It stars Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier as two escaped prisoners, one white and one black, who are shackled together and who must co-operate in order to survive. The Defiant Ones premiered on June 29, 1958 at the 8th Berlin International Film Festival, where Poitier won the Silver Bear for Best Actor. Upon its release in the U.S. on September ...

The Defiant Ones: Directed by Stanley Kramer. With Tony Curtis, Sidney Poitier, Cara Williams, Theodore Bikel. Two chained-together escaped convicts, one White and one Black, must learn to get along in order to elude capture.

Sidney Poitier stars as Noah Cullen, an educated black convict in a chain gang whose "other half" is John "Joker" Johnson, a white, Southern bigot played by Tony Curtis. The two men, shackled together with chains, decide to escape when their prison truck crashes on the highway, providing them with a chance for freedom.

Two convicts bound together by an unbreakable iron chain escape a Southern work gang and must put aside their differences in order to evade capture.

A totally absorbing film showing great acting talents of Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier as escapees from a chain gang. Chained together, they must get along to survive and conquer the racial prejudices that divide them so.

THE DEFIANT ONES is an unlikely buddy film. Sidney Poitier stars as Noah Cullen, an educated black convict in a chain gang whose “other half” is John “Joker” Johnson, a white, Southern bigot played by Tony Curtis.

Swapping slurs and tragicomically trying to fight each other while chained, the two are later caught and face lynching, but then are reprieved through the nighttime intervention of Big Sam (Lon Chaney, Jr.), himself an escaped chain-gang prisoner.

"Joker" (Tony Curtis) and "Cullen" (Sidney Poitier) are chained together on a prison bus when it has an accident. Seeing a chance, and despite the fact that they pretty much loathe each other, they abscond and plan to jump a train to escape.