Procès de singe

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.

We have been blessed with many, many wonderful films over the decades, and we have also been blessed with seeing many, many fine actors and actresses. Here you have a film, with a host of stars; brilliantly portraying characters from a true story, with acting that is sublime. The dialogue is sharp, witty, and each performance is gripping. Small town America, religious bigotry are all handled in a sympathetic manner by the use of powerful acting. I gave this film a 10 purely because it is one of those rare gems that stay in the mind forever. It is truly memorable, and one can watch it time and time again to marvel at the superb portrayals. There is a saying that they don't make 'em like they use to. No sir, they certainly don't!

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.

Sometimes a film becomes dated over time, that it lacks relevancy due to the way its filmed and its content. But in the case of Inherit the Wind, Stanley Kramer's production in terms of acting and staging is dated, but the themes are sadly still painfully relevant. Evolution vs. Creationism is still a hot button topic, though of course it shouldn't be (and the Supreme Court has ruled against Creationism as unconstitutional), but maybe even more shocking is to see the town of Hillsboro and how it could be like some small towns in America, mostly the South and the Midwest. One wonders if the mob could be as large and howling and fervent today as it was in Hillsboro (or how it was during the actual Scopes-Monkey trial in the 1920's).

But what stays most passionate about the film, and also at its most flawed, is its conviction about the issue. Kramer is a right director for this material, if not the best. It's full of passionate speeches- it could also be said 'preachy' not too ironically enough in some scenes- and blazing courtroom scenes that are not very realistic (the way the lawyers speak and speechify to the jury and the people in the courtroom and, of course, the audience in the theater), but somehow they're highly enjoyable. This doesn't mean the writing in the film is always great, or all of the characters. But the film is compulsively watchable 'issue' film-making, self-important but full of poignant touches.

The wisest choice that Kramer made, akin to what he did with The Defiant Ones, is put BIG actors in these BIG roles. Chiefly these are for Henry Drummond, the defense attorney played by Spencer Tracy, and the prosecutor Matt Brady played by Federic March (or rather, devoured by March). Like Frost/Nixon, the film becomes really as much about these two men, two old characters who have known each other over the years and have a real respect/hate relationship with one another (see the scene where they're on the rocking chairs to see their connection). 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. If nothing else, it's worth it to watch the film for these two, though I might consider Tracy the winner overall, while March gets points in individual scenes, like when he grandstands towards the end when the case is dismissed (also when he stands up for the girl Rachel Brown when she is "damned" by her father, but as a calculating move to get her on the stand).

Which brings me to some of the flaws in the film. Kramer has a lot that he wants to say as a filmmaker, but he doesn't know how to tweak anything down past it being super theatrical. It would've helped, for example, to cut just a little of the dialog, some of the pompous exchanges between characters (albeit some of the dialog is actually pretty funny, mostly when Gene Kelly's reporter disses Brady). Another problem was Rachel Brown, who firstly is concocted as a contrivance (hey, let's make the daughter of the evangelical reverend also the fiancé of the science teacher), but more-so that she's just a lame character, poorly written like many characters end up being in Kramer films, if not anywhere near as bad as the daughter in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. And the last little moment of the film, when Drummond puts together two specific books together, is a completely tasteless gesture, meant to appease both the believer and non-believer sect after what was a satisfactory ending between Tracy and Kelly where the former tells off the latter.

But faults aside, the film does carry some legitimate power, and if nothing else I would watch it again just for the scenes between the two big stars. It's an actor's picture as much as a "message" picture, and as the themes carry some strong weight for discussion, not to mention the impressive semi-frightening sight of the Hillsboro religious mobs, it's really the actors who make it a (near) must-see.