Mere Opinion: A Review of Inherit the Wind (1960)
Roberts offers his review of Stanley Kramer's 1960 masterpiece "Inherit the Wind", caricatures and all.
In my more irritable moods, when my misanthropy is at full mirth, I find myself living in a world that is devoid of thought. There are few things that escape this feeling; our politics, our schools, our media--if I went on with this list, I would be putting in more thought into this than the participants of any of those fields do. To paraphrase Schopenhauer, it seems that people would rather believe than think, and thus are inaccessible to reason, for they only respond to authority.
This is a tendency that extends into cinema; one need only consider the current 'debate' people are having about the place of the Marvel Cinematic Universe in American cinema. Those of the MCU fanbase seem to think that mere entertainment is worthy of elevation, as if the fulfillment of their subjective whims is worthy of an award. On the other side, there are those whose common vernacular includes the names Hitchcock, Scorsese, Wilder, Spielberg, or Kubrick. Where those of the MCU fanbase value their subjectivity to the point of solipsism, with a punctuated childishness, those who worship 'Cinema' with a capital C seem to treat various directors as mere axioms of greatness. It is, alas, a battle of authority inflamed by belief--who is the authority on cinema? The views of the movie-goers (or movie-streamers, nowadays), or the accomplishments of particular film auteurs, as Vidal used to say with such disdain.
To me, this spat seems to be little more than a symptom of cinema in transition; moving between those who consider cinema an experience, and those who think experience can be made cinematic. Where Will Self noted, pessimistically, that he believed the death of film was upon us, I think he is a bit premature; death is not here yet, but a mid-life crisis is in order. Fueled as we are by our unspoken theatrum mundi, the film exists as the largest of the monuments we have erected to a world so made that it requires a frame to be understood. The epidemic of superhero movies, of nostalgia-tinged 'shows', and the desperate reproduction of past tales in the name of 'content' is much like the shiny new car or the pathetic but loin-invigorating affair of any mid-life crisis. It is as if, perhaps, we have seen this one before.
Like the children of most 'show, don't tell' marriages that are plagued by midlife crises, I have decided to ignore the crisis; someone is going to wander back in shame, or there will be a divorce. We just have to let go. Until then, I have taken refuge in the TV shows of the recent decade or so, and allowed my personal tastes to decide what movies I watch, rather than the squabbling incontinence of the Twitterati--they are already taking the piss; there is no need for me to do so too. One such film that appeals to my taste is, in fact, an older movie; Stanley Kramer's Inherit the Wind (1960). Part of this appeals, I must confess, is too idiosyncratic to be appreciated by you, dear reader: this movie is a fictionalization of the Scopes 'Monkey Trial' of 1925: in fact, while it was written first as a play in 1955 before its adaptation to the silver screen in 1960, it had been made clear that the characters were caricatures of real people. Bertram T. Cates (Dick York) is a fictional version of John T. Scopes, Henry Drummond (Spencer Tracy) is patterned after Clarence Darrow, Matthew Harrison Brady (Fredric March) is a stand-in for William Jennings Bryan, and E.K. Hornbeck (Gene Kelly) is patterned after H.L. Mencken (hence my interest). The trial is also based on the crux of the Scopes Trial; namely the issue of teaching evolution in schools, when the state has strictly forbidden its teachings. Instead of dealing with the Butler Act of Scopes Trial fame, for example, it is dealing with an act which is not named but referred to constantly as 'The Law'.
Another reason for its appeal to my particular tastes is because this movie, made in 1960, was produced for a more specific purpose: as the director Stanley Kramer noted in an interview in 1996, and as the original playwrights Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee made note of in the 2001 staging of the play in Kansas, this movie (and the play it made cinematic) was a way of criticizing the Senator Joseph McCarthy's Red Hunt, which at the time the play and movie were made, were relevant and important. The movie itself was being affected by the trials, when one of its writers Nedrick Young had to write under the nom-de-plume Nathan E. Douglas, because he was blacklisted. As Kramer put it, the issue of evolution was a parable--an art form we either get little of, or we get clumsily nowadays, like Stendhal's pistol shot in a theater--not to hash out the role of religion in schools, but the right to think, which is made clear in Henry Drummond's interrogation of Brady in the movie.
