Inherit the Wind

Plot synopsis:
Based on the famous Scopes Monkey trial of 1925 a Tennessee school teacher Bertram Cates (Dick York) is arrested for teaching his students Darwin's theory of evolution. The case receives national attention and one of the newspaper reporters (Gene Kelly) arranges to bring in renowned defense attorney and athiest Henry Drummond (Spencer Tracy) to defend Cates. The prosecutor played by Fredric March is a former presidential candidate and famous evangelist. The two are old adversaries and clash throughout the film. The situation is further complicated by the fact that Cates's girlfriend is the daughter of the town's bombastic preacher (Claude Akins). Throughout the movie the sarcastic Kelly mocks the bible toting hostile townsfolk. Tracy eventually calls March to the stand and prods him to explain various biblical stories such as Jonah and the whale. March is so rattled by Tracy's questioning that he collapses under the strain. In the end despite his badgering of March, Tracy is sympathetic to March's beliefs. The judge (Henry Morgan) issues a $100.00 fine much to the dismay of many in the courtroom.

Tags: dramatic, boring, historical

Review:
Inherit the Wind is a dramatization of the famous Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925 when a biology teacher was arrested and challenged a law passed by the Tennessee State legislature making it a crime to teach anything other than the account of creation as set down in the Book of Genesis.
Dick York is the biology teacher here, renamed Bertram Cates for the play and the film version of that play.In fact all the names of the dramatis personae of the Scopes Trial have been changed to allow some creativity by the authors Jerome Lawrence and Robert Lee. Spencer Tracy and Fredric March play fictionalizations of Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan named Henry Drummond and Matthew Harrison Brady respectively.Of course that is what Inherit the Wind is primarily known for, a duel of double Academy Award winners.
It's my favorite scene in Inherit the Wind.Stanley Kramer lived long enough to see this film become so relevant for today's times.
It's also a film that features some outstanding, larger than life acting, notably from the leads, whether it is Tracy, playing the crusty liberal for whom "an idea is more important than a monument" or the superb March, his performance full of facial tics and movement, and whose fundamentalist character does "not think about what I do not think about." Director Kramer clearly places his sympathies in the former camp, although he does not bludgeon the audience with preconceptions.
In the mid-1970s the director also made three 'judgement' films for TV based on other real trials.Whilst On The Beach offers a verdict of its own on humanity's military foolishness, and Judgement At Nuremberg is a just as sombre account of another judicial milestone of different significance, arguably Inherit The Wind falls neatly between the two in ways other than just the order of production.
Judge Mel also provides one of the trials more memorable, quiet moments when, just as it did in the real case, he finds the increasingly frustrated Drummond in contempt of court - only to see the fine which he levies paid for by the parents of a drowned child condemned by the fundamentalist lobby.In the light of today's religious debates in the US, Inherit The Wind seems braver than ever, and Tracy's character is allowed several hard hitting outbursts which, one wonders, would remain as so powerfully expressed if rewritten for a modern retelling.
Inherit The Wind has been remade thrice more to good, but ultimately less memorable, effect (including once with Kirk Douglas) but the Kramer version remains ahead.Dramatic variances aside, inevitably any presentation of the Scopes trial, and such controversial material as it contains, will never please everyone.
Again, the relationship between Bryan and Darrow was more complicated in real life than the film has time or care to show - although ultimately one is so caught up in the fairground of judicial combat as the case progresses that one forgives such accommodations with the truth.Inherit The Wind stands badly in need of a decent special edition, a golden opportunity perhaps being offered by the widely followed 2005 debate that took place in Pennsylvania.
The way the trial is shot reminded me of the brilliant blocking of another Stanley Kramer film with Acting Giants And Relevant Themes "Judgement At Neuremberg" If you haven' seen "Inherit The Wind" do so, if you have, see it again and share the experience with your kids.
The trial is the very heart of the movie--and yet it is supported by a wealth of early 20th century Americana--the fire-and- brimstone preacher, the look and feel of that hot Tennessee Summer, theboistrous singing of "Gimme that Ole Time Religion" that makes the audiencewant to join right in, these are all terrific details that add to the keen enjoyment of this film.
