333. The Defiant Ones (1958)

Running Time: 97 minutes
Directed By: Stanley Kramer
Written By: Nedrick Young, Harold Jacob Smith
Main Cast: Tony Curtis, Sidney Poitier, Theodore Bikel, Charles McGraw, Lon Chaney Jr.
Click here to view the trailer

A BLACK AND WHITE STORY

"That's a great way to live. You keep quiet all your life and the only time you open your mouth is when you're dyin'."

Man, I loved me some Tony Curtis in "Sweet Smell of Success" and so with the impending viewing of "Some Like It Hot", I figured why not make it a double feature of Tony Curtis and pop in "The Defiant Ones" as well. The wife and I actually owned "The Defiant Ones", but I had never seen it, as it had been one of her purchases, approximately a year or so ago.

The premise is pretty straight forward, so I'll TRY to keep it short and sweet and we can all get on with our lives. When a truck, transporting prisoners, rolls over the road during a rainstorm, no one is killed, but two convicts (who are chained at the wrist) escape. The cons are Johnny "Joker" Jackson (Curtis) and Noah Cullen (Poitier) - a white man and a black man, apparently something that would've never happened in a real life Southern chain gang. As you may have guessed, the racial tensions are ratcheted as high as they'll go and we flip back and forth between watching the convicts try to get further away and watching a posse of men form, who are out to recapture the two men. Joker and Cullen get a pretty good head start, but are slowed up when they're caught trying to steal food and find means to break the chain, during a stop at a small village. They're nearly lynched, but are cut loose by one of the villagers, a former member of the chain gang himself. Eventually they make their way to the farm of a single mother, where they manage to break the chains. The single mother kindles up a little romance with Joker, but can Joker bring himself to abandon Cullen?

If you wanted to poke at "The Defiant Ones", it'd be really easy to. I mean, the whole film is an obvious symbol for whites and blacks trying to coexist in the United States, at a time when a lot of whites either refused or were hesitant to make peace with the African American population. I've discovered that the one thing I hate, almost as much as racism, is movies that continually try and make it the basis of their plot. If you look back to my "Crash" review, you'll find a glowing rating, but as time went on, I realized that I very much dislike "Crash", because it comes off as too much of a sermon. Stop telling me how wrong racism is. Anyone with a brain in their head, who has the sense enough to choose your picture as their selected viewing, is probably already going to know that and I highly doubt any Clan members or white supremacists were holding a "Crash" ticket. But, we're not talking about "Crash" are we and thank God.

No, what we're talking about is "The Defiant Ones", a picture that I won't poke the stick at and one that, instead, I'll embrace and call a hell of a picture. It certainly doesn't come off as preachy and I can swallow the hokey symbolism angle, as long as theirs a good movie to back it all up and is there ever! Curtis and Poitier are fantastic, just as I'd suspected and the whole storyline is right up my alley. The film taps into a previously untapped market and that is the "buddy prisoner" film. It's lesser known than it's sister genre, the "buddy cop" film, but just as good and usually more edgy. I mean, come on folks, what more can I say? What's not to like about a couple of prisoner, one black and one white, chained at the wrists, trying to find a means to separate themselves, set in the South at a time when white men and black men weren't seen together?? It has gold written all over it and I loved it, and I think you will to, but like I said, just try to overlook the whole hokey symbolism thing.

RATING: 8/10  "Buffalo 66" and "The Apartment" have set the bar high already this season, so I can't go '10', but still damn good and it (hopefully) will find a spot on the TOP 20.

MOVIES WATCHED: 608
MOVIES LEFT TO WATCH: 393

February 3, 2013  7:39pm