Odds Against Tomorrow may well be the "last film noir," containing elements of the film noir of the '40s and '50s but predicting some of the subgenres into which the genre was to evolve in the '60s--films about racial conflicts, psychopathic criminals, homosexual bank robbers and other "socially conscious" variants of the crime drama. Robert Ryan gives an excellent performance as a Southern drifter whose hatred of blacks is focused on his partner in a bank heist in upstate New York. Harry Belafonte is a Harlem musician drawn into the crime in order to pay back a debt before a hoodlum takes his payment in more violent ways. Ed Begley plays the third partner in crime, a cold-blooded, corrupt cop who masterminds the heist and then finds himself caught in the crossfire between Ryan and Belafonte. In his original New York Times review, Bosley Crowther wrote, "...the sheer dramatic build-up of this contemplation of a crime is of an artistic caliber that is rarely achieved on the screen. Under the tight and strong direction of the realist, Robert Wise...the drama accumulates tensely... Following the proven techniques of the so-called 'documentary style,' Mr. Wise shot all his outdoor scenes in New York City and Hudson, N.Y., thus catching in Joseph Burn's fine camera the look of actuality... Mr. Ryan is brilliant, cold and rasping...recalling the anti-Semitic killer he played in the melodramatic Crossfire a dozen years ago. As the butt of his obsession, Mr. Belafonte is firm and sure..."