Inherit the Wind (1960) pits Fredric March versus Spencer Tracy, and fundamentalist religion versus science, but at its core is the premise that knowledge should not be repressed because the religious right is uncomfortable with it.
This is
obviously a timely message for our present era, but the script was based on the
1955 play by Robert E. Lee and Jerome Lawrence, whose message was more about
the repression of McCarthyism than creationism, who used the famous standoff of
the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial to reflect on not only the right of free speech,
but of the very right to think for oneself.
“An idea is a
greater monument than a cathedral,” goes one line in this strong, literate
script.
As regards the battle between Mr. March and Mr. Tracy as actors, it is a pleasure to see two old lions with juicy character parts to play. Since much of the story takes place in a courtroom, which is inherently dramatic, this gives them a notable setting to joust.
Spencer Tracy, of course, was famous for stealing a scene just by standing still, but Fredric March stretches even his usual strong screen presence by unrepentant scenery chewing in this movie. At times, it appears to render his character somewhat cartoonish, but then, we know that bombastic men who enjoy public notoriety can sometimes appear cartoonish.
Directed by
Stanley Kramer, the film is rich in atmosphere with the setting of a small
Southern town almost lyric in its storytelling.
I love the slow-moving camera that glides around characters in a scene
without sharp, abrupt cuts.
We begin with
the tick-tock of the clock on the courthouse, and the march of a sheriff,
joined by others including a minister, to the jailhouse to retrieve the prisoner
for his trial. There is no one else on
the streets, and its almost like a “high noon” showdown in a western.
There is no desperado
in the jail, however, just young Dick York, a high school science teacher who has
taught his class about evolution from Charles Darwin’s Descent of Man.
We will soon see that it is something of a show trial rather than a criminal
indictment; the creationists have enticed a nationally known public speaker to
prosecute the case, and an equally nationally known lawyer arrives to defend Dick
York.
York plays his role with sensitivity and nuance, he was really a fine actor before his more well-known gig as Darrin Stevens in the TV show, Bewitched. His character is overwhelmed by the attention, pained over the separation from his fiancée, who is not sure his crusade is either wise or necessary, and ultimately he takes a principled stand because of the trauma inflicted on the parents of a student by fundamentalist insensitivity over their son’s tragic death.
Gene Kelly
plays a smart-aleck reporter, whose newspaper has provided the services of
Spencer Tracy as a means to showcase the event and sell papers.
Florence Eldridge, the real-life wife of Fredric March, plays his wife here. This was the final of several films she made with her husband. We last saw her play his longsuffering wife here in Another Part of the Forest (1948). She is not so longsuffering in Inherit the Wind, but she does have a lot to contend with keeping her larger-than-life husband supported with her understanding, fried chicken, and occasional admonishments to keep him in line.
The characters
played by Spencer Tracy, Fredric March, Florence Eldridge, Gene Kelly, and Dick
York are, of course, all based on real-life people. They are given fictional names here, perhaps
to keep the story more of a parable than a documentary. The real figures are William Jennings Bryan,
who like his fictional counterpart played by March is a three-time unsuccessful
candidate for president, was a Secretary of State under President Wilson, and a
noted orator whose “Cross of Gold” speech in 1896 pushing for keeping the U.S.
off the gold standard monetary system made him a giant of nineteenth-century
American politics. He, like his fictional counterpart, also supported women’s
right to vote, which makes him a fascinating contradiction.
Spencer Tracy’s character is based on Clarence Darrow, eminent attorney and one-time supporter of William Jennings Bryan in his presidential campaigns. It also seems like an abrupt contradiction when Tracy and March meet at the local hotel and we think the fireworks will start, but they greet each other as old friends.
First, Tracy greets Florence Eldridge warmly; they are old friends, too. We are set up to understand that though the citizens of this small town who clamor at the courthouse and burn Dick York in effigy are hot under the collar at feeling their religious beliefs are threatened, the fight between the two old gladiators is an intellectual sparring of mutual respect.
