9 / 10
Official trailer
A Teacher in a Cell
Bertram Cates teaches biology in Hillsboro, a small, devout town in the South, and one morning the local officials walk into his classroom and arrest him in front of his students. His crime is teaching Darwin’s theory of evolution, and state law forbids it. The town is scandalized. Within days, the whole country is watching.
The story is a fictionalized version of the Scopes trial of 1925, when John Scopes was prosecuted in Dayton, Tennessee, and Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan argued the case. The writers changed the names and invented a lot of the details, but the spirit is there. Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee wrote it as a stage play in 1955, and Stanley Kramer turned it into this film.
The playwrights were writing about their own time as much as the twenties. It was the McCarthy era, and the play is really about what happens when a community decides some ideas are too dangerous to be spoken.
Give me Tracy and March in a sweltering courtroom and I’m happy for as long as they want to argue. They’re so good together that I’d watch them fight over a parking ticket. The message gets heavy in places, but it’s a message I agree with, and the film delivers it with more warmth than sermons usually get.
Tracy and March
Fredric March plays Matthew Harrison Brady, a famous orator and three-time presidential candidate who arrives to prosecute Cates, greeted by a brass band and adoring crowds. Spencer Tracy plays Henry Drummond, a brilliant, rumpled defense lawyer who comes to defend him and is greeted with hymns and threats.
The two men were once friends and allies, and their scenes together crackle with old affection, old grudges and real respect. March plays Brady as a showman, vain, hungry for applause and gorging himself at every meal. Tracy plays Drummond as a quiet, shrewd man with a sly sense of humor who hates hypocrisy and loves a fair fight.
Watching two of the great actors of their era face off across a sweltering courtroom is a joy. Tracy was nominated for an Oscar for it, and deserved to win.
For Writers
Brady and Drummond were once friends. Their shared history turns a legal clash into something personal, full of respect, regret and old wounds.
Opponents with a history make every exchange richer. If your antagonists once liked or admired each other, every argument carries the memory of what they’ve lost, and the reader feels it even when they’re shouting about something else. Old friends know exactly where to hit, and they know exactly what it costs them to do it.
Kramer never lets that history disappear. Even at the height of the trial, Drummond treats Brady with a kind of weary tenderness, and it makes their final confrontation sadder than any villain’s defeat.
The Town
Hillsboro is shown with a mix of affection and alarm. The townspeople are good, hard-working people who love their faith and their community, and they’re easily turned into a mob. There’s a night-time rally outside the jail, led by the town’s fiery preacher, Reverend Brown, with torches, hymns and a burning effigy of Cates.
Claude Akins plays Brown as a man consumed by his own certainty, who calls down damnation on his own daughter, Cates’s fiancée, for defending the man she loves. It’s the most frightening scene in the film, and it’s also the one that turns the town against him. Even Brady is horrified and tells him to stop.
That rally scene chills me. Akins calling down damnation on his own daughter in front of the whole town is the ugliest thing in the film, and Kramer stages it so the torchlight and the hymns make it worse. Kramer is careful here. Kramer respects faith. His warning is about what happens when faith is used to silence people, and several of its most sympathetic characters are believers.
Hornbeck
Gene Kelly, in a rare dramatic role, plays E.K. Hornbeck, a cynical big-city newspaperman modeled on H.L. Mencken, who sneers at the town and its people. He’s witty, amusing and cold, and he’s on Cates’s side for all the wrong reasons.
Hornbeck is the film’s cleverest touch. He gives voice to everything smug outsiders thought about towns like Hillsboro, and by the end, Drummond turns on him, because Hornbeck has no respect for anybody’s beliefs, including his own. It’s a sharp reminder that cynicism isn’t the same as thinking for yourself. Gene Kelly surprised me here. I’d never have cast the man from the musicals as a sneering Mencken type, and he’s so smooth at it that Drummond’s final dressing-down feels like a long-overdue slap.
Brady on the Stand
The film’s legendary scene comes when the judge forbids Drummond from calling scientists to testify, and Drummond, out of options, calls Brady himself to the stand as an expert on the Bible. Brady, proud and confident, agrees.
