Procès de singe

Like Elmer Gantry I first saw Inherit the Wind in the theater in Brooklyn when I was 13 years old. Both of those films dealt with issues arising from the Roaring Twenties out of religion. At the time I thought both were great dramatic pieces dealing with issues of the past. I thought how much we'd grown up as a country from 1925 to 1960.

If you had told me that 46 years later we'd be fighting these same battles and that preachers had as much political power as they do I and many others would have said you were nuts. Yet here we are today in an age when Pat Robertson is taken as a serious political figure.

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. In fact Spencer Tracy received another Academy Award nomination for this film, but lost to Burt Lancaster for Elmer Gantry. That's ironic to me because I thought March captured the essence of William Jennings Bryan better. Bryan is a man whose time has passed him by. But he's still a hero to the folks of small town rural America in the south and middle west. One thing to remember is that while Bryan was a great orator and advocate, he had not practiced law in over 30 years when he stepped into the courtroom for the trial. If he had been a better lawyer, he might not have fallen into the one big trap Tracy set for him and the trial and the attending publicity might have been better for his side.

As good as Tracy is, the year before in Compulsion I think that Orson Welles captured the real Clarence Darrow in his character of Jonathan Wilk. No one in Hollywood could do long take speeches quite like Spencer Tracy though. I'm sure that's why Director Stanley Kramer hired him and they developed quite the screen partnership with Tracy doing four of his last five screen roles for Kramer.

Stanley Kramer made some impeccable casting choices filling out the minor roles of the various townspeople of Hillsboro, Tennessee. There are two that I would single out. Claude Akins who usually played tough guys in various action films was astounding as the town preacher, the Reverend Jeremiah Brown. Sad to say there are still many like him out there. Akins's offbeat casting worked wonders, it turned out to be the high point of his screen career.

On the opposite end of the spectrum was Noah Beery, Jr. who is a farmer and who's son was drowned some time before the events of the film. Beery is the town non-conformist, he refused to allow his son to be baptized and Akins has said the adolescent is in hell because of it.

In a key scene when Tracy draws the ire of Judge Harry Morgan who sentences him to jail for contempt of court, Beery offers to put up his farm for collateral for Tracy's bail. Tracy's about to quit the case, but that simple gesture gives him hope, in the ultimate decency and clearheadedness of ordinary people. 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. I wonder what he must have thought.

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. Spencer Tracy and Fredric March. Together or apart, they are as wonderful as ever. The film has great pace and energy and there is never a dull moment. Simply a joy to watch.

People like to comment on this film's "overacting". Try watching any of Joan Crawford's movies from this period and then get back to me. Inherit the Wind is a totally compelling story of the traditional school of thought versus a new scientific one. It centers on a small southern town coming to terms with Darwinism and its implications on Christianity. Spencer Tracy is an eloquent defense lawyer fighting to let evolution stay in the public schools. The script is quite good. The court room exchanges are thought provoking and moving especially when one knows about the real people and events behind the story. It's very difficult to come up with a criticism here. Not a weak performance to be seen.

Too bad the battle over evolution still seethes in certain parts of the country, which means the movie still has topicality. This earnest version of the famous Scopes trial recounts that milestone event Stanley Kramer style, which means the message comes through loud and clear. It's an actor's hothouse, two hours of dialog with little action except for the marching mobs. Tracy wisely low-keys it much of the time while March, unfortunately, sometimes borders on loud-mouth parody. At the same time, Kelly manages the professional cynic in amiable style. And I really like York as the skinny, slightly befuddled teacher whose dedication to science in the classroom causes the big ruckus. Then there's the rather plain- faced Donna Anderson (Rachel) shrewdly cast as Cates' (York) girl friend, but more importantly, functions as the town's barometer of opinion.

All in all, there's no doubt whose side the movie's on. At times the backwoods fundamentalists are near caricatures, aggressively smug in their trust in the Bible and loud rejection of science as to humanity's origin. But it's important to note that Drummond's (Tracy) basically arguing for freedom of thought and not atheism per-se. Doing the latter would, of course, have spelled box-office doom. Still, it was pretty gutsy of Kramer to take on biblical literalism, even in 1960. In fact, Drummond's religious views are never made clear, though Kramer has him add the Bible to Darwin's tome as the movie closes.

I think it's fair to say that the movie takes a basically liberal position toward religion and reason, rejecting only that which cannot stand up to science. All in all, it's a histrionic powerhouse that at times fairly crackles with emotional give and take in an epic cultural clash.

It's a rare American film that takes the grand clash of ideas as almost its entire central subject matter, and Inherit The Wind has for that reason alone for long been a personal favourite. 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 fact as a filmmaker he had a reputation for making movies that held opinions and took stands, with a particular weakness for courtroom scenarios. Inherit The Wind came after the post-apocalyptic On The Beach, and just before the sombre Judgement At Nuremberg (also with Tracy). 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. Like On The Beach, it makes its judgement too: not on a worldwide disaster visited by man upon himself, but on the perils of stifling free thought. And, as in Judgement At Nuremberg, it's a trial of ideas here too. But whereas the evil ideology of the Nazis ultimately brought millions to their deaths and stands condemned with its architects, it is enough in Hillsboro that "That if you take a law like evolution and you make it a crime to teach it... tomorrow you may make it a crime to read about it. And soon you may ban books... because fanaticism and ignorance is forever busy, and needs feeding." In fact Tracy and March, with Kelly's able help, hold the centre stage for so much of the time that despite their best efforts the supporting cast seem a little enervated. The romantic subplot between Cates and his girlfriend (ostracised by her father for straying into the wrong camp) is occasionally a little cloying and, upon reflection is too much of a reflection from the main event. More damagingly, the character of the Rev. Jeremiah Brown, as portrayed by a miscast Claude Akins, is so fervent and cold hearted in the cause of the righteous that it occasionally wonders too close to self parody. An improvement to historical events is made by the introduction of a, for the most part, even-handed trial Judge Mel. It is he who provides an anchor for the audience in court as the two heavy weights slug it over points of order and procedural objections. 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. When he says, "I don't swear for the hell of it. Language is a poor enough means of communication. We've got to use all the words we've got. Besides, there are damn few words anybody understands" we all know what he means. And when he campaigns for a man to have the same right to think "as a sponge" it's a moment that remains starkly memorable. Curiously, a less emotional Darrow variant was essayed a year earlier by Orson Welles in Compulsion (1959), a version of another famous criminal trial. 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. The source play upon which Kramer's film is based simplifies matters a little too readily and other criticisms can be made: for instance the original textbook from which the schoolteacher was convicted of teaching illegally evidently contained an advocacy of racist policies and eugenics unacceptable today while it also accepted the notorious Piltdown forgery as genuine proof of a 'missing link' and so on. 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 current disc offers little more than the film, although the widescreen presentation does justice to the splendid black-and-white cinematography of Ernest Laszlo, which effectively conveys the sweaty claustrophobia of small town, Bible-belt America. Whether or not the hesitation in bringing out such a potentially controversial, expanded package is a matter of intelligent design or just random selection, the public will have to judge for itself.