Inherit the Wind (1960) - film review

In Hillsboro, a small town in Tennessee, schoolteacher Bertram Cates is arrested for teaching Darwin’s Theory of Evolution to  a class of high school students.  According to state law, it is illegal to promulgate any view which contradicts the exact literal truth of the Bible.  When Cates’s girlfriend Rachel speaks out in his defence, she finds herself rejected by her own father, a fundamentalist preacher.  The town rejoices when Matthew Harrison Brady, a former presidential candidate and renowned Bible basher, declares that he will prosecute Cates in his forthcoming trial.  There is a less positive reaction when hardnosed journalist E. K. Hornbeck arranges for an equally prominent lawyer Henry Drummond to take charge of the defence.  Drummond is regarded as a champion of liberal thinking and is therefore given a far from friendly reception when he arrives in the town.  What begins as the trial of one man will soon assume a much greater significance, the trial of a man’s right to think for himself...

Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee’s highly acclaimed play Inherit the Wind provided an appropriate vehicle for the politically minded producer-director Stanley Kramer to prompt a serious reflection on two important contemporary themes – the fallout from the McCarthy era and a growing public mistrust of scientific progress (fuelled by the creation of the atom bomb).  The parallels between the events depicted in the film, based on a real-life case of 1925 (the so-called Scopes Monkey Trial), and the recent clampdown on leftwing sympathisers is striking.  The paranoid fanaticism of McCarthy and his followers, which led to the imprisonment and ostracisation of anyone who had even the slightest association with Communist politics, is obviously a close relation of the over-the-top religious zealotry that could criminalise someone simply for teaching a scientific theory.  Today, with religious fundamentalism in the ascendant across the world, and with Creationalism being embraced in preference to Darwinian evolution in many American communities, this film has a powerful resonance, perhaps offering a chilling vision of things to come.

Whilst not as groundbreaking or contraversial as some of Kramer’s other films,  Inherit the Wind is nonetheless a superlative piece of film drama.  It brings together two icons of Hollywood, Spencer Tracy and Fredric March, for one of cinema’s most absorbing and energetic courtroom battles.  Tracy may notionally be the good guy, since he occupies the more reasonable position that champions free thought and respect for the individual, yet our sympathies are torn equally between his and March’s character.  The more passionate and fanatical March becomes, the more pathetic he appears – a sad deluded old man shouting in the wilderness, surrendering all ties to humanity as he clings to the decaying vestiges of soulless religion.  Tracy is superb as the defender of liberal values and turns in what is undoubtedly one of the greatest turns of his career, but it is March who gets to play the more interesting character and probably has the greater impact.   

Between these two colossi there are several distinguished supporting artistes who somehow manage to make a mark.  In one of his few straight dramatic roles, Gene Kelly is surprisingly effective as a cynical newspaper hack, even if his character is only there to provide Tracy’s character with a good sounding board for his liberal notions.  Harry Morgan makes an excellent judge, managing to hold his own as the two heavyweights slug it out in front of him in a contest that looks increasingly less like a trial and more like a Medieval jousting tournament.  Away from the courtroom, there are one or two poignant scenes, many featuring March’s real-life wife Florence Eldridge, who plays his wife in the film.  Intelligently scripted and acted with as much sincerity as gusto, Inherit the Wind makes a compelling cautionary drama which, whilst it has a lighter side to it, reminds us that the battle between religious extremists and progressive thinkers is far from over.

© Alex Sullivan 2010

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