r>by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
At 9 p.m. on Friday, September 30 I put on Turner Classic Movies for a screening of the 1960 film Inherit the Wind, Stanley Kramer’s adaptation of the 1955 hit Broadway play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee (not that Robert E. Lee!) based on the real-life 1925 “monkey trial” in Dayton, Tennessee in which biology teacher John T. Scopes was charged with violating a newly passed Tennessee state law forbidding the teaching of evolution in public schools. I had not realized until just now that there have been at least three TV-movie remakes of Inhterit the Wind – in 1965 with Melvyn Douglas and Ed Begley, in 1988 with Kirk Douglas and Jason Robards, and in 1999 with Jack Lemmon and George C. Scott – as well as a 2017 short directed by and starring Langston Tillman as “Henry Drummond.” I first encountered Inherit the Wind in high school, when I ordered a copy of the play and it became one of my favorite books, so when I first saw this movie on TV I was disappointed that the actors didn’t perform the way I had fantasized they would when reading the playscript. The second time I saw the film was at a public screening at the College of Marin during which a group of Fundamentalist Christians hung out outside the theatre with copies of a Chick’s Tract called “Big Daddy?” which attacked the theory of evolution; the comic-book tract told the story of a biology professor who becomes convinced that creationism is scientifically correct and resigns his job.
It was a real-life reminder that the issues raised by the Scopes trial, and particularly the attempts of state lawmakers in 1925, 1972 or 2022 to legislate what can and can’t be taught in the schools. Since then I’ve seen this several times, including at least once with my husband Charles, who was upset that Lawrence nad Lee changed the names of the location and the principal characters – Dayton became “Hillsboro” (and though it’s clearly Southern it’s not specified that it is in Tennessee), Scopes became “Bertram Cates” (Dick York – and I couldn’t help but think that if the Fundamentalists in town were upset by him teaching evolution, they’d have freaked out totally if he had shown up with an actual witch as his wife, as in his best-known role in the TV series Bewitched), prosecutor William Jennings Bryan became “Matthew Harrison Brady” (Fredric March), defense attorney Clarence Darrow became “Henry Drummond” (Spencer Tracy), and H. L. Mencken, the nationally known reporter who broke the story and made it a media cause célèbre, became “E. K. Hornbeck” (Gene Kelly, continuing Kramer’s penchant for casting musician dance stars in non-musical roles he’d started with Fred Astaire in On the Beach – though Kelly, unlike Astaire, had played non-musical roles before). “Why didn’t they just use their real names?” Charles asked.
This time around Charles was struck at the sheer number of actors in the film who went on to do parts in ling-running TV series – not only Dick York but Paul Hartman as the bailiff, Norman Fell as a radio technician. and Henry Morgan as the judge, called “Mel Coffey” in the film even though the judge in the actual Scopes trial was John Raulston. I didn’t like Inherit the Wind when I first saw it, and today I know why: Spencer Tracy and Fredric March, both usually restrained performers, overacted terribly – was Kramer in such awe of his legendary stars he didn’t dare tell them they were overdoing it? He worked hard to get both stars into the film, at one point signing Tracy on the basis that March was going to be in the film even though March hadn’t yet confirmed. (Tracy and March were long-time friends, and when Tracy made a film of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde nine years after March had, March publicly defended Tracy against critics who had thought Traqy had been miscast and March had played the part far better.) Lawrence and Lee also gave “Cates” a love interest, Rachel Brown (Donna Anderson), daughter of the local pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Brown (Claude Akins). Seen today, it’s hard not to regret the opportunities the facts of the Scopes trial gave that the filmmakers ignored or miffed. The real JUdge Raulston was a deeply religious man who opened every session of the trial with a prayer, and when Darrow objected on the ground that the judge opening each session of a trial dealing with the whole question of separation (or lack thereof) between church and state might make it look like the judge was taking sides, Raulston was perplexed and deeply hurt because it had been his routine in every case to open court with a prayer. The trial in both the movie and in fact took place during a major heat wave, but because everyone in the court – judge, attorneys, jurors, spectators – was sweltering, Raulston had the trial moved outdoors, so mos
t of it took place on the lawn of the courthouse rather than inside it. (One could readily understand how Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee weren’t about to write that into their play, but I think Kramer and his writers, Nedrick Young – who was getting his first credit here since coming off the blacklist, which gave him a point of identification with “Cates” – and Harold Jacob Smith, missed a major opportunity by not including this in the film.) Also, in the real trial townspeople clamored to get onto the jury because that would presumably give them better seats than they’d have in the spectators’ section – only the jurors actually missed most of the trial, including Darrow’s legendary examination of Bryan as a witness on the Bible, because Judge Raulston excluded the jury from it. Still, despite its flaws, the 1960 Inherit the Wind tells a profound storl well, and what strikes me most strongly about this movie is its continuing relevance. Amazingly, the nutso brand of Fundamentalist Christianity that gave rise to the ridiculous law under which Scopes was prosecuted (and which the Tennessee state government didn’t repeal until 1966) is not only alive and well but ascendant in this country, especially in the current radical Right-wing majority (mislabeled “conservative”) of the U.S. Supreme Court, which sees nothing wrong with hegislating their own moral principles from the bench regardless of public opinion or basic sanity.
The forces that pilloried John Scopes are alive and well in states like Texas and Florida, where state leaders like governors Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis (respectively) are working to purge their states’ public-school curricula of anything they consider “woke,” including the ideas that slavery was evil, that human-caused climate change is real, that Queer people – especiallyl Trans people – have any rights that straight people are obliged to respect, and that abortion is the murder of innocent babies and therefore a moral horror. MS-NBC host Alex Wagner kicked off the first week of her new show with accounts of Florida social-studies teachers who were forced, on pain of being fired, to pay $700 each to attend weekend workshops in which state officials gave them their marching orders on how to teach anything that might make white, straight Christian students uncomfortable – and, to add insult to injury, the teachers were forced to pay for their own indoctrination sessions in a state that ranks in the low 40’s in terms of how much they pay their teachers.
As Clarence Darrow said in his opening statement in the real Scopes trial (a portion of which got plugged into Young’s and Smith’s script just before the scene in which the judge holds “Drummond” in contempt, which also actually happened), “Ignorance and fanaticism is ever busy and needs feeding. Always it is feeding and gloating for more.” Also, Lawrence and Lee somewhat overdid making “Brady” into a mental and moral doofus; in the early 2000’s PBS ran a documentary on the real William Jennings Bryan which made him seem liie a far more thoughtful and intellectually interesting figure than he comes off in this movie. The real Bryan was an economic liberal who staunchly opposed so-called “social Darwinism,” the idea that the homan race was still evolving and rich people were biologically superior to non-rich people. One Social Darwinist said that “the millionaires are products of natural selection,” and Bryan’s opposition to the Social Darwinist call for lassiez-faire capitalism seemed to have led him to his crusade not only against social Darwinism but original Darwinism as well.