But historical trivia is not enough to make any work interesting; cinema, first and foremost, is an art. This simple fact is missed, most of the time, by everyone who discusses cinema. It is a discussion of aesthetics, rather than what it is deployed for--which tends to be either puritanical moralism or political theorizing. I hold fast to the idea that theorists and puritans ruin movies by making them gris for their mills; topics for their navel-gazing. Removed from the realm of aesthetics, cinema becomes Adorno's culture industry, a homiletic that we might as well give up to pedants and puritans like Adorno.
Inherit the Wind, as art, is a beautiful mix of the parable, the use of caricature, and the expression of its theme: the right to think. In essence, the achievement of Stanley Kramer is how he gets caricatures to think--perhaps in hope that we would copy what we see on the screen. The characters, with certain exceptions like Rachel Brown and her father, seem to descend upon the city of Hillsboro in a manner as ridiculous as the parade that is mustered to meet them.
Consider, to begin with, Henry Drummond. In many ways, his character screams Clarence Darrow; the suspenders he grabs and snaps, his reputation as 'the agnostic from Chicago', or his friendship with Matthew Brady. Even in his speech, or his questioning of Brady, anyone familiar with the Scopes Trial can hear Darrow.
And yet, his caricature opens him up as a relatable character; he is, like many people, not antagonistic against religion itself, but against what religion is being used for. One might consider how, at the end, Drummond takes Darwin's Origins of Species and the Holy Bible and places them together; this less than a minute-long scene frames the movie far beyond the trial it is structured on. This sort of perspective is presented brilliantly in his discussion with Brady on the porch, sitting in their rocking chairs. After relating a story about wanting a rocking horse which turned out, as he put it, to be 'all shine and no substance', he adds:
"...and that is how I feel about that demonstration I saw tonight, Matt. All glitter and glamor--you say you are giving the people hope, I think you're stealing their hope. As long as the prerequisite for that shining paradise is ignorance and bigotry and hate, I say to hell with it."
Or consider, for a moment, Matthew Brady: a stand-in for William Jennings Bryan, he is used to give the perspective of the purported 'believer'. We see this in his mannerisms, in his speeches and his accosting of Drummond as trying to 'poison the minds of the youth'. But, in the middle of the film, we see a nuance to the caricature of the Brady the Believer when, among the fired-up crowd of Hillsboro Hooligans, Brady is the one who asks the fire and brimstone preacher to remember that Christianity promotes forgiveness. Quoting from Proverbs 11:29, from which the movie gets its title, Brady notes:
"Remember the wisdom of Solomon, from the book of Proverbs: he who troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind. The Bible also tells us that God forgives His children. And we, as children of God, should forgive each other."
And finally, E.K. Hornbeck, a stand in for H.L. Mencken, is used to give the perspective of a firm unbeliever, a dogmatic atheist. A verbal cowboy with a quip at the ready, firing from the hip, Hornbeck treats the case with levity. But not only is the case seen in this light manner, but the whole of humanity. As he relates to Drummond:
"Ah, Henry! Why don't you wake up? Darwin was wrong! Man's still an ape, and his creed is still a totem pole. When he first achieved the upright position, he took a look at the stars--thought they were something to eat. When he couldn't reach them, he decided they were groceries belonging to a bigger creature. That is how Jehovah was born…[and] you would still be spending your time trying to make sense out of what is laughingly called the human race."
Hornbeck's view is described by Drummond as 'a worm's eye view of history', and rightly so; in a sense, Hornbeck is the only one viewing the case from a cynical position. Avoiding both the delusions of the religious and the hesitations or excuses of the agnostic, Hornbeck is less forgiving and sees religion as a weed meant to be pulled out by the root. It is the unique irony of a man who states that there is no meaning; he is passionate in spite of it, certain in ways the agnostic is not.
With caricatures like these…well, let's not be cliché here; but these caricatures seem inflated, not as a matter of entertainment, but as a way to allow for space for the characters to change. Space for them to think.
