"The Defiant Ones"

"The Defiant Ones"

a movie I've always heard about and had never seen

Yesterday, on Turner Classic Movie Channel, there it was for me, like a gift.

Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis play two prisoners who escape while being transported from one prison to another, in the South. They are chained together, by their wrists. The vehicle they're riding in goes off the road and rolls: they get out and take off across the brown countryside.

The rest of this black-and-white film is a series of scenes, cutting back and forth from the two escaped convicts, to the guys chasing them -- lawmen, and one with a pack of dogs -- bloodhounds for finding people, and Dobermans for -- biting people, apparently, though you don't see that in the movie -- it looks like that's the plan.

All of the pursuers wear hats with brims. And every time the action switches off the convicts and back to the band of men coming after them, you hear music, ostensibly from one man's radio -- very tangy, twangy, peppy early rock-and-roll: the hum and wail of saxophones. It's an unexpected lightening of mood -- adding "attitude."
But -- we must note, it's not musical background like you get in many movies -- the music is supposed to be playing from the radio of one of the men in the group, so it's "realism." Not "movie" music.

When it cuts back to Curtis and Poitier, there's no music; just gritty struggle against a bleak background.

The two discuss their choices: Sidney Poitier says, "I'm not goin' south." So they go north.
They meet up with people in a turpentine town who want to lynch them.
It rains. The two of them discuss race relations and The Way Things Are.

Tony Curtis says, "I wasn't a big enough crook. To get somewhere in this world, you gotta be a big enough crook where you can get away with anything." (Hello - ! Calling Wall Street, circa 2010!)

Seems like the way they are chained together for part of the picture is intended as a metaphor for modern human experience: we are all bound together by -- Society, our loyalty to country, obligations in communities, family, etc. and we have to respect and get along; if we don't, we don't survive.

I kept thinking during the film yesterday, it must be from the Early 1960s. That was my bet; looking it up on Google today found it was released in 1958. I was close but not "on." A very socially progressive picture and theme, for the 50s! Eisenhower was president.

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