The Defiant Ones Reviews

James Baldwin famously derided this as white liberal wish fulfillment, and he wasn’t off the mark. Stanley Kramer’s cinema at its most essential elements is just that, well-intentioned if sanctimonious liberal guilt/fantasy. The Defiant Ones is another entry in that canon as it literalizes elements of racism by shackling the races together in a chain gang.

Never mind reality when there’s an elaborate metaphor to explore racial tensions during the civil rights movement. It’s a long-form fable that starts out like The Fugitive, car crash that leaves two prisoners chained together on the run with the law in hot pursuit, before providing a series of moralizing episodes that explore a host of issues. Some of them are great and some of them are heavy-handed in their treatment, more often than not they swing between the two modes.

Excusing that there’s no way the deeply segregated south would ever allow black and white prisoners to mix, The Defiant Ones is still a nice display for the cinematic talents of stars Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis. Yes, Curtis’ natural accent slips through his attempt at a southern one, but the emotional heft and power he brings to role outweigh that detail. While Poitier’s riotous indignant, even better served as Virgil Tibbs, and barely concealed rage at the system made me rethink my prior idea of him as a marbleized figure, basically a living monument. They’re wonderful individually but even better playing off each other.

There’s still plenty of The Defiant Ones that has aged finely, not just the two lead performances, but Cara Williams and Lon Chaney, Jr. as a lonely widow and sympathetic former prisoner, respectively, who appear in the best vignettes of the film. It is certainly the best of the Kramer/Poitier films having remained more visceral and dynamic than the lethargic Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and hysterical Pressure Point. Restraint is one of the key ingredients that has allowed this one to stand tall during the intervening decades.