Odds against Tomorrow

In Odds against Tomorrow (1959), the relation between crime thriller and social commentary in Robert Wise’s film can be said to turn the generic glove inside out so that the heist picture becomes a vehicle for social protest. Unlike The Defiant Ones (1957), in which the positive social message is compromised by its ultimately regressive take on the prison picture, the apocalyptic, seemingly nihilistic conclusion of Odds against Tomorrow represents a negative critique of both the heist and social-problem picture. From this dual point of view, Wise’s film may be said to be what Jonathan Munby calls a “civil rights noir,” an oxymoron that points to the limits of the classic social-problem film even as it points up the latent utopianism of the heist picture. Unlike the conclusion of The Asphalt Jungle, which looks backward to the nation’s agrarian past, the ending of Odds against Tomorrow evokes the lunar landscape and, by implication, the promise of the “new frontier”--of space travel and civil rights in the oppressive face of ignorance and prejudice.

From the Cabaret Number to the Melodrama of Dance Reform

Chapter 4 focuses on two Bharatanatyam-trained stars in the 1950s and 1960s, Vyjayanthimala and Waheeda Rehman, analyzing changes in film dance alongside the canonization of specific classical and folk dance forms by the Sangeet Natak Akademi. By studying how dance training influences acting repertoires, this chapter calls attention to movement, gesture, and bodily comportment to enhance our understanding of virtuosity and technique, proposing a movement-based analysis of film acting grounded in kinesthetic performance and spectatorship. Rehman and Vyjayanthimala’s most ambitious production numbers speak to their own performative desires as trained dancers. Films featuring these A-list actresses as dancing protagonists evince a generic tendency, described here as the “melodrama of dance reform,” which combines the dance spectacular with the “social problem” film, producing in the process cinematic figurations riven with anxieties and aspirations around female sexuality, bodily movement, and economic independence.

Confronting Domestic Violence and Familial Abuse: Once Were Warriors (Lee Tamahori, 1994)

This chapter points to the presence of three often-overlooked coming-of-age narrative strands in Lee Tamahori’s Once Were Warriors, in what is ostensibly a social problem film. A comparison with Alan Duff’s autobiographical novel from which the film was adapted, reveals strategies that Tamahori adopted to invest the story with a more standardized generic complexion that relates it to the Hollywood action films of filmmakers like Robert Aldrich and Sam Peckinpah and Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns for the sake of enlarging its box office appeal for an international audience. Finally, the discussion shows how Tamahori changed the ideological underpinnings of the story by converting Duff’s neoliberal vision of self-help into an assumption that a return to the values of traditional Māori culture is the remedy for the ills of socio-economically deprived Māori who have migrated to the city.