Rod Steiger

"The Defiant Ones" (1958)

Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis co-star as a pair of escaped convicts chained together and on the run in the South. Like all of Poitier's Civil Rights-era films, this is primarily a treatise on racism. But, much the same as 1967's "In the Heat of the ... moreNight" (starring Poitier and Rod Steiger), "The Defiant Ones" actually tracks the unlikely love that grows between two men who start out hating each other. Poitier and Curtis are bound by a chain made of more than metal; it is the metaphoric chain of hatred and racial intolerance. But when the chain is finally broken, they are free to love each other.

(Everett Collection)