The Defiant Ones (1958)

Second viewing (first with original audio); first viewed on March 12, 1996

A truck transporting prisoners has an accident and two of them, chained to each other, escape, being subsequently chased through a country area.

It is very well filmed, and a remarkable collection of stills might be extracted from any part of it. The movie is also well written and flows at a nice, entertaining pace. All that being said, this is clearly a film with a message, and, furthermore, one that does not appeal to me. It stands on a foundation of radicalized Marxism, its thesis being that race differences are irrelevant in the face of capitalist oppression. Its relativistic view of crime is also typically left-wing; the script is, in this regard, fairly sophisticated in that it has two agents of repression, one (the sheriff) a liberal and the other (the military) a reactionary. The liberal sheriff is an important piece of this puzzle, as he evolves to a realization of his own proletarian condition and thus partially identifies with his targets of persecution (who are more properly categorized as lumpen-proletariat). Why do I call it "radicalized" Marxism? Well, this framework is not exactly what Marx postulated. He never, as far as I know, factored race into his writings, and also didn't consider the lumpen-proletariat as revolution material. This film's diretor would in subsequent films further pursue his leftist agenda, and I suppose Guess Who's Coming to Dinner is the inevitable corollary to The Defiant Ones: after all, if whites and blacks are stuck with each other as implied here, they might as well marry each other and thus extinguish their differences. As a side note, speaking of this director, his It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World looks strangely out of place amid his filmography. Perhaps the persons who were in charge of allocating scripts had a conversation and one of them described it as a "race movie", which prompted someone else to suggest to "hand it to Mr. Kramer".

Rating: 67