The French title

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The French title incidentally conveys better the symbolic meaning of the movie.
The chain caused only racial hatred while binding physically the two men ;
more than once, they stopped short of killing each other only when the burden
of dragging each other' s corpse deterred them.
When faced with the lynching mob, the white convict realized to his horror these whites
made no difference between him and his hated black escape mate.
The chain saw to it.
Perhaps that was the first dawning on both of their real common human condition.

But soon, once "safe", they reverted to their favorite pastime :
trying to kill each other.
When succeeding at last in getting rid of the pestilent thing,
they discovered they couldn't do without each other :
the chain that bound has turned into the chain that bonds.

The last part of the movie is of sublime beauty, a manly beauty both
steel-tough, and heartwarming as true brotherly love.
The characters of Old Sam who saved them from the lynchers and freed them,
and the humane sheriff who forbade the use of bloohounds in the manhunt,
are not redundant at all but indispensable to the human dimension.

The film came to an abrupt but logical end : no music but only
the black man singing what could be a lullaby to his newly found brother,
precisely the song
in the beginning that provoked so much hatred in the white.
The sheriff holstered his weapon after finding them ,shaking his head
in compassionate disbelief.

The movie doesn't contain an anti-racist message, it rises above any message
and says what it has to say without catering to any p0litical c0rrectness.
Perhaps, they should have titled it : " THEIR OWN BROTHER'S KEEPER "

A movie that really honors AMERICA, period ./.