Plot
Two prisoners in the American South, African-American Noah Cullen (Poitier) and the white John "Joker" Jackson (Curtis), escape from a chain gang. Despite their mutual loathing, they are forced to cooperate, as they are chained together. Gradually, they begin to respect and like each other.
Cullen and Joker flee through difficult terrain and weather, with a brief stop at a village where they attempt to break into a general store, in hopes of obtaining food and tools to break the chain that holds them together. Instead, however, they are captured by the townspeople, who form a lynch mob; they are saved only by the interference of "Big" Sam (Chaney), a man who is appalled by his neighbors' bloodthirst. Sam persuades the townspeople to lock the convicts up and turn them in in the morning, but that night, he secretly releases them, after revealing to them that he is also a former chain-gang prisoner.
Finally, they run into a young boy named Billy. They make him take them to his home and his mother (Williams), 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 drive off in her car. The men agree to split up. However, after Cullen leaves, the woman reveals that she had lied - she sent Cullen into the dangerous swamp to die to eliminate any chance he would be captured and perhaps reveal where Joker had gone. Furious, Joker runs after his friend; as he leaves, Billy shoots him.
Wounded, Joker catches up to Cullen and warns him about the swamp. As the posse led by humane Sheriff Max Muller (Bikel) gets close, the escapees can hear the dogs hot on their trail. But they also hear a train whistle and run towards the sound. Cullen hops the train and tries to lift Joker on as well, but is unable to drag him aboard. Both men tumble to the ground. Too exhausted to run anymore, they realize all they can do is wait for their pursuers. The sheriff finds Cullen singing defiantly and Joker nearly passed out in his arms.
Read more about this topic: The Defiant Ones
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—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“The westward march has stopped, upon the final plains of the Pacific; and now the plot thickens ... with the change, the pause, the settlement, our people draw into closer groups, stand face to face, to know each other and be known.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)
“There saw I how the secret felon wrought,
And treason labouring in the traitor’s thought,
And midwife Time the ripened plot to murder brought.”
—Geoffrey Chaucer (1340?–1400)