What follows is the best scene in the film and the one I’d rate it on.
Drummond asks Brady simple questions about scripture and reason, about how long a day was before the sun was created, about who decides what the words mean. Brady answers with bluster and certainty, then gets tangled, then gets angry, and finally the crowd laughs at him. Drummond never claims the Bible is wrong. He argues that no man has the right to tell another what he’s allowed to think.
March is superb as Brady’s confidence crumbles, and Tracy never gloats. He takes no pleasure in humiliating an old friend.
For Writers
Drummond calls Brady to the stand as an expert on the Bible. The prosecutor becomes the witness, and the trap closes through his own pride.
The most satisfying reversals come from a character’s own strength turning against them. Brady’s certainty and love of an audience make him accept Drummond’s challenge, and those same qualities destroy him on the stand. Drummond barely has to do anything. He opens a door, and Brady’s vanity walks him through it. When you plan a confrontation, ask what your antagonist is proudest of, and find a way for that pride to lead them into the trap. The reader will feel it as justice, and the villain’s downfall will seem to come from inside them.
The Verdict and After
Cates is found guilty, as everybody knew he’d be, and fined a hundred dollars. Brady, stung by the tiny sentence, tries to deliver a grand speech to the crowd, but nobody’s listening.
The radio broadcasters cut him off, the people wander away, and he collapses in the middle of his words. He dies soon after.
The ending is quiet and moving. Drummond speaks up for Brady against Hornbeck’s mockery, reminding him that Brady was a great man once. Then, alone in the empty courtroom, he picks up a copy of Darwin’s book and a Bible, weighs them in his hands, puts them together in his briefcase and walks out.
It’s a perfect final image: both books, side by side, carried by a man who believes there’s room in the world for both.
For Writers
Drummond puts Darwin and the Bible side by side in his briefcase. The final image resolves the film’s argument without a word.
A strong closing image can say what your whole story means without a speech. Readers remember a gesture far longer than a summary, and a single physical action can carry the entire theme. Kramer could have given Tracy a closing speech. He gave him a briefcase, and the briefcase says more.
Look for an object or gesture that sums up your story’s resolution. If you’ve spent the book arguing, let the last page show the answer instead of stating it. Readers who have followed the argument will get it.
Stanley Kramer
Kramer made a string of films about big social issues in this period, including The Defiant Ones and Judgment at Nuremberg, and he’s sometimes accused of preaching. Inherit the Wind does preach a bit, and the characters sometimes turn into speeches. But the performances and the courtroom scenes are so strong, and the argument so humane, that it rarely feels like a lecture.
The black-and-white photography captures the heat of a Southern summer, with sweating crowds, flapping fans and a stifling courtroom, and the whole film feels like it’s about to boil over.
Where It Creaks
The film is long and talky, and some of the townsfolk are caricatures. The romance between Cates and Rachel is thin, and Dick York, as Cates, has less to do than the lawyers around him. Some viewers will find the message heavy-handed.
The romance is where my attention wanders. Dick York is likable enough, but whenever the film leaves the courtroom for Cates and Rachel, I’m waiting to get back to Tracy and March.
The performances hold it together, and Tracy especially is at the top of his game.
Craft Note
Craft Note
Inherit the Wind turns a trial about a science lesson into an argument about the freedom to think. The courtroom is the arena, and the stakes are what a community is willing to let its people say.
Stories about ideas work best when characters with history, pride and something personal at stake carry the ideas.
If your story argues a point, give each side a champion the reader can respect, and let the argument cost both of them something.
Tracy, March and the Right to Think
Inherit the Wind is a 9 because Tracy and March give me the finest acting duel I can name, and because the film treats faith with respect and fanaticism with fear. It loses a point for the talkiness, the thin romance and a few cartoon townsfolk. The briefcase ending, Darwin and the Bible packed side by side, is one I’d put up against almost any in American film, and the argument it closes is as relevant now as it was in 1960.