This film - about the 'Monkey trial' of a teacher who supported the theory of evolution over the teachings of the Bible - has two great reasons for watching it.
So throughout the film, while the issue of evolution vs creationism is brought simmering to a boil, Tracy, a sensational actor, has to try to keep up with March who is so over the top that he cracks the ceiling with a sledgehammer.Best of all is to see their showdown when Drummond puts Brady on the stand, a theatrical gesture but in keeping with the fact of the case (William Jennings Bryant really was called to stand during his own trial), and in having these two actors yell and stare and make big gestures at each other.
Top cast assembled in a dramatized history lesson roughly based on the "Scopes monkey trial."  Tracy defends the embattled high school teacher and March tries to stir up the local opposition.
So Spencer Tracy plays Henry Drummond instead of Clarence Darrow, Fredric March plays Matthew Harrison Brady instead of blow-hard populist Williams Jennings Bryant, York plays Bertram Cates instead of John Scopes - an earnest young man who wonders if this is all worth it, and Gene Kelly plays E.
L. Mencken, eating hot dogs and airing satirical pieces and just getting under Tracy's character's skin in general in an early non-musical role.I suppose most observers would say this film leans pretty left, and I'm not going to argue with that, but there's some effort to give the Fredric March character some dignity, like when he intervenes in Claude Aikens' let-'em-all-burn-in-hell diatribe and when he cuts off his own inquisition-like haranguing of Aikens' daughter after his wife calls out his name.
And the movie hedges its bets a bit at the end by having Spencer Tracy revealed as "the atheist who believes in God" and the way he balances the Bible and the Darwin book as if they carry the exact same weight.Also, all that singing about old time religion at both the beginning and end.
I remember reading Inherit the Wind in my high school, we kinda watched most of the film, but since I haven't seen it in almost 5 years, I figured to watch this movie again and give an adult's point of view.
A trial ensues, at which civil rights lawyer Henry Drummond (Spencer Tracy) represents Cates, while Bible-thumper Matthew Harrison Brady (Fredric March) represents the state.What stuck in my mind as much as (if not more than) the trial was the revolting attitude of the townspeople: in one scene, they march through town carrying a burning effigy of Cates, singing about how they'll hang him.
Once upon a time in 1925 Tennessee, a teacher named Scopes had the audacity to question creation in front of his students and it ended up as "The Monkey Trial"---a war between celebrity barristers Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan played by Spencer Tracy and Fredrich March respectively.
Tracy's Drummond is integrity's last, best hope against a world of small-town, Southern, Christian, ignorance and malice.Frederic March as Matthew Harrison Brady, based on William Jennings Bryan, depicts Tracy's opponent as a fat, befuddled, self-deluded old man.Overall, "Inherit the Wind" depicts the battle of light -- Northerners, atheists, and white collar types -- against the forces of darkness -- Southerners, Christians, and too many blue collars or rednecks.Thank God, or H.L. Mencken, I've grown up a lot since I first saw, and loved, this movie.There are two problems here: the movie is a pack of twisted lies.
There is a very good site devoted to debunking this movie; it's called "The Monkey Trial." Point by point, and with quotes and full citations, the site goes through the film's many lies, and history's truths.HL Mencken was a bigot; his real comments about the South, not to mention African Americans and Jews, are atrocious.William Jennings Bryan was one of America's greatest orators, not the befuddled dunce Frederick March portrays in this film.
This biography points out that WJB electrified the masses with his speeches, helped make FDR's New Deal possible, and fought against Social Darwinism, the truly evil application of Darwin's theories to elitist, classist, racist, anti-immigrant, eugenic purposes.The entire plot of the movie is nonsense; the Monkey Trial was a publicity stunt hosted by the town itself.So, given that "Inherit the Wind" is a pack of lies, what *is* its underlying logic?
