Defiant Ones, The

The Defiant Ones, a film directed by Stanley Kramer and released in 1958, is the story of two convicts who have escaped a southern chain gang and face physical challenges. This fast-paced, suspenseful film was made at a critical time in the civil rights movement, and what would otherwise be a straightforward action-adventure is complicated by the fact that one convict is white—John “Joker” Jackson (actor Tony Curtis)—and the other is black—Noah Cullen (Sidney Poitier).

From the outset, Kramer throws down the gauntlet to those who believe they can rule by fear and discrimination. Although the recent Red Scare years had resulted in the blacklisting of several hundred Hollywood personnel, in The Defiant Ones, Kramer himself was defiant. In the opening credits, two men playing small parts as truck drivers have their faces appear directly above the names of screenwriters Nedrick Young and Harold Jacob Smith. These were the men's own names, with one twist: Nedrick Young was the blacklisted Nathan E. Douglas, but he and Smith received the 1958 Academy Award for best screenplay written directly for the screen.

This theme of resistance is taken forward through the film's technique and narrative. Beginning on a rainy night as a truck comes into view, the soundtrack plays a voice singing the lament, “Long gone. Twenty long years on a chain gang.” As the drivers complain of the noise, viewers realize the song is coming from the truck, and cutting to its interior, viewers see that the prisoners, all white except one, are being transported. It is the African American prisoner Cullen who is singing, and his shackled partner Joker retorts, “You heard what the man said, nigger, now shut up.” But Cullen is practicing the only form of resistance at that moment available to him; just like slaves controlling the working day by slowing down their singing in the fields, he is using his voice to retain freedom within his captivity.

Soon after, the truck crashes and Cullen and Joker escape. From then on the film intersperses chase scenes with quieter moments that explore not just the current impacts of volatile race relations within the United States but, more profoundly, the economic and cultural structures that created and perpetuate racism and class inequalities.

As they try to break their chains, each man has a particular goal. For Joker, it is to become Charlie Potatoes, a big shot who drives a Cadillac, wears expensive clothes, and has a beautiful woman on his arm. When he tires of trying to break the chains with a rock, he tells Cullen to take over. Cullen channels his sarcastic “yessir” into his own desperate quest for “no more ‘yessir boss.’” Each man is seeking not just to break his metal chains but also the chains society places on the disadvantaged: race for Cullen but, equally, his economic position for Joker.

Joker hates the word thanks. It reminds him of his years parking cars for hotel patrons when the louder he said “thanks,” the bigger the tip he received. He dreams now of being a patron himself. But when Cullen asks if he, too, could go in that hotel and is told, “yes, through the back door, so long as you've got a pail and mop,” Cullen retorts that Joker could go “through the front door just [Page 679]long enough to collect your tip,” thus underscoring Joker's lowly place in the class hierarchy.

...