Editor Reviews:

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 essential video:
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

Rating : - A Black and White Movie For a Technicolor World
This is the second in my "series" of films for which I am truly thankful, the problem with that being that it is the first one that most of you will be reading. Such is life. In my first review, which was actually more of a thumbnail appreciation of the original production of THE THING (a film that literally shaped the rest of my life), I mentioned that there was another film that had taught me an important lesson at the age of 12, one that I hope I will carry with me for the rest of my life. Well, INHERIT THE WIND is that film.

Directed by Stanley Kramer, INHERIT THE WIND gives us a very fictionalized account of the infamous Scopes Monkey Trial in which a man was tried and convicted for teaching Darwin's theory of evolution in a Tennessee school. Virtually all of the names and locations have been changed as have many of the pertinent facts because this was never intended to be anything more than a work of historical fiction through which the director and the screenwriters expressed their points of view. I do admit as I've looked back on it over the years that it does come down a bit harshly on the anti-evolution Christian segment, but then they were never intended to portray actual people as much as they were meant to represent the generalized sentiment held by a large segment of society at that time and in that place. The pro-evolution forces are not without their warts--Gene Kelly's newspaper reporter is an extremely obnoxious character who supposedly represents H.L. Mencken who covered the actual trial. He's abrasive,crude,and a symbol of everything that's wrong with the so called "intellectual elite".

As I said earlier this is not a review per se. I merely want to tell you why I am thankful for this particular film. So here goes. At the end of the film Spencer Tracy who has been representing the defendant prepares to leave the courthouse for the last time. He gathers up all of his papers and the copy of Darwin's book he has been using for reference during the trial. Then he spots a copy of the Bible on the table. He picks it up, and holding Darwin's book in one hand and the Bible in the other he seems to be weighing them against each other as if to see which one is physically heavier. Finally he simply puts them together and walks out of the courthouse with both them both. What I took from this scene and from the film itself was that it was never necessary to completely discard one thing in order to embrace another, and that seemingly disparate ideas could co-exist as long as the mind that held them was willing to contain them both. Creationism vs Evolution, Christianity vs Atheism are like seeing things as black white when everything is really in Technicolor.