Inherit The Wind was released on December 9 by Twilight Time.
Stanley Kramer’s 1960 film Inherit the Wind occupies similar dramatic space as Lumet’s Twelve Angry Men and James Foley’s Glengarry Glen Ross, films about men in high-pressure situations using words as weapons.
But where those films ground their thematic text in traditional narrative structures (both utilize the investigation into a crime as the framework for what we all know is the main show), Kramer’s adaptation of Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee’s 1955 play can’t really be bothered. It wants to make a grand statement on science vs. faith, the individual vs. the masses, the power of free speech, etc., and it wants to make that statement BIG and it wants to make it LOUD.
Inherit the Wind, new on Blu-ray thanks to Twilight Time, is a fictionalized recounting of the Scopes Monkey Trial, which saw a young teacher arrested for bringing Darwin’s theory of evolution to the classroom at a time when doing so was against the law. Tensions are high in the heavily religious town where Scopes stand-in Bertram Cates (Dick York) awaits trial, tensions that are only exacerbated when the legal counsels begin arriving.
For the defense is Spencer Tracy as Henry Drummond (based on Clarence Darrow), while the prosecution is spear-headed by Bible-thumping politician Matthew Harrison Brady (played by Frederic March, based on William Jennings Bryan [the inspiration for the Cowardly Lion! Look it up. Right now. Do some work for once in your life, jeez.]).
Also on hand are hard-charging newspaperman E.K. Hornbeck (Gene Kelly), Cates’ fiancée Rachel Brown (Donna Anderson), and Rachel’s fearsome preacher father, played by Claude Akins.
Kramer takes his time with the set-up, carefully establishing what each character has at stake heading into the trial, what they hope to achieve from the proceedings, and what the points of conflict and relationships are between each of the major characters, front-loading the film’s plot developments so the bulk of the movie can be spent inside the courtroom watching the fireworks go off.
And oh, what a sight these fireworks are. There’s no twisting narrative path for the legal proceedings to uncover, which means that the trial essentially boils down to Tracy and March arguing about the central principle of knowledge against religion and free thought and expression against ‘approved’ teachings.
It’s dynamic stuff, and Kramer displays a master’s touch at keeping the proceedings visually interesting without getting in the way of Tracy and March’s commanding performances. While Inherit the Wind’s origins as a stage show are quite evident, Kramer knows how to use the frame to set up silent jokes or sell a character beat. A lesser director would have locked the camera down and let the towering speeches and arguments carry the day, but Kramer provides his cast with exactly the right support.
The quality of those speeches and arguments cannot be oversold. The screenplay, by Nedrick Young and Harold Jacob Smith, is bursting at the seams with beautifully stated passion, grandiose monologues, and the kind of rat-a-tat dialogue exchanges that seem to fluster modern screenwriters as much as they came second nature to the old school scribes. Inherit the Wind is a socially minded examination of the past and present, while also being a wildly entertaining time at the movies.
The creative team came by that passion honestly. Kramer and these writers had collaborated on The Defiant Ones, and Kramer’s career was littered with scorching (or screeching, as the case may be) socially minded polemics.
The desperate plea for reason and open-mindedness must have been of particular importance to Nedrick Young, who found himself blacklisted by Hollywood in the 50s and 60s. Young was subpoenaed by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, those twats, and pled the Fifth when pressed to speak about his relationship with Communism.
For these men, and many of their colleagues, a person being able to speak their mind and form their own opinions without fear of reprimand or punishment wasn’t just an idle intellectual point; it was life and death. Inherit the Wind burns with that desperation.
It’s also possible that that desperation led to the gentlemen overplaying their hand. The film comes down so heavily on the pro-science angle, it reduces the entire opposition to cartoonish villains. Religion is represented by duplicitous assholes at best, mouth-breathing, violent hicks at worst.
The only flaw the ‘good’ guys have is that they are just too righteous, man. They won’t stoop to the lows of the religious people, and they won’t compromise their principles to make the easy point. The closest Kramer comes to ever extending even a little bit of dimension to his do-gooders is with the cynical Hornbeck. But even this is half-hearted and unconvincing, seeing as how Hornbeck not only gets all the best, funniest lines in the film, but is played by Gene Kelly mustering up every bit of elf prince rock star charisma that he possesses.
Which is a lot. Because he’s Gene fucking Kelly.
And if that’s the movie Kramer wanted to make, that’s fine. The nastiness of the townspeople is one of the major fictional additions, with Kramer even going so far as to have the rabble rouse themselves into a fucking lynch mob. A musical lynch mob, no less. Again, that is Kramer’s prerogative as a storyteller to enhance whichever details suit his story best.
But by shutting down even the slightest bit of empathy for the other side, Kramer takes the wind out of his own sails. He tries to tie up the film with a hilariously on the nose visual representation of the reconciliation between faith and fact, but given how much disdain the film has displayed for matters of God, the moment feels utterly unearned.
It’s a shame that Kramer takes such a tunnel vision view of the matter, as it’s possible that he missed that March’s Brady is the best character in the entire film. A truly good man who is undone by both his single-minded devotion to his God and by his compulsive need to grand-stand for a crowd, Brady alone feels like a fully developed human being, not an ideology wrapped in meat and sweat. March lets you see both the private Brady, the public Brady, and the way that the push and pull between those two identities gradually erodes at his soul.
Matters of the soul are the ultimate concern of Inherit the Wind. The film asks questions about responsibility, about conscience, about sacrifice, and about the power of language and images to shape minds. Had the film only busied itself with these notions, there’d probably be plenty to talk about.
But Kramer didn’t make a pretty little dead thing, he made a movie that is alive and angry, flawed and beautiful. He made a film based out of the past to address the present and which continues to speak to us now, decades removed from the sort of fears and issues that so motivated Kramer.
Or… at least… we hope we’ve moved on…
Available from Screen Archives Entertainment.
Also On Cinapse:
Stanley Kramer’s Judgment At Nuremberg