9 / 10
Inherit the Wind is two great actors going at each other for two hours, and that’s all it needs to be. Spencer Tracy and Fredric March play thinly disguised versions of Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan, and both are superb.
Stanley Kramer directed it in 1960 from the stage play. It’s a 9.
The Premise
A schoolteacher in a small southern town is arrested for teaching evolution. A famous politician and orator comes to prosecute, a famous defense attorney comes to defend, and a cynical big-city reporter comes to write it up. The town turns it into a carnival, and the trial becomes an argument about whether people are allowed to think.
The Tracy-March Confrontation
Tracy’s Drummond is rumpled, patient and lethal. March’s Brady is vain, warm and genuinely devout, and the film is careful to make him a man instead of a fool. They were friends once, and the film keeps reminding you. The scene where Drummond calls Brady himself to the stand as an expert on the Bible is one of the great sequences in courtroom cinema.
The Kelly Hornbeck
Gene Kelly, against type, plays the reporter as a sneering cynic based on H. L. Mencken, and the film ends by rejecting him. Drummond turns on him in the last scene and tells him that he’s as intolerant as the people he mocks, a braver ending than the film needed.
The Period Adaptation
The play was written in 1955 as a response to McCarthyism and the blacklist, using the Scopes trial as cover. It isn’t accurate history: the real trial was arranged as a publicity stunt by the town, the teacher was never jailed, and Bryan wasn’t destroyed the way March is. Take it as a drama about intellectual freedom, which is what it was written to be.
The Ending
Drummond leaves the courtroom, picks up Darwin in one hand and the Bible in the other, weighs them, and puts them together in his bag. It’s the whole argument in one gesture.
Craft Note
Craft Note
Inherit the Wind writes its opponent with real conviction and real dignity. Brady believes what he says, and beating him means beating a good argument.
Give the other side its best case. A straw man makes your hero look small.
Does Inherit the Wind still hold up?
Yes. It’s a 9. The acting is magnificent and the argument hasn’t dated at all. Treat the history as fiction and the drama as first rate.
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