Inherit the Wind (1960)

Directed by Stanley Kramer. Starring Spencer Tracy, Fredric March, Gene Kelly, Harry Morgan, Donna Anderson, Dick York, Elliott Reed, Claude Akins, Florence Eldridge, Phillip Coolidge.

One of liberal Kramer’s finest “message movies,” bringing Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee’s stage play to the big screen as a fictionalized account of the Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes legal case, better known as the Scopes “Monkey” Trial. Tracy is the defense attorney (standing in for Clarence Darrow) while March thunders as the Bible-thumping politician who assists the prosecutor (standing in for William Jennings Bryan); cast against type, Kelly covers the “outsider component” as the jaded, sharp-tongued journalist covering the story for the Baltimore Herald (standing in for Henry L. Mencken). Though the filmmakers stack the deck in its persuasive purpose (and the picture proudly wears its McCarthyism-allegory lapel), there’s no faulting the passion; watching arguments being made in the name of scientific record as “incontrovertible as geometry to any enlightened community of minds” in a losing cause stokes infuriation every time, especially since the battle retains relevance even today. March overdoes it at times as the blustery statesman, lips flapping whenever he begins to doubt his own inflamed rhetoric, but only the sad-eyed lovebirds York and Anderson (the defendant and preacher’s daughter respectively) fatigue with their panic-struck romance. Remade multiple times for television.

87/100