The Defiant Ones

No remake comes close to this film's drama tension, about two escaped convicts, one white, one black, who are chained together & have to depend on each other despite their mutual racism. Shot in the heyday of the civil rights struggle!... Full review

No remake comes close to this film's drama tension, about two escaped convicts, one white, one black, who are chained together & have to depend on each other despite their mutual racism. Shot in the heyday of the civil rights struggle!... Full review

There is this story going around that Robert Mitchum refused the part Tony Curtis eventually played because he did not want to work with a black man. The actual story is that Mitchum who did spend time on a southern... Full review

This Stanley Kramer classic covers a lot of ground -- literally and figuratively. Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier are white and black inmates who, while chained together at the wrist, escape their captors when their prison truck hits the ditch.... Full review

Stanley Kramer was a Hollywood producer who turned into a director. He shows he had a promise when he undertook the direction of this production that involved race relations in the America of the 1950s, where segregation was still in... Full review

Kramer's story about to escaped prisoners hooked up together, black and white, is still the best picture ever made on racism. At first they hate each other, but through their run for freedom they even become true friends and the... Full review

I found this film very entertaining, thanks in part from great performances by both Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis, and due to great directing by Stanley Kramer. The black and white cinematography is great, as is the story of a... Full review

Sidney Poitier continues to break race barriers with this formula jail-break drama. Teamed with Tony Curtis, the escaped prisoners encounter many situations, where their difference in color seems to matter more than the fact that both are fugitives from the... Full review

This great film follows two escaped convicts (Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier) as they try to out run the law. The problem is that both men are chained together. The bigger problem is that one is a white southern man... Full review

I have seen this film several times and each time I am feeling that this is one of the best drama I've ever seen. There are new remakes of this film, but the original is the best. Acting of Sidney... Full review

In my opinion Sidney Poitier does some of the best acting of his career in this movie. Then, in the famous last scene, Poitier cradles the injured Curtis and rocks him gently. ... Full Review

The film sits somewhere between the bogus virtue of Kramer's The Defiant Ones and the poetry of Laughton's Night of the Hunter , combining racial intolerance with the nightmares of childhood, born out of Kennedy's stand on civil rights and Martin Luther King's marching. ... Full Review

The latter was really Nedrick Young, a blacklisted writer, whom producer Stanley Kramer hired knowing full well that Young was using an alias (when "Douglas"' credit appears onscreen, it is superimposed over a close-up of a truck driver -- played by Nedrick Young). ... Full Review

Yet the performances are excellent....the direction (by do-gooder Kramer) too single-minded and naively optimistic to really work.....so is Leavitt's photography, the latter winning the Oscar for Best black-and-white cinematography..... ... Full Review

THOUGH the term "bromance" may have been coined to describe such films as Clerks (1994), The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005) and the current comedy hit I Love You, Man, cinema has long thrived on the complex dynamics of male bonding. ... Full Article

March 18, 2009 - With I Love You, Man opening this Friday, the notion of bromance, or man-love, has been getting a lot of attention. ... Full Article

Watching last night's episode of Lost , I couldn't help thinking of The Defiant Ones , the 1958 classic starring Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis as chained-together escaped cons who, despite their mutual hatred, must work together in order to... ... Full Article

Stanley Kramers 1958 polemic against racial intolerance is a case of a simple story well told.Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier are escaped convicts, chained together and on the run from the law. ... Full Article