Admission $4.50 for single or double bill

In “sending a message to the nation's conscience,” Stanley Kramer never denied the narrative potential of America's deepest troubles. In The Defiant Ones he balances the most obvious of symbols--a black man and a white man shackled together, mutually loathing, yet mutually dependent--with a grace of style and an emotional veracity that makes the emblematic image entirely workable. He is aided by an Oscar-winning script* and consummate performances by Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier as two convicts who escape, still chained together, from an overturned prison van into the night in the deep South. It is an action film shot in stunning monochrome with a new challenge, and a new irony, at every turn. Theodore Bikel as the sheriff, and Cara Williams and Lon Chaney, Jr. as baffled citizens they meet along their tortuous route, are standouts among a fine supporting cast.