The New Pictures

Odds Against Tomorrow (HarBel;

United Artists) is a thriller that makes a peculiar plea for racial integration in the underworld. The hero (Harry Belafonte, who is also the producer) is a singer in a Harlem hotspot who signs on for a bank robbery to pay off his bookie. Unhappily, once he is in, he discovers that another member of the gang is a paranoid punk from Oklahoma (Robert Ryan) who would sooner risk the bundle than his sense of white supremacy. The punk calls the Negro "Brother Bones," and warns him not to "crap out" on the job. "Ah been handlin' [Negroes] all mah life. He's no diff'ent because he's got him a twenty-dollah pair a shoes."

The tension builds well to the climax--thanks partly to Director Robert Wise (I Want to Live!), partly to an able Negro scriptwriter named John O. Killens, but mostly to Actor Ryan, a menace who can look bullets and smile sulphuric acid. But the tension is released too soon--and much too trickily. The spectator is left with a feeling that is aptly expressed in the final frame of the film, when the camera focuses on a street sign that reads: STOP--DEAD END.

The Last Angry Man (Columbia), the hero of Gerald Green's cinemadaptation of his bestselling novel, is a cranky, kindly, old-fashioned family doctor with the sort of character that practice makes perfect. Dr. Sam Abelman (Paul Muni) lives and works in one of the worst neighborhoods in Brooklyn, loves and cares for his patients day and night, though most of them are too ignorant to appreciate him and too poor to pay his bills. The thing

Dr. Sam hates most is "the new age, the age of the galoot, the fast buck, the something-for-nothing crowd," and he goes out of his way to give every phony he sees a piece of his sharp mind.

As long as the picture tells Sam's story, it is pleasantly entertaining. It is good to see Paul Muni again--Stranger on the Prowl (1953) was his last picture--and the folksy, matzo-barrel humor is fun. Unfortunately, the picture tells Sam's story for only 20 minutes or so. The rest of the time (about 80 minutes) the audience watches a big wheel (David Wayne) go round in circles trying to get Sam to appear on television and talk pretty for the people. Sam himself makes the only adequate comment on all this. He gets so sick and tired of the television types that he drops dead.

The Best of Everything (20th Century-Fox), based on Rona Jaffe's bestselling novel (TIME. Sept. 15, 1958), tells what happens to the bright young things from college that come wriggling down to Manhattan to get in The Big Swim. They land in The Typing Pool. And from there, it is only another wriggle to The Flesh Pot. Compared with the hot buttered Manhattan of Authoress Jaffe's imagination, the Hollywood version of the big city is a sort of cautiously diluted Scotch-and-Sodom. Nevertheless, a virgin's virtue can dissolve with appalling celerity in this sinister mixture.

Career Girl No. 1 (Hope Lange) is a Radcliffe grad who goes to work for a paperback publisher and in the evening takes a postgraduate course in premarital relations at the Plaza Hotel. When she discovers that the course only leads to a mistress' degree, she decides to concentrate on her career and eke out her love life with an alcoholic editor of teen topics (Stephen Boyd).

No. 2 (Suzy Parker), an actress who is determined to go places, goes astray with a philandering director (Louis Jourdan). When he kicks her out and takes the next girl in, Suzy takes a header off the nearest fire escape.

No. 3 (Diane Baker), a wide-eyed kid from Colorado, gives her heart and other personal effects to a lowdown uptown type (Robert Evans) who promises to marry her. But on her wedding day, bridal bouquet in hand, she discovers that he is not driving her to the church but to the abortionist.

Add to all this three more major characters (Joan Crawford, Brian Aherne, Martha Hyer), three other office romances, a script loaded with schoolgirl sophistication and half-aphorisms ("Old is when you know all the answers." "No, old is when you don't even bother to ask the question"), and an understandably bored performance by an old Hollywood pro, Director Jean Negulesco. The result is just about the dullest retelling of the old cautionary tale since Bertha, the Sewing-Machine Girl.

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