THE DEFIANT ONES (1958)

Country: U.S.A.

Genre(s): Adventure / Drama

Director: Stanley Kramer

Cast: Tony Curtis / Sidney Poitier / Theodore Bikel

Plot

Chained together, two escaped convicts, one white and one black, try to make their way to freedom with the law in pursuit.

What I Liked

In 1957, the year before “The Defiant Ones” was released, nine African American children required a military escort to go to school in Little Rock, Arkansas to keep them from being accosted by the white segregationist protesters outside of the school.  Just a couple of years earlier Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat to make room for a white person, prompting a series of events that led to a boycott of the bus system in Montgomery, Alabama led by Martin Luther King, Jr.  Fourteen year old Emmett Till had been lynched for allegedly flirting with a white woman in 1955.  Race was clearly a hotbed of controversy in America in the late 1950s. Amid all this, Stanley Kramer and his cast and crew took a risk by making “The Defiant Ones,” an allegory for race relations in America.

 It could be said that the film’s basic premise, of a white racist and an bold black man being chained to one another and having to rely upon each other to live, oversimplifies a complicated topic.  I honestly believe that the film’s genius is in its simplification, by suggestion that the matter gets right down to the most basic of principles: survival.  Instead of complicating matters by showing every facet of the segregation versus integration issue or analyzing the causes of the civil rights movement or portraying the federal law versus states’ rights question, Kramer’s film strips all the rhetoric and bullshit away and gets down to people and universal truth.  I suppose that kind of simplification is why allegory in general is so effective.  “The Defiant Ones” is an allegory that was made particularly powerful in 1958 not only by its representation of a controversial topic of the day, but by refusing to water down the realism of the conflict between white Joker and black Cullen.  Joker routinely calls Cullen “nigger,” a word which incites Cullen to understandably lose his temper and lash out physically, once coming close to killing Joker.  Ugliness like this represented in a major motion picture in the “Leave It To Beaver” 1950s would certainly have made quite a few people uncomfortable.

The characters are played with fiery energy by Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier, each of whom received best actor nominations for their performances.  The transformation of their relationship from spiteful resentment to devoted friendship may be predictable from a plot standpoint, but Curtis and Poitier make the development both natural and moving.

What I Didn’t Like

The scenes involving the police search for the escaped convicts amounted to nothing more than an unnecessary sub-plot that added nothing to the film’s overall message.  The two characters vying for control of the group, the local Sheriff and the police Captain, were mildly interesting but possessed nowhere near the combustible tension inherent in the conflict between Joker and Cullen.  Certainly showing the police getting ever closer on the tail of the two heroes was necessary to add drama to what is ultimately a chase movie.  I just felt it could have been handled better.

Most Memorable Scene

Though this movie covers a lot of ground, literally, I still feel its script would work just effectively on a stage as a play.  The relationship and dialogue between its characters are the real highlights of the film.  The best dialogue comes as the two of them wait in hiding for the opportunity to rob a country store, as each man reveals his personal history and motivations.  It is here that we first see the hatred between the two characters break and a mutual respect begin to form.  Joker and Cullen learn that they are not as different as they once believed and find a common ground in their hatred for the rules society insisted they live by.

My Rating: 4.5 out of 5