings of the story and its resolution.

But the movie belongs to director Wise and cinematographer Musuruca. From the opening frame of the drifter’s silhouette riding over a mountain pass in driving rain in the day’s gloaming, you know you are in noir territory. The night-for-night scenes use available light and sharp contrasts to develop the dark themes of violence and betrayal, with interior scenes using key lighting and disturbing angular shots to establish risk and menace. The daylight scenes are filmed in classic western-style with deep focus and from higher angles. There is a brilliantly filmed cattle stampede at night in the middle of the film, that has to be text-book. The score from Roy Webb adapts seamlessly from the dramatic to elegiac scenes of the lone horseman on the plain.