However, I would like to comment upon a very interesting coincidence involving the role of one of the characters in this film, E.K. Hornbeck, a newspaper reporter covering the "Monkey" trial (played brilliantly by Gene Kelly, the character being, most agree, after H.L. Mencken, the prominent newspaperman, book reviewer and political commentator who covered the actual Scopes trial in 1925.) Kelly plays a cynical newspaperman who is the "bete noire," the gadfly of both Henry Drummond (the Spencer Tracy character) and Matthew Harrison Brady (the Frederic March character.) For Hornbeck everything is false, everything is a "con" in one way or another, including Brady's old-style religion and Drummond's belief that modern science and philosophy belie a literal reading of the Bible.In another fine film - some say also one of the finest ever produced by Hollywood - Elmer Gantry - Arthur Kennedy also plays the role of a newspaperman, covering the religious "revivals" held by the lead characters, played to perfection by Jean Simmons and the incomparable Burt Lancaster.
The attorney paid for by Baltimore journalist E.K. Hornbeck (Gene Kelly) for the defense was the famed trial lawyer Henry Drummond (Spencer Tracy) and the prosecutor was the orator and statesman Matthew Harrison Brady (Fredric March).
Inherit the Wind still takes place in the 1920s and the issue is still evolution, but the extreme right-wing mania is undeniably a reflection of the paranoia andbitter hate of the witch-hunters.Tracy and March make sparks fly in a 15-minute scene where Drummond grills Brady and leaves nothing but a shuddering wreck of a once-great, but stubborn and narrow-minded man.
Inherit the Wind was a harbinger of the sort of movie soon to come,--To Kill a Mockingbird, Fail-Safe, The Best Man, The Birdman Of Alcatraz--and as such isn't even a very good example of its type, as unlike it successor films it has neither wit or even the faux-Bohemianism of these loping dinosaurs of the New Frontier and Great Society..
To view it should be a duty in EVERY school to see how the opression of "right and moral majority" can be worst than the Nazi regime.Spencer Tracy is fantastic performing the Drummond/Darrow lawyer and Gene Kelly has a brilliant and edged speech that cuts like a knife!
A souped-up Hollywood adaptation of the historical Scopes "Monkey" Trial in 1925: a high school science teacher is tried for teaching Darwin's theory of the evolution to his students on account of the violation of a Tennessee's state law.
To a liberal mind, why "the right to think" needs to be pointed up in a legal court is beyond belief, and one's mild contempt cannot be mitigated by Kramer's rip-snorting deployment aiming to heighten religious bigotry and hostility: whether it is that poignant chanting of OLD TIME RELIGION by an uncredited Leslie Uggams opens the film, or a grand pageantry to glad-hand Matthew Harrison Brady (March), a beloved statesman and the standard-bearer of biblical piety, to join the prosecution team; or the appended fictitious story between Rev. Brown (an imposingly conflicted Claude Akins) and his daughter Rachel (an equally conflicted and tormented Donna Anderson), who is the fiancée of the defendant; or the townsfolk's relentless marching demonstration of baying for blood, all of which ultimately render the ending a shade anticlimactic.
Brady sees "God's on trial", but he didn't count on an old friend, civil rights attorney Henry Drummond (an aging yet scrappy Spencer Tracy), a trade for Clarence Darrow, to defend Cates."Wind" is an unusual but heated boxing match.
Prosecution still won the case, however, since Scopes was on trial for teaching evolution - and in the end, the fact was that he did.In the film, which is loosely based on the actual events of the Scopes Monkey Trial, Spencer Tracey plays Darrow in the form of Henry Drummond, an educated man who thinks fundamentalism is a joke.
Matthew Harrison Brady (Fredric March)is based on William Jennings Bryan.Stanley Kramer's direction is excellent, the b&w photography is superb and the performances are great.
The film pits two acting giants against one another for the only time in their illustrious careers: even if essentially understated, I think that Spencer Tracy delivers perhaps his greatest performance in this film (which deservedly earned him an Academy Award nomination) portraying famed lawyer Clarence Darrow  who was played by a burly Orson Welles a year earlier in COMPULSION (1959) - in all but name; Fredric March, who by this time had slipped into supporting roles, countered this with a showy (and necessarily hammy) portrayal of his flamboyant adversary, the true if misguided 'villain' of the piece  his flustered death scene is very moving and he managed to capture the character's every nuance perfectly, in my opinion; I would have liked to see the Academy recognize his contribution equally but at least he did win the coveted Best Actor Prize at the Berlin Film Festival!