Gene Kelly’s character is based on the acerbic journalist H.L. Menken, himself a bundle of contradictions who enjoyed tearing down pomposity, but was himself an elitist, who was not a fan of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.
The so-called
Scopes Monkey Trial occurred in Dayton, Tennessee, in a blistering hot week of
July 1925. Here in the movie, a local
funeral parlor passes out fans with their advertising to the people in the
courtroom. Later in the film, the two
combatant counsels get permission to peel off their suit coats. (In the real
trial, the proceedings were finally allowed to take place outdoors due to the awful
heat in the courtroom.)
Because the
teaching of evolution is taken as a blasphemy by creationists who take the
Bible as literal, and is illegal in Tennessee, the story quickly becomes, as it
did in 1925, a fight to preserve religious teaching from being pushed aside in
relevance by scientific thought. We
begin the story, as the men march to from the courthouse, one of them wearing a
clerical collar, we hear an acapella rendition of “Give Me That Old-Time
Religion.” It sung as a slow, stately
dirge by Leslie Uggams. This is just a voiceover, however. We do not see her, nor do we see any people
of color in this movie. Another
interesting contradiction.
This is a somber moment, and though the quiet streets of this small town will soon be filled with street vendors selling souvenirs and hot dogs, and an actual carnival with a Ferris Wheel, the intent at the outset in this community is to keep their dignity and pride.
In the
courtroom, Mr. Tracy and Mr. March, both of nimble minds despite their tired
bodies, hash out not so much the Constitutional ideas of separation of church
and state, or the First Amendment, but rather confine themselves almost entirely
to biblical logic and illogic.
Mr. March
states with authority that the world began in 4,004 B.C. on October 4th
at 9:00 a.m., and Mr. Tracy after some thrust and parry, gets Mr. March to
admit that the day at the time of creation might not have been a precise 24
hours. One day might have lasted years,
or eons.
This is the crux of the courtroom battle, for Tracy’s expert witnesses, all representing scientific disciplines, are disallowed by the judge, played by Harry Morgan. To build his case, Tracy must rely on putting Mr. March on the stand instead and using Mr. March’s formidable knowledge of the Bible to turn the tables on him.
Because they
are old colleagues and know each other well, the twists and turns of their
minds is like playing chess with a familiar opponent.
Fredric March, rather than protest, actually enjoys being put on the stand because he is something of a grandstander, who clearly directs his remarks not to the jury, and not to Mr. Tracy, but rather to the crowd in packed seats in the courthouse, and the new-fangled radio microphone in court. He loves an audience.
This is where March
does most of his mugging and scenery chewing, but how close this came to the
real William Jennings Bryan, I really don’t know. He is, at least in the film, an example of a
highly intelligent man who enjoys an argument, but with God on his side, anyone
who opposes him must be morally deficient.
The townspeople, already disposed to find fault with Dick York’s
teaching evolution in his science class to their teenagers, is gleeful to see
his lawyer marked as a heretic.
At one point, we see Fredric March, along with his wife, show great compassion and concern for Dick York’s fiancée, played by Donna Anderson. She is troubled by the trial, especially since her father is actually the minister, played by Claude Akins. He is a fire-and-brimstone preacher, and in one scene, when he prays to a photo of his deceased wife in his daughter’s presence, begging his wife not to condemn their daughter for loving and defending a heretic schoolteacher, from falling from the way of grace, and we see he is unfeeling, cold, manipulative, and arrogant. When she seeks guidance in the matter from March, he is kind and we see another side of the famous grandstander.
However, in
confidence, she has told him that Dick York left the church. A student of his drowned two years
previously, a 13-year-old boy, and Preacher Claude Akins said the boy was
damned because he had not been baptized.
This infuriates Dick York, and pains the boy's parents, who are in the
courtroom. His father is played by Noah
Beery.
