The Defiant Ones (1958)
Directed by Stanley Kramer
Two convicts—one white, one black—escape while chained to each other.
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What critics compared The Defiant Ones to
A cut from Elwood in the back of the car that brings him to the academy to a clip of Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis in a similar setting at the beginning of The Defiant Ones, for instance, suggests a bit of psychic recall: a character drawing from his own pop-cultural frame of reference as a way of coping with his own horrific circumstance.
And while “Nickel Boys” is mercifully far too experiential and self-possessed to end with a series of sobering title cards about the history it depicts, there's a palpable sense of implication in the recurring use of film clips (Stanley Kramer's “The Defiant Ones” is a major point of reference) and news footage, which serve as damning reminders of culture's selective myopia.
Ross repeatedly references scenes from Stanley Kramer's classic The Defiant Ones (1958), wherein prisoner Sidney Poitier is changed to the racist Tony Curtis as they flee authorities, eventually bonding over the experience.
Still, I am hard-pressed to think of a film that uses footage from another movie as thoughtfully or as powerfully as Nickel Boys uses moments from The Defiant Ones, Stanley Kramer's film about two prisoners (played by Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier) who escape from their incarceration in shackles and must learn to work together, despite their differences.-Dissertations will surely be written about the camerawork in this movie, not just for its POV but for its choices of specific angles, particularly its repeated motif of images looking directly up at the sky, or, in the shot that has become the film's main poster, up to a mirrored ceiling reflecting the two protagonists back at themselves.
Ross additionally intercuts other forms of media, like videos that appear to be taken straight from YouTube as well as scenes from other films, like the 1958 Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier movie "The Defiant Ones."
Even beyond the canon of films that valorize the Confederacy and the Old South, movies have white heroes with whom audiences can identify: Robert Shaw in Glory, Skeeter in The Help, Agents Ward and Anderson in Mississippi Burning—even Tony Curtis' Joker, who begrudgingly comes to respect fellow chain gang prisoner Noah Cullen (Sidney Poitier) in The Defiant Ones, a movie Elwood watched at Nickel.
At times they remind us of the squabbling runaway convicts in The Defiant Ones (1958).
Similar figures can be identified in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and The Defiant Ones, where Sidney Poitier’s characters go to unreasonable lengths to console and save bigoted white folk, assuring the addressed (white) viewer that no matter how hateful their actions, no matter how unspeakable the history of their country’s racism, the established order will not come under threat.
But its pedigree is slightly different, reaching back through the Gene Wilder-Richard Pryor comedies of the 1970s to “The Defiant Ones” in 1958, which starred Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis as runaway convicts in the Jim Crow South.
If you can imagine a mash-up of “Driving Miss Daisy” with “The Defiant Ones,” you’ll have some idea of what “Green Book” is like.
It worked when Sidney Poitier jumped off the train to save Tony Curtis’ life in “The Defiant Ones” (1958), and Gray is hoping, with all the best intentions and underwritten characterizations, that it will work now.
Examples range from “ The Defiant Ones ” to “ The Help .”
Throughout, echoes of past Hollywood movies (from "Casablanca" to "The Defiant Ones") reverberate.
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Second, there is the “Magical Negro,” the Black character teaches Whites compassion, folklore-like lessons and other doses of emotionality (think Hattie McDaniel in Gone With The Wind, Sidney Poitier in The Defiant Ones, or, a recent example, Morgan Freeman in Bruce Almighty).
In this film, “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness,” Strange and Mordo will have a “The Defiant Ones” moment (Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier 1958 film).
Despite its stylistic debt to Robert Altman's films, the true inspiration for "Crash" are the liberal "problem" dramas of the late 1950s and early 60s like "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" and "The Defiant Ones."
The unlikely pair wind up tethered by a common cause, but Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier in The Defiant Ones they are not.
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It’s a tired trope, and has more than a whiff of “The Defiant Ones" (that 1958 movie where a white prisoner is shackled to a black prisoner and they make a run for it).
"District 9" is content to be a loud, smart, frenetic action movie with just a hint of interspecies bonding a la "The Defiant Ones."
Or to put the above in more concise filmic terms, it’s a stew of V , City of God , The Office , Alien , and The Defiant Ones filtered through a Cloverfield -by-way-of-Verhoeven aesthetic.