HYDE movies during shootingINHERIT THE WIND also features Gene Kelly's most satisfactory non-musical film performance as a cynical reporter, who is also an opportunist and something of a heel; it's interesting, too, that Kramer had just utilized Kelly's dancing 'rival' Fred Astaire in a straight role in his previous film, the excellent if depressing end-of-the-world opus ON THE BEACH (1959).By the way, Joe, I don't feel that Kramer intended to bash Christianity at all with this film: his main concern was freedom-of-speech which the teacher put under trial was prevented from exercising by the bigoted community, which in this case happened to be over-zealous practitioners of the Faith!
Spencer Tracy puts on a prodigious performance, one of the all-time best, as Henry Drummond (effectively Clarence Darrow) in this recreation of the Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925.
Religion in this instance is used as an example of an avenue toward intolerance whereby mankind takes the fresh and illuminating thoughts of the bible and translates them (or more accurately allows others to translate them) into a rigid set of rules which are thereby man-made whilst assuming the aura of god-given.Directed by Stanley Kramer and starring two hollywood heavyweights, Spencer Tracy and Fredric March, the film benefits from tight dialogue, a claustrophobic courthouse set and a rumbustuous performance by the leads who spend a great deal of time trying to outdo each other.
But that's not the case in reality, and that's not the case in Stanley Kramer's 1960 movie *Inherit the Wind*.This story is loosely based on the Scopes Trial of 1925, where a Tennessee schoolteacher got in trouble for teaching evolution in the classroom, which was against state law at the time.
Here, Tracy plays Henry Drummond (based on Darrow) and March plays Matthew Harrison Brady (based on Jennings.) Dick York has a less central role as Teacher Bertram Cates (based obviously on Scopes.) Why were the names changed?
Tracy was good (although at times he looked a bit grizzled, and he seemed older in this movie than he would some years later, for example, in "Guess Who's Coming To Dinner.")The movie - which features supporting performances from folks such as Claude Akins as the local minister and Harry Morgan as the judge - remains surprisingly relevant, with the continuing strength of some of the fundamentalist churches in parts of the United States especially and continued debates over the teaching of evolution in schools.
If anyone thinks Evolution is correct, that is only an *opinion.* The way Inherit the Wind serves as pro-Evolution propaganda is a disgrace and slap in the face to film-making, God, Christianity, and mankind as a species.The fact that this movie and play is sometimes served up to unwitting students as a mandatory part of their public education is nothing short of disgusting!
The dialogue is the real star of this film, with so many memorable lines.Though the story is based upon the actual Scopes "Monkey Trial", it is a work of fiction.
One of its best attributes is that the film builds throughout its entirety to a final climax.The primary characters are wonderfully portrayed by Spencer Tracy (as Drummond), Frederic March (as Bryan) and Gene Kelly (as Hornbeck).
Although Fredric March and Spencer Tracy had been acting in films for some time before Inherit the Wind, each turns in such a masterly performance here, it is as if they were inventing acting from scratch.
Seen a lot of films in my time, this is the greatest, mesmeric performances from those great actors Frederic March and Spencer Tracey, with some useful stuff from gene Kelly away from his usual genre.
How much of this is a Stanley Kramer agenda, I don't know; after all, this movie was already a play which itself was based on the actual Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925.
I certainly support the sensibilities of allowing all people to think for themselves, but whether or not Darwinism should be taught to students as "science fact" rather than "theory" is another matter.But as far as a rewarding movie-going experience, INHERIT THE WIND is highly recommended and provides much food for thought.
Spencer Tracy plays Henry Drummond (aka Clarence Darrow), the liberal defense attorney for schoolteacher Bert Cates (Dick York) who has been placed on trial by his entire town for daring to teach Darwinism (i.e. evolution theory) in his classroom.
To this effect, the film brings together the considerable acting talents of Spencer Tracy, Fredric March and Gene Kelly.
The trial that ensued would be one of the most memorable in US history.Director Stanley Kramer's Inherit the Wind, based on the real 1925 Scopes Trial, brings to life one of the most controversial court cases of all time.
Stanley Kramer's direction proves he was the right man for the man, and the screenplay engrosses and makes you think.It is the acting though of Spencer Tracy and Fredric March that makes Inherit the Wind so worth watching.