March gets her
on the stand and twists her words to break her, until his wife, Florence Eldridge, from the
gallery, shouts his name to stop. Is he
trying to get the fiancée to repent of loving Dick York and shame her as her
father tried to earlier, or does he just really want to win this case? Is it his religious zeal or his
competitiveness that turns him to cruelty?
Beyond the scenery
chewing, the other aspects of March’s portrayal I find distracting is his heavy
makeup and obvious skull cap to replicate William Jennings Bryan’s baldness.
Spencer Tracy
manages to mock Fredric March enough to the point where even the devout gallery
snickers at March and applauds Tracy, and that evening when March and Florence Eldridge retire to
their hotel room, he is an exhausted and frustrated man, hurt at being laughed
at in court. We wonder if he is
emotionally stable.
At the end of the trial, his character collapses in court from the heat and dies, as did the real William Jennings Bryan (though some weeks after the trial was over). In the next scene, when Tracy is quietly packing his briefcase in court, and Gene Kelly snidely congratulates him and triumphs over the theatrical ending of Fredric March, Tracy pays tribute to March. He calls him a great man.
Mr. Kelly
teases Tracy, and they have a brief war of words, and Kelly learns and delights
in the contradictions he has discovered in Tracy.
All the three principal men in this story have their contradictions, and we leave it to Florence Eldridge’s summation when Donna Anderson confronts her about her husband’s cruel fanaticism: “My husband is neither a saint nor a devil, and he makes mistakes…if he’s been wrong, at least he stands for something.”
Gene Kelly stands for nothing, he’s only here for the deliciously cynical mocking. As Tracy says to him, “You never pushed a noun against a verb except to blow up something.”
One of Kelly’s
lines I love: “It’s a newspaperman’s duty to comfort the afflicted and afflict
the comfortable.”
Inherit the
Wind, (which Tracy quotes from the Bible, “he that troubleth his own house
shall inherit the wind” Proverbs 11:29) is one of the films from that pivotal era
I mentioned in this
post on A Face in the Crowd (1957):
There was…
“…something
noticeably different about movies in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
There is no name for them, at least not that I know of, but they are pointedly
liberal in their message. Films like Inherit the Wind, Twelve
Angry Men, Judgment at Nuremberg, The Miracle Worker, To Kill a Mockingbird,
Seven Days in May, are different from the cynical noir of the late 1940s
and early 1950s, as if in the wake of crumbling of McCarthyism, an era when
liberals were politically and legally persecuted, when the Silent Generation
marched cautiously, blindly toward the New Frontier, the writers—who were the
most persecuted under McCarthyism, came out from the noir shadows and said, 'Enough. Our turn in the sun now.'”
Inherit the
Wind, which comes out of the McCarthy era, is really about free speech,
including, but not only, the right to quote from other than the Bible. As Tracy says, “It is a good book, but it is
not the only book.”
I recall an
incident from when I was in college, I think it was in 1980. I had a geology class, and the professor
cheerfully announced that anyone in class who may have had deep religious beliefs
need not be unsettled by the Big Bang theory of the creation of the universe,
because it could have been God who created the Big Bang.
I was shocked
by his announcement. I had been raised
to go to church and considered myself religious, yet I found nothing upsetting
by learning about science. It never
occurred to me that a college professor in a very progressive state (Massachusetts)
would feel the need to placate anyone about science possibly refuting their literal interpretation
of the Bible.
No one in class, as I remember, made any comment or reacted, so perhaps I was the only one surprised. Along with church, I was also raised on the notion of separation of church and state.
I thought he was a good teacher, and I enjoyed
the class, and soon we were engrossed in talking about another Big Bang, as that was the
year Mount Saint Helens erupted. He
never mentioned anything about that being in the Bible.
*******************************
Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Movies in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century and Hollywood Fights Fascism and Christmas in Classic Films. TO JOIN HER READERS' GROUP - follow this link for a free book as a thank-you for joining.
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