Review of Inherit the Wind (1960) by Shane S — 19 Feb 2012

One of the more thought-provoking plays to have come out of the transition between modernist writing and postmodernism, the classic satire "Inherit the Wind" analyses McCarthyism from all sides, from the popular opinion to the opposition. However, unlike most critiques of McCarthyism, it took a side nobody wanted to pick: the median that states that both warring sides are right in one way, but deadly wrong in another. In many ways, with all of those court cases in the South about the teaching of Darwinian evolution, it's still extremely relevant to this day. At the same time, with the rise of a progressive, more aware and open-minded version of Christianity, the play is looked at as a transitional work marking the transformation of America from a fundamentalist, unshaking ground to a country hellbent on progress and equality.

In that sense, the film is very similar to that. Save for some off-putting sappy moments, Stanley Kramer's "Inherit the Wind" marked another transition in Hollywood - that the film industry could take big steps towards depicting anything. In that sense, a lot of the things that make the play both relevant and merely a transitional figure are in place here - relevant in the fact that Ray Comfort, Kirk Cameron, and a few Hollywood select have attempted to "reform" it by turning it back towards the all-ages studio system, but transitional in the idea that Hollywood would be inspired to make edgier films (both by greed and by boredom) like "The Pawnbroker," "The Graduate," "Easy Rider," and so on. However, it's not the historical value that makes this film so powerful. It's the acting and the dry wit prevalent throughout. Same as the play.

The acting is good. Like, scary good. Especially with Spencer Tracy as the agnostic Henry Drummond and Fredric March as the crazy Fundamentalist Matthew Brady, I get an idea on how this film works. Both of these guys are their characters - they rarely, if ever, display any of their trademark personas found in the bulk of their resume. They don't play as Spencer Tracy and Fredric March acting for a paycheck - they actually have passion in these roles. This isn't the tired, proselytizing "acting" that plagues Sherwood Baptist's pictures - this is true passion. True life.

So, thanks to high school, most of you know what this play is about: a fictionalized Scopes trial. Something that nobody should care about, but in the South, it was a big deal. Of course, the Scopes trial was made as a publicity stunt in order to show the unconstitutionality of a law banning the teaching of evolution (as in, "this thing can potentially destroy freedom of the press" unconstitutionality), but here, it's purely serious business. A town driven by religion wants this trial to affirm their faith - they don't want anything that could drastically alter the way they live, even if it's something as trivial as the theory of evolution. With that, we get three sides:

1. Matthew Harrison Brady, the fundamentalist who thinks that everything in the Bible is 100% true. Like, the whole "Cain's wife" controversy, the fallacy of the fall of man (in a nutshell, how can Adam and Eve knowingly do bad if they had no knowledge of what is good or bad?), Joshua making the sun stand still for 7 days (a violation of physics), and the exact time of the days in the Genesis accounts.

2. E.K. Hornbeck, the newspaper writer who is desperate to be so progressive that he disowns anything he considers "antiquated," especially religion. He sees nothing positive in humanity, especially the things they make. He is the "genius liberal atheist communist Democratic" of the group - the Amazing Atheist, so to speak. He is similarly fundamentalist as Brady, but on a different topic: human pessimism.

3. Henry Drummond, the straight man of the group. He's the defense attorney of the teacher arrested for giving some of his students a few pointers on evolution. He considers Brady a friend, so he can't fully throw away religion, but he knows that it is increasingly being superseded by new evidence in science, so he can't live by blind faith alone. He is the agnostic - the awkward middle ground between faith and pessimism. And he needs to prove a point to everybody - that neither faith nor solely looking forward will help us, but looking back at what we do and accepting change at the same time will.

So, why is this film a 4-star for me? Sappiness during a few dramatic sequences, the obvious "let's trim out stuff in order to make our film more one-sided" thing, and obvious symbolism. However, as a message film, it's original, it's bold, and it fights for something that it thinks is right: faith and science co-existing together, working for different aspects of humanity. Shame most people don't learn that when they look at the film.