The Defiant Ones

Two escaped convicts chained together, white and black, must learn to get along in order to elude capture.

• Director: Stanley Kramer
• Genre:Crime / Drama / Thriller
• Runtime:96 minutes

Cast

Tony Curtis : John ‘Joker’ Jackson
Sidney Poitier : Noah Cullen
Theodore Bikel : Sheriff Max Muller
Charles McGraw : Capt. Frank Gibbons
Lon Chaney Jr. : Big Sam (as Lon Chaney)

Two prisoners in the American South, African-American Noah Cullen (Poitier) and racist John “Joker” Jackson (Curtis), escape from a chain gang. Despite their mutual loathing for each other, they are forced to cooperate, as they are chained together. Gradually, they begin to respect and like each other.

Cullen and Joker flee through difficult terrain and weather, with a brief stop at a village where they attempt to break into a general store, in hopes of obtaining food and tools to break the chain that holds them together. Instead, however, they are captured by the townspeople, who form a lynch mob; they are saved only by the interference of “Big” Sam (Chaney), a man who is appalled by his neighbors’ bloodthirst. Sam convinces the townspeople to lock the convicts up and turn them in in the morning, but that night, he secretly releases them, after revealing to them that he is also a former chain-gang prisoner.

Finally, they run into a young boy named Billy. They make him take them to his home and his mother (Williams), whose husband has abandoned his family. The escapees are finally able to break their chains. When they spend the night there, the lonely woman is attracted to Joker and wants to run off with him. She advises Cullen to go through the swamp to reach the railroad tracks, while she and Joker drive off in her car. The men agree to split up. However, after Cullen leaves, the woman reveals that she had lied – she sent Cullen into the dangerous swamp to die so she could have Joker to herself. Furious, Joker runs after his friend; as he leaves, Billy shoots him.Read more