Themes: Religious Zealotry, Fighting the System, Lawyers
Main Cast: Spencer Tracy, Fredric March, Gene Kelly, Florence Eldridge, Dick York, Henry "Harry" Morgan
Release Year: 1960
Country: US
Run Time: 128 minutes
Plot
The Evolution vs. Creationism argument is at the center of the Jerome Lawrence-Robert E. Lee Broadway play Inherit the Wind. Lawrence and Lee's inspiration was the 1925 "Monkey Trial," in which Tennessee schoolteacher John Scopes was arrested for teaching Darwin's theory of evolution in violation of state law. Scopes deliberately courted arrest to challenge what he and his supporters saw as an unjust law, and the trial became a national cause when The Baltimore Sun, represented by the famed (and atheistic) journalist H. L. Mencken, hired attorney Clarence Darrow to defend Scopes. The prosecuting attorney was crusading politician William Jennings Bryan, once a serious contender for the Presidency, now a relic of a past era. While Bryan won the case as expected, he and his fundamentalist backers were held up to public ridicule by the cagey Darrow. In both the play and film versions of Inherit the Wind, the names and places are changed, but the basic chronology was retained, along with most of the original court transcripts. John Scopes becomes Bertram Cates (Dick York); Clarence Darrow is Henry Drummond (Spencer Tracy); William Jennings Bryan is Matthew Harrison Brady (Fredric March); and H. L. Mencken is E. K. Hornbeck (Gene Kelly). Dayton, Tennessee is transformed into Hillsboro -- or, as the relentlessly cynical Hornbeck characterizes it, "Heavenly Hillsboro." ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
Review
Stanley Kramer's Inherit The Wind is the topical movie that has aged better than almost anything else in Kramer's directorial output. In contrast to most of the social-issue films that he directed, including On the Beach, Inherit the Wind often seems as immediate and gripping as it did in 1960, mostly because its issues have not gone away. Adapted from the hit play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, the film is exceptionally true to its source, with virtually all the second half confined to the courtroom. It is a tribute to Kramer's often underrated skill as a director, as well as to the material and the cast, led by Spencer Tracy, Fredric March, and Gene Kelly, that the movie never lets up in tension or focus. The film also benefits from some vivid and convincing performances by the supporting cast: March's wife Florence Eldridge as Brady's wife, Donna Anderson as the woman betrothed to the accused school teacher, Claude Akins as her minister father, Dick York as the accused teacher, and Hope Summers, Ray Teal, and William Fawcett as various small town types. This is a model of how every faithful screen adaptation of a play should look. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide
Joe King - Costume Designer, Stanley Kramer - Director, Frederic Knudtson - Editor, Ernest Gold - Composer (Music Score), Rudolph Sternad - Production Designer, Ernest Laszlo - Cinematographer, Clem Beauchamp - Production Manager, Stanley Kramer - Producer, Ned Young - Screenwriter, Harold Jacob Smith - Screenwriter, Robert E. Lee - Play Author, Jerome Lawrence - Play Author
Rotten Tomatoes has given the film an 90% rating with 19 fresh and 2 rotten reviews.[3]Roger Ebert refers to it as "'a film that rebukes the past when it might also have feared the future." [4]Variety described the film as "a rousing and fascinating motion picture [...] roles of Tracy and March equal Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan who collided on evolution [...] a good measure of the film's surface bite is contributed by Gene Kelly as a cynical Baltimore reporter (patterned after Henry L. Mencken) whose paper comes to the aid of the younger teacher played by Dick York. Kelly demonstrates again that even without dancing shoes he knows his way on the screen."[5]
Awards
Academy AwardsInherit the Wind was nominated for four Academy Awards but lost all of them.
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