Stanley Kramer (1958)
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967) is Stanley Kramer at his awkwardly high-minded worst but this earlier collaboration with Sidney Poitier is relatively good. Since the late 1940s, Kramer had produced a string of well-known movies – Champion (1949), High Noon (1952) and The Wild One (1953) among them – but had directed only two films before The Defiant Ones. (I’ve not seen either of these, Not as a Stranger (1955) and The Pride and the Passion (1957).) Written by Harold Jacob Smith (screenplay) and Nedrick Young (story), The Defiant Ones would, within a very few years, be seen as typical Kramer fare – an earnest, politically liberal perspective on thorny social and moral issues. One night, somewhere in the American South, a vehicle transferring prisoners from one jail to another crashes and two convicts escape. One’s African American, the other white and they’re shackled together ‘because the warden had a sense of humor’. Noah Cullen (Poitier) and John ‘Joker’ Johnson (Tony Curtis) don’t like each other – one of their prospective pursuers predicts they’ll kill each other before they’ve gone five miles – but they’re physically required to co-operate in order to stay on the run. By the film’s closing scene, in which Noah and Joker are recaptured, they have got rid of their metal chains and learned they’re bound together by their common humanity.
The Defiant Ones is visually more fluid and dynamic than you might expect from a Kramer film. (Sam Leavitt’s black-and-white cinematography won the Academy Award, as did the didactic screenplay; the picture received six other Oscar nominations, including nods for Kramer and both his leading men.) The sequences in which Noah and Joker run through hilly terrain, often in bad weather, are exciting and almost amusing – Noah has a much longer stride so Joker especially is always off balance. A weakness is that, though the narrative is premised on the twosome’s gradually increasing trust and understanding of each other, illustrations of this seem thin on the ground. Kramer and the writers are sure of the story’s final destination but it’s not long before that’s reached that Joker, once they’ve eventually disposed of their shackles, is on the point of making off without Noah. Even after that, they part company: it’s only when he learns Noah is heading for a swamp in which he’ll certainly drown that Joker heads off in desperate pursuit of him.
The presentation of contemporary racism is interesting. Noah and Joker try to break into a general store in the hope of stealing tools to free themselves but are captured by a group of locals whose vile leader Mack (Claude Akins) wants to burn both men. It’s striking that, because Joker is literally attached to Noah, Mack is ready to kill the white man (who’s a redneck bigot like himself) along with the Black man but the pair’s saviour is a pat idea. Big Sam (Lon Chaney Jr), who persuades the other locals to lock Noah and Joker up for the night and hand them over to the law next morning, surreptitiously releases them: it’s revealed that Big Sam was once a chain-gang prisoner, too. A much longer episode involves a white pre-adolescent called Billy (Kevin Coughlin), then his mother (Cara Williams). (She’s ’the woman’ in the cast list – I’ll give her an initial capital.) Noah and Joker bump into Billy, who’s out in the fields with a rifle (‘hunting’); in a struggle for the gun, Billy falls over and hits his head on a rock. It’s Noah who stays back to bring him round; once he succeeds, the boy runs straight to Joker for protection, staring hostilely at Noah. The three of them then head back to where Billy and the Woman live (the man of the house deserted his wife and son). With a hammer and chisel that Billy brings from the yard, Noah and Joker break their chains. The Woman then gives food to Joker but is disinclined to do the same for Noah until Joker tells her to. These instances of automatic, casual racism hit home harder than a set piece like the lynch mob.
Kramer alternates the principals’ story with scenes involving their main pursuers – a sheriff (Theodore Bikel), a police captain (Charles McGraw), and the man responsible for the police bloodhounds and Dobermans (King Donovan); there’s also a newspaperman (Lawrence Dobkin) in tow. Theodore Bikel works up a decent characterisation as the humane sheriff but this group’s disputes are too many and mechanical – we always want to get back to the main duo. Both are serving time for a serious offence – Noah for ‘assault and battery … intent to kill’, Joker for armed robbery. It’s not suggested that either has been wrongfully convicted although Noah’s attack was on a white man who racially insulted him. Excellent as they are, Poitier and Curtis, because they’re so naturally engaging, have to work hard to convince you they’re men capable of criminal violence – and I’m not sure they do. Both have fine moments, though.
Oddly enough, Curtis’s best bit not only doesn’t come in an exchange with Poitier but collides with the film’s worst performance, from Cara Williams. From the moment the Woman appears, she’s giving Joker the glad eye in a big way. Fiddling with the top of her skirt, smiling furtively, Williams strikes come-hither poses for Joker and the camera that are held far too long. This Woman is clearly hungry for a man but she needs to be rougher, more straightforward for the desperation to come through credibly: Cara Williams’ Deep South flower-born-to-blush-unseen number is gruesome. When he and Noah arrive at her house, however, Joker is ill – with ‘poison in his system’, Noah tells the Woman – and passes out. When he comes to, and with Noah now asleep, the Woman is nursing Joker. Kramer gives Joker a lot of script here – the theme is ‘All the things you ever wanted but you ain’t gonna get’ – but Tony Curtis feels what he says and Joker’s enervation makes it all work. And you do believe in his need for sex – Joker and the Woman sleep together that night.
Poitier’s highlight – a triple highlight – is also in the nature of a solo and indeed it comes in singing rather than spoken dialogue. Noah delivers an adaptation of W C Handy’s 1920s blues song ‘Long Gone John (from Bowling Green)’ three times during The Defiant Ones. At the start, he’s driving everyone in the prison van crazy with it. The next time he sings, while they’re on the run, he again gets on Joker’s nerves. The third rendition comes after the two men have tried and failed to jump on a slow-moving train – Noah gets aboard and attempts to pull his companion up too but Joker can’t make it, and they both fall to the ground. Exhausted, they wait for the inevitable, which arrives in the form of the sheriff, who arrests them. Sidney Poitier may not be technically a good singer but he’s a mightily expressive one in the sarcastic anger and exasperation he gets into Noah’s version of ‘Long Gone’, especially in the second reprise. Joker, lying against Noah, is finally at peace with his singing. This may simply be because he’s done for, yet the moment conveys better than perhaps any other the friendship the men have formed. It also supplies The Defiant Ones with a highly effective ending – unemphatic and, as such, uncharacteristic of Stanley Kramer.
19 January 2025
Postscript
The Defiant Ones was the second of two films that I saw in BFI’s Sidney Poitier season, following The Slender Thread. There would have been more but I’d seen others before, including A Raisin in the Sun as recently as last October at BFI. When I wrote about that film, I was looking forward to seeing Lilies in the Field in the Poitier retrospective. It does strike me as silly for BFI’s brochure to mention in the note on The Slender Thread Poitier’s ‘historic Best Actor Oscar win in 1963 for Lilies of the Field’ but give no explanation as to why Lilies of the Field isn’t included in the current Poitier season.
