Clarence Darrow

Henry Fonda brings his Broadway one man show to the screen in this taping of Clarence Darrow. It is in my humble opinion the best Clarence Darrow out there. That would include Spencer Tracy, Jack Lemmon, and Jason Robards from the three Inherit The Wind films and Orson Welles from Compulsion.

The play is taken from Irving Stone's Clarence Darrow For The Defense which I read years ago. I recognized many lines from the book. Stone as author wrote uncritical hagiographies and this was no exception.

Many cases are covered including some forgotten today. Before doing criminal cases primarily Darrow was a lawyer for organized labor. The audience might be fascinated to learn about those.

Fonda keeps our attention all the way. This film comes highly recommended.

The taped performance of Henry Fonda's one-man show was aired as "IBM Presents Clarence Darrow" on September 4, 1974, on NBC.

Clarence Darrow is/was a larger-than-life figure. Although I know relatively little about him personally, the cases he was involved with still have a lasting impact today. The Scopes case, the Leopold and Loeb case, some union trials... and this one-man show is as relevant in 2017 as it was in 1974, amazingly enough.

Fonda is fantastic and really brings Darrow to life. What made him so great (and Fonda expresses this well) is how he made himself a part of the trials. An attorney is more often than not a tool of the client. But with Darrow, you didn't just get a legal argument... you got a whole philosophy of life. Whether he questioned religion or raised Nietzschean ideas, he argued from the soul rather than the law book.

In the 1970s, one-man Broadway shows were quite common. For example, there were shows with actors playing the likes of Mark Twain, Will Rogers and Groucho Marx. So, it's not surprising that Henry Fonda would do his own one-man show about the famous lawyer, Clarence Darrow.

I was amazed as the show apparently was NOT a success and only went for 29 performances. Apparently, however, someone liked the play and convinced the powers that be to record it and play it on television...and once again with Fonda in the lead....who also happened to look quite a bit like Darrow.

As for the play, it consists of a simple set and Fonda pretending to be Darrow. He then talks about his life, various important court cases he handled and his life philosophy. As for this, some viewers might be put off with Darrow's seemingly atheist (or at least agnostic) beliefs, though in many ways these views and Darrow's politics are quite in line with Fonda's. This might also account for the comment about Republicans and Democrats and slavery, as noted in the IMDB trivia, as it seemed more a jab by Fonda about CURRENT Republicans than an accurate comment about slavery (which was strongly associated with the pro-slavery Democrats at the time).

Overall, an amazing one-man performance...worth seeing even if you are not the biggest fan of Fonda or Darrow.