THE DEFIANT ONES A film review by Steve Rhodes Copyright 1998 Steve Rhodes
RATING (0 TO ****): ****
As two convicts, one black and one white, wake up arm-in-arm like a pair of sleeping Siamese twin babies, they look at each with an instant rage. They have been soaked to the bone by a torrential downpour. Asleep they nurtured each other, but awake their racial hatred is rekindled with a vengeance in 1959's THE DEFIANT ONES.
The great producer and director Stanley Kramer blessed the world with a host of moving dramas that garnered him seven Academy Award nominations (HIGH NOON, THE CAINE MUTINY, THE DEFIANT ONES, JUDGMENT AT NUREMBERG, DR. STRANGELOVE, SHIP OF FOOLS, and GUESS WHO'S COMING TO DINNER), but no actual statuettes other than the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award. His pictures, however, got won others numerous Oscars as well as nominations.
THE DEFIANT ONES received Academy Awards for Sam Leavitt's moody cinematography with its sharp whites and gloomy grays and for Harold Jacob Smith and Nedrick Young's crisp but powerful screenplay. Notable among the many Oscar nominations were the ones for best actor by Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis. Poitier went on to win in his only other nomination for LILIES OF THE FIELD, but Curtis was never nominated again although he's done over a hundred movies.
THE DEFIANT ONES begins when the vehicle carrying the two convicts, John 'Joker' Jackson (Curtis) and Noah Cullen (Poitier), crashes in a big storm. They break loose, which sets up the story's cat and mouse chase. There are two parallel stories, the major one of the prisoners on the loose and the more minor one of the law enforcement officers and their rag-tag posse of local hunters and their dogs. Kramer cuts back and forth between them as each group has their own arguments and squabbles. The chase, although interesting, plays out on a minor stage with the dialog within the two groups taking center stage.
In contrast to today's films, where the word "nigger" is thrown about as if it means nothing more than any other profanity, this movie treats it with the contempt it deserves. In their first verbal encounter in the picture, Joker uses the word nigger to refer to Noah. Noah immediately lashes back with the furious retort, "Nigger! You call me that again, and I'll kill you!"
When the trackers begin assembling for the big hunt, one of them asks, "How come they chained a white man to a black?" Sheriff Max Muller, played in an Oscar nominated performance by Theodore Bikel, says with disgust, "The warden's got a sense of humor." But the sheriff figures that the arrangement is to his advantage since it surely means that "They'll kill each other in 5 miles." And he's not far off. They taunt each other with insults of such ferocity at first that their chance of survival does indeed look slim.
After a while, however, their chained condition brings them together and makes them realize the similarities of their conditions and of their upbringing. Both view their backgrounds and their confinement as somehow having been caused by society's repression - one for being black and the other for being poor. Curtis laments that his troubles stem not from his life of crime but from the fact that he was not a big-time crook, since those guys always get away with it.
Eventually, the two escapees run into a lynch-happy redneck and his white buddies. At this point jail begins to look pretty inviting. Their newly found friendship beings to crumble when death looms eminent. Curtis boldly proclaims that they can't hang him because he's white, but they aren't particularly impressed with this line of reasoning.
Kramer stages the scenes with such simplistic power that he gives the outdoors almost the look of a stage play -- all the better to focus the audience's attention on the words in the two dramas at hand. He shoots in tight close-ups to draw the audience into the story.
With two superb performances and palpable tension, the film has a strength that rises above the simplicity of the storyline. As Siamese twins, for example, their inevitable fistfight makes no sense and yet seems perfectly natural. If one knocks the other out or worse, the other one will have little chance of dragging a dead body through the countryside
Among the many excellent small performances, Cara Williams, another Oscar nominee, plays a man-starved widow, known only as "the Woman," who thinks the handsome Joker is just about the best thing to come to her remote farm in years. Easily overlooking his past, she feels nothing but sympathy for him. Her sad, glistening eyes speak volumes. Although some scenes become a bit didactic, most have remarkable subtlety. When the Woman wants to show her willingness to have sex with Joker, she merely lets her hair down with a knowing smile. One brief kiss, and the camera cuts away to the next morning. Her look as she drops her hair is more erotic than most nude scenes today.
Although I would have preferred a more dramatic and surprising ending, Kramer stages the inevitable one with efficient precision, and the story seems to wind down rather than ending. But it is in the dialog that the film finds its power anyway and not the drive toward some hokey conclusion.
THE DEFIANT ONES runs a fast 1:37. It is not rated but would be PG-13 for adult themes and a little violence and would be fine for kids around 10 and up.
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