Remember the Warner Brother's cartoon where Sylvester the Cat and a bulldog escape, chained together, from the dog catcher? They kept bickering and hitting each other with large chunks of wood. That cartoon was called "DeFightin' Ones" and was a take-off on the Stanley Kramer film The Defiant Ones.

Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis star in this 1958 classic story of two convicts who escape in the South when their chain gang truck overturns during a fight started by a racial epithet.

Far from being a "buddy" film, The Defiant Ones shows the two slowly building a relationship that could not really be called amiable or even friendly.

Stanley Kramer exposes the predisposition of the southern whites in this film to mistrust and think the worst of Poitier's character on the basis of his race. Curtis' character argues to Poitier that the discrimination should be accepted, it is just the way things are. "I didn't make the rules!" Curtis' character says. "Yeah, but you sure live by them," is the reply.

Curtis learns what being a second class citizen means when threatened by a lynch mob. "You can't lynch me," he says as he is bound next to Poitier,"I'm a white man!"

It is up to Poitier's character to show Curtis and the audience that even after the chains and shackles are removed, it's loyalty to others out of the merit of humanity that binds them together.