Inherit the Wind
Description
Two-time Best Actor OscarÂ(r) winners* Spencer Tracy and Fredric March go toe-to-toe in this thrilling re-creation of the most titanic courtroom battle of the century. Garnering four Academy AwardÂ(r) nominations**, including Best Actor (Tracy), and featuring Gene Kelly in a rare, critically-acclaimed dramatic role, Inherit the Wind is powerful, provocative cinema and “a heaping measure of entertainment” (The Hollywood Reporter)! The controversial subject of evolution versus creation causes two polar opposites to engage in one explosive battle of beliefs. Attorney Clarence Darrow (Tracy) faces off against fundamentalist leader William Jennings Bryan (March) in a small Tennessee town where a teacher has been brought to trial for teaching Darwinism. Let the trial begin…and watch the sparks fly!Amazon.com
Two of the juiciest roles in the American theater fall at the feet of Spencer Tracy and Fredric March, and both men make a meal of it. Inherit the Wind, based on the play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, is a slightly fictionalized account of the Scopes Monkey Trial, that galvanizing legal drama of the 1920s. When a young Tennessee teacher is prosecuted for teaching the theory of evolution in a public school, he receives unwanted public attention as well as the legal advice of a giant. Tracy plays the role based on Clarence Darrow, the eloquent defense attorney, and March storms his way through a part based on Williams Jennings Bryan, the failed presidential candidate (and famed orator) who prosecuted the case. Gene Kelly plays a character based on the acid-penned H.L. Mencken, reporting on the trial and caustically commenting on the absurdity of the human animal. Stanley (Judgment at Nuremberg) Kramer’s direction is not especially subtle, but the verbal fireworks unleashed during the trial sequences are still stirring. Even the different styles of the actors are intriguing: March is all mannerism and false padding around the belly, while Tracy does his patented naturalistic grumbling. It would be nice if this story were a quaint period piece, but its issues and arguments keep reemerging in the headlines with each new generation. –Robert Horton
Popularity: 1% [?]
TF said,
September 1, 2010 @ 8:23 pm
This movie is terrible. When people make a movie, you assume they would try to make it entertaining at the very Least. Don’t waste your time viewing this film. It lasts way too long and you’ll be happy when its over. Even if you do like the movie, it has a terrible ending. Hardly any of the conflicts are solved, and you’re left with a feeling of disgust. That is only if you manage to make it through the entire movie. The songs in it as well are way too long and sound terrible. To sum it up, this movie is terrible.
Rating: 1 / 5
Oscar said,
September 1, 2010 @ 10:19 pm
Total manipulation and bias throughout the entire movie.
The Producers of this movie must have thought that the people viewing this film, are as stupid as the characters they had portrayed as “Christians”.
So far removed from any truth. The only thing this film is “based on” is the Director’s own personal bias.
Just because “one” has the money to make a film, doesn’t mean that “one” has the intelligence to do so, or even the right to insult the intelligence of others. Don’t waste your time or your money on this film.
Rating: 1 / 5
Deacon said,
September 2, 2010 @ 1:15 am
Thankfully, due to the internet we may read original source documents concerning important historical events. (…)Mr. Bryan was a hero of the Faith and it is a blessing to read the closing argument he prepared, but was unable to deliver. If only our Christian statesmen and pillars of the community would speak in such open terms with such a glowing love of God and neighbor as he did. We have been beaten down by the godless backlash that followed Scopes, of which this movie is an example, but it is time for a new generation of brave Christians to face the threats which are destroying western nations from the inside out. Please let yourself be transported to the wholesome, healthy, holy, righteous vision of society which William Jennings Bryan represents and presents in the original source. This movie should have portrayed Bryan as a great man on the side of a greater Truth and Darrow as the slimy, worldly-wise man he was.
Rating: 2 / 5
STEPHEN T. McCARTHY said,
September 2, 2010 @ 1:32 am
I recently rented INHERIT THE WIND to see for myself if it was really as bad as I’d heard. It was. I am astounded to find how many reviewers have excused its massive deviation from fact under the banner of “entertainment.” Has our capacity to evaluate information diminished to the point that we are no longer able to differentiate between simple entertainment and pure propaganda? When a movie presents a supposedly intellectual argument, and paints EVERY SINGLE MEMBER on one side of that argument as a buffoon maroon, but shows the other side as thoughtful, open-minded, and humanitarian, you can bet the farm that you’re being propagandized! A couple of reviewers here have equated the movie with an indictment of the horrors of “McCarthyism.” These folks have been twice-bamboozled! Obviously they don’t do any independent research, but ingest whatever gets fed to them. Go to http://www.thenewamerican.com and click on “Profiles” if you want to learn the truth about Joseph McCarthy and “McCarthyism.”
