The Defiant Ones ****½ (1958, Tony Curtis, Sidney Poitier, Theodore Bikel) – Classic Movie Review 3424

Producer-director Stanley Kramer’s classic liberal 1958 film is a simple, moral tale that works well thanks to the strong writing, the classy photography, the all-round excellent performances, the exciting chase sequences, the crafted production and the fine direction. The moral is that two men must learn to get along if they are going to elude capture.

Two convicts on the run in the American South are hampered by the chains that shackle them together and the fact that one of the inmates John ‘Joker’ Jackson (Tony Curtis) is a white racist and his partner Noah Cullen (Sidney Poitier) is a prejudiced-against African American. They hate each other. Or, to put it another way, ‘they couldn’t like each other less, they couldn’t need each other more.’

Curtis and Poitier are first rate, and Theodore Bikel does well, too, in an interesting role as the humane Sheriff Max Muller, who organises a posse to track the duo down in what he considers a civilised, justice-respecting manner – just the opposite of the police chief in In the Heat of the Night (1967).

The movie won two Oscars: Nedrick Young (aka Nathan E Douglas) and Harold Jacob Smith for the Best Original Story and Screenplay and Sam Leavitt for the Best Black-and-White Cinematography. Nedrick Young had been blacklisted at the time and the Oscar went to his pseudonym ‘Nathan E. Douglas’. Far too late, in 1993 AMPAS restored Young’s credit on the request of his widow and recommendation of the Academy’s writers’ branch. There were seven more nominations, including Best Picture and Best Actor for both stars.

The movie also won the 1959 Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture and Poitier won the Bafta for Best Foreign Actor.

Also in the cast are Charles McGraw, Lon Chaney Jnr, King Donovan, Claude Akins, Lawrence Dobkin, Whit Bissell, Carl ‘Alfalfa’ Switzer and Cara Williams.

It was the last film of former Our Gang star Carl ‘Alfalfa’ Switzer before he was shot to death on 21 January 1959, aged 31, by an acquaintance in Mission Hills, California, during an argument over $50 that Switzer felt the acquaintance owed him. The acquaintance pleaded self defence, and the judge ruled the death justifiable homicide.

Reporter: ‘How come they chained a white man to a black?’ Sheriff: ‘The warden’s got a sense of humour.’

Tony Curtis said: ‘At first they said I was too good-looking for the part. So I wore a false nose and made myself look uglier. I felt pretty strongly about wanting to do that movie.’

It was remade as a TV movie in 1986 by director David Lowell Rich, with Robert Urich and Carl Weathers.

Kramer worked again with Poitier on Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967).

© Derek Winnert 2016 Classic Movie Review 3424

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