A Film Canon

The Defiant Ones establishes Stanley Kramer as the voice of liberal Hollywood, and his aesthetic signature as a slightly disingenuous 'topicality'; an ability to appear ahead of his time while remaining just behind it. As a result, it's difficult to decide whether the film's premise - two escaped convicts, one black (Sidney Poitier), one white (Tony Curtis), chained together and attempting to elude an ever-expanding search party - is visionary or regressive, an explication of the ultimately comforting, symbiotic proximity threatened by desegregation, or a reassurance that the civil rights movement can be satisfied simply by extending the most basic provisions of humanity to African-Americans. In the same way, Poitier's role as Kramer's mouthpiece brings him uncomfortably close to noble savagery, culminating with his final self-sacrifice - which, despite being anticipated by Curtis', is far more iconographic and dehumanising - as if to confirm suspicions of the tribal atavism lurking beneath ostensibly nonviolent protest. Combined with the discursive script, which imbues every utterance with a self-congratulatory, theatrical 'significance', this ensures that the strongest moments tend to be those that are free of dialogue - whether in the form of the extended, silent sequences in which Poitier and Curtis balletically negotiate the parameters enforced by the chain - in both its real and imaginary incarnations - or, most memorably, Kramer's elaboration of the carnivalesque search party, whose jazzy, Afro-Cuban score (the only music in the diegesis, with the exception of Poitier's unbearable spirituals, which open and close the narrative) exoticises everything that they are pursuing, collapsing the searchers into an unsettling surrogate for the credulous, apolitical spectator.