INHERIT THE WIND pretends to portray the famous 1925 Scopes “Monkey Trial” with a little dramatic license. This movie strays SO FAR from the facts that even saying it is “based on” the actual event renders that term so elastic as to be meaningless! John Scopes is renamed Bert Cates (Dick York), Clarence Darrow becomes Henry Drummond (Spencer Tracy), William Jennings Bryan becomes Matthew Harrison Brady (Fredric March) and Dayton, Tennessee becomes Hillsboro, Tennessee. The playwrights, Jerome Lawrence & Robert Lee, did not alter the names because they thought they could improve on them, but so they could legally reinvent history. The idea was to twist the truth & present it as entertainment “based on” a true story, knowing that over time, the drama will become accepted as factual by the masses. And it worked! Look how many of us grew up thinking that INHERIT THE WIND was an essentially accurate account of the “Monkey Trial.”
All of the Christians (believing in “Creationism”) in the movie are portrayed as emotionally-overwrought, brain-dead bigots. Paint any other group with such a broad brush and you’ll be in court for the rest of your life, but here in Amerika, it’s always “open season” on Christians. Hardly sympathetic to both views, in reality, Darrow called Christianity, Bryan’s “fool religion.”
Contrary to many opinions posted here, the acting does NOT make INHERIT THE WIND worthy of your time. March & Claude Akins are mere caricatures, but they’re not to be blamed as Brady and Rev. Brown were written as cartoon blowhards. Tracy’s naturalistic performance is enjoyable as usual, but Tracy was ALWAYS Tracy from film to film; there’s nothing new here. Gene Kelly was fine as the cynical, MENSA-donkey newspaper reporter, but it was a simple part to play. The best, most sympathetic performance was actually turned in by Florence Eldridge as Mrs. Sarah Brady. Now her I believed.
If you’re interested in comparing the events portrayed in the movie, INHERIT THE WIND with the REALITY of the 1925 “Monkey Trial”, to see just how far the playwrights deviated from truth, click on my name above, and go to my Amazon guide called, “SO YOU’D LIKE TO…STOP FALLING FOR SPENCER TRACY’S MONKEY BUSINESS!” You’ll be surprised at how seriously the movie distorted the facts in order to condition people to the dogma of Darwinism!
Rating: 1 / 5
Albert Lee said,
September 2, 2010 @ 1:35 am
Stanley Kramer was a liberal member of the hollywood elite
who hated america. He also hated God. And this was his
anti-God epic. Its set in a courtroom, but for all the justice
and law in the film, it might as well be a courtroom in
Stalin’s russia or Saddam Hussien’s Iraq.
From beginning to end, the facts in this film are changed to
fit the message. Which is that religion, god and anyone
who isn’t at minimum an agnostic or (better) an Atheist
is a clown and a fool and probably in need of a re-education
camp.
What you never see in this movie, for example, is the case
that Bryan made in various forums against the social implications
of Darwinism. The liberals and agnostics were not simply
concerned with Darwinism as science, but Darwinism as a
philosophy of life. In that philosphy, the concept of man and
morality, was replaced by the iron law called “survival of the
fittest” or as the never-mentioned alternate title of
Darwin’s book “the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life”. Darwinism was the phiosophical basis
of Social Darwinism, Eugenics and many sick ideologies based
on the concept that all human life was a struggle for
preservation of race with no rules.
We also don’t see agnostic Clarence Darrow rampaging through
the courtroom demanding that the Bible be removed from the
countroom and that no one should dare to pray in his presence.
Kramer makes Darrow into the good rational nice man. The good
man compared to Bryan the raving irrational lunatic who ideas
(as created by Stanley Kramer) are obviously insane.
Kramer also has no sense of the irony of the absurdity of
using a courtroom to decide issues of religious belief and
science. Its not the place of any court to decide matters
of science. The court can decide if a law restricting the
teaching of a subject is valid in the broad sense, but a
court cannot decide or place a value on a specific subject
or announce to the world that evolution is truth.
The abusurdity of the case is that any decision in the matter
that touches on the issue of evolution itself pushes the
court toward an establishment of religion. If the court rules
one way, it has endosed christianity, if it rules the other,
it has made a move against christianity.
The core of the film takes all the life and complexities out
of Byran. He is reduced to a pompous demagog who is fed
arguments by Stanley Kramer while the real words of the man
are forgotten.
Meanwhile, real-life drunken moral degenerate adulterer
Spencer Tracy is played up as the kindly “good american” home
spun man of the people who is the heart of good sense and
reason. His Darrow is about as far from the real thing as
its possible to get.
It would have been possible to make a good film about this
subject. But to do so, the film-maker and writer has to
respect both sides of the arguement at a minimum enough
so that both are allowed to make their case.
But what Stanley Kramer set out to do was to make a vicious,
untrue film where he got to ridicule his enemy (religious
people, people in middle america, ministers and anyone
who isn’t agnostic or atheist) while the opposing side was
gagged and locked out of the courtroom.
Rating: 1 / 5