In a late 1950s, pre-Civil Rights legislation, liberally-endorsed metaphor kind of way, The Defiant Ones is a completely decent film. I’m only mentioning this because the Eureka Classics Bluray pops on 6.11. Notice how I’m conveying a vaguely dismissive attitude? Should every liberal-hearted social-issues film of the prehistoric past be so denigrated? I think it’s because Stanley Kramer‘s earnestly liberal brand of cinema has been put down for so many decades. There doesn’t seem to be any other permissible attitude toward the guy. I’ve always respected his brand while understanding that it represents a certain form of pat, tidy liberalism that was put out to pasture in the late ’60s.
