The Defiant Ones

One night in the late 1950s, in the Southern United States, a truck loaded with prisoners swerves to avoid another truck and crashes through a barrier. The rescuers clear up the debris and discover two prisoners have escaped, an African-American man shackled to a Caucasian man because "the warden had a sense of humor." They are told not to look too hard as "they will probably kill each other in the first five miles." Nevertheless, a large posse and many bloodhounds are dispatched the next morning to find them. The two missing men are Noah Cullen and John "Joker" Jackson. Despite their mutual hatred, they are forced to cooperate, as they are chained together. At first their cooperation is motivated by self-preservation, but gradually they begin to respect and like each other.

Cullen and Joker flee through difficult terrain and weather, with a brief stop at a turpentine camp where they attempt to break into a general store, in hopes of obtaining food and tools to break the chain. Instead, they are captured by the inhabitants, who form a lynch mob; they are saved only by the interference of "Big" Sam, a man who is appalled by his neighbors' bloodthirst. Sam persuades the onlookers to lock the convicts up and turn them in the next morning. That night, he secretly releases them, being a former chain-gang prisoner himself.

Finally, they run into a young boy named Billy. They make him take them to his home and his mother, whose husband has abandoned his family. The escapees are finally able to break their chains. When they spend the night there, the lonely woman is attracted to Joker and wants to run off with him. She advises Cullen to go through the swamp to reach the railroad tracks, while she and Joker will drive off in her car. However, after Cullen leaves, the woman reveals that she had lied: she has sent Cullen into the dangerous swamp to die, to eliminate any chance he would be captured and reveal where Joker had gone. Furious, Joker runs after his friend; as he leaves, Billy shoots him.

Wounded, Joker catches up with Cullen and warns him about the swamp. The posse led by humane sheriff Max Muller gets close. The two hear a train whistle and run toward it. Cullen catches up to the train and jumps aboard. Joker runs alongside, desperately trying to catch up. Cullen calls to Joker and holds out his hand. Their hands clasp, but Cullen is unable to pull Joker aboard. Both men tumble to the ground. Too exhausted to run, they realize all they can do is wait for their pursuers. The sheriff finds Cullen singing defiantly and Joker lying in his arms.

Drive-in advertisement from 1958

Robert Mitchum, a veteran of a Southern chain gang, turned down the role of Jackson because he believed black and white people would not be chained together in the segregated South at that time.[5] Mitchum’s reasoning was misinterpreted over the years into the claim that he turned down the film because of his refusal to work with a black man.[5] Kramer wrote that Poitier was initially unsure of Curtis' casting but became supportive. Curtis, however, denied this; he stated that he had contractual rights to approve who would play Cullen. However, despite Curtis' many later claims and stories, Kramer had originally cast Poitier and Marlon Brando as the two leads when a previous contractual obligation prevented Poitier from being able to accept the role. Kramer wanted Poitier for the role so badly that he delayed the film's production, which led to Brando having to decline because the delay caused shooting to overlap with another obligation. Curtis was cast afterwards. Curtis did request Poitier's name appear with his above the movie title marking a first for Poitier in his career.[6][7]

Carl Switzer, of the Our Gang comedies, has a small role. It was his last before his death.

The film earned rentals of $2.5 million in the United States and Canada but did not perform as well overseas.[3] It ultimately made a profit of $1 million.[2]

The basis of The Defiant Ones was revisited several times in popular media:

• Lenny Bruce parodied the film in his bit The Defiant Ones from his album I Am Not A Nut, Elect Me.
• Warner Bros. parodied the film in Friz Freleng's 1961 cartoon D' Fightin' Ones, in which Sylvester the Cat escapes from captivity in a dogcatcher truck while chained to a bulldog.
• On his 1964 debut LP, Godfrey Cambridge parodied the film, re-writing the final scene so that Cullen makes it onto the train without his white companion, to which Cullen (played by Cambridge) says, "Byeeee, baby...!"
• In 1972, the story changed the gender of the protagonists in the film Black Mama White Mama, starring Pam Grier and Margaret Markov.
• Another 1972 B-movie added a science fiction blaxploitation twist as The Thing with Two Heads, in which a racist white man (played by Ray Milland) has his head grafted onto the body of a living black man (played by Rosey Grier).
• In 1986, the film was remade for television, starring Robert Urich and Carl Weathers.
• The film was paid homage to by the 1992 Quantum Leap episode "Unchained", in which protagonist Sam Beckett lands in the body of a white Mississippi road-gang worker chained to a wrongly convicted black man, and the two must escape together or be murdered by the corrupt warden.
• In 1996, the film was remade as Fled, starring Laurence Fishburne and Stephen Baldwin.
• The 2018 western video game Red Dead Redemption 2 features an optional questline where the player can help two chain gang escapees, a white man named Mr. Black and a black man named Mr. White, evade the law after being wrongfully convicted of a crime, or hand them over to the authorities for their bounties.
• A pair of Marvel Comics supervillains called Hammer and Anvil were parodies of the film's leads.
• The film was unofficially remade in Hindi by Bollywood (Indian cinema) titled Kachche Dhaage starring Ajay Devgan & Saif Ali Khan. The story was changed to a different setting to enable the protagonists to be chained together while settling their differences on the run.
• The 1987 G.I. Joe the Movie has the temporarily blinded Roadblock and the former Cobra Commander working together to escape Cobra-La; this was a deliberate reference to The Defiant Ones by writer Buzz Dixon, as admitted in the commentary for the 25th anniversary Blu-ray edition.
• In his second autobiography Why Me, Sammy Davis Jr. revealed that Elvis Presley wanted to star alongside him in this film. However, Colonel Tom Parker, Presley’s manager, was against it.[18]

• List of American films of 1958

Wikimedia Commons has media related to The Defiant Ones.

• The Defiant Ones at IMDb 
• The Defiant Ones at the TCM Movie Database
• The Defiant Ones at AllMovie
• The Defiant Ones at the American Film Institute Catalog
• The Defiant Ones at Rotten Tomatoes
• "The Defiant Ones" at Every Oscar Ever