Art is, very often, built on different forms of distortion; exaggeration, mythos, selective exclusion, anachronism, juxtaposition--you name it. Some directors do this to serve a functional purpose, like making a movie more dramatic or appealing. Others, like Werner Herzog, see it as a way of getting at an 'ecstatic truth' or some idea that is deeper than mere fact. In Inherit the Wind, the use of caricature is employed in the name of both of these; on one hand, any account of the Scopes Trial includes certain truths that do not fit in this movie; for example, the Scopes Trial was planned out by the ACLU as a test case. John T. Scopes was a football coach--so in a merely technical sense, he should not have been teaching evolution regardless. Or the fact the original argument put forth by Darrow was that evolution and theism were compatible. In fact, the entire theme of the 'right to think' does not appear in Darrow's arguments. Nor did Darrow, Bryan, or Mencken look like any of their caricatures; Darrow lacked the wispy white hair of Spencer Tracy because his was thinning; unlike Brady, Bryan's head looked like it was smashed in by a skillet; and Hornbeck's slicked hair and thin physique looked nothing like the middle part, 'brewer's son' look of Mencken.
But these sorts of overlooked 'facts', as well as the maintenance of certain truths of the case, like the questioning between Darrow and Brady, are dispensed with so that the caricatures used can be made to embrace the theme of the movie; that is, so the caricatures can think. Throughout the movie, each character is forced to confront the other, both inside and outside the court. Outside the court, often we see the actual thinking that the movie seems to encourage; Drummond and Brady sitting together on the porch, Hornbeck berating Drummond in the hotel room, or Drummond's dressing down of Hornbeck at the end, and so on. One also watches as these acts of thought seem to be discarded, or dressed up, for court--a court that Brady humorously asks to be allowed to dress down due to the heat.
In a sense, even, the heat of the court--a historical fact--is used in a symbolic way; it is where the caricatures are placed and forced to confront the other's thoughts. The heat is turned up on both the caricatures and the thoughts they have, and that Drummond believes they ought to have the right to. I would further say that the heat represents the way the clash between the thoughts presented forces each caricature to re-evaluate their thoughts. Whether it is Drummond realizing that he should use the Bible to prove his case, or Brady's emotional moment with his wife which reveals his stance on religion is mostly about his ego, or Hornbeck's moments of moralism, each character is forced into re-considering their ideas, even if they do not change them as much as alter them slightly.
This space for changes in thought that underpins the inflation and deflation of these caricatures gives voice to the theme of Inherit the Wind in a beautiful manner; it leaves room for the emotions of the movie, as in the recounting of the death of the Stebbins boy or the fight between Father Brown and his daughter Rachel, exemplifying the way religion seemed to be different per generation. But most importantly, it expresses the theme of the movie clearly by having each character acting out the right to think, which is on trial. There is a sort of irony that the people wishing to deny someone the right to think were using that right to think itself, an irony Drummond makes clear in his final examination of Brady.
The right to think, exercised by caricatures and put on trial, is brought forth and thrown in our face so that we cannot shake it. We cannot avoid it. And, as perhaps Kramer hoped, such a forceful demonstration of it might be something we would mimic, if not come to believe completely.
Of course, that hope was not realized. It is a rule of humanity that serious thought is crowded out by prejudice in the end; we do not want to think, we want to believe. Instead of trying to improve what we know and how we understand the world, we desire only the quickest, most certain, often most dogmatic views we can find. We are in search of the rules, ideas, and beliefs that can be our authority, rather than function as a door to a more true but more uncertain position. Most of us live where our way of thinking is inherited from our parents and our ideas are picked up from our peers, beginning a cycle of the same old way of thinking being used to justify believing what the people around us believe.
Inherit the Wind is a movie that, in the face of this stunning tendency towards nonsense, tries to offer us a way towards something better, if only out of a wager that we might mimic what we see on screen. Using caricatures that we can understand easily and relate to, Inherit the Wind tries to show us not only the way they think and how it can be right or wrong, but that in order for that to happen, we must have that right. It is my opinion that this movie ought to be shown in political science classes, as a way to make the right to think, while not enumerated in the Bill of Rights we like to ignore, is by far the most important right we have. Especially now, in an age of a far right resurgence and its advocacy for the suppression of everything that they do not consider Christian and its encouragement of an embracing of prejudice that is aimed at its enemies, the right to think is endangered.
This movie is important as one of the ways one might fight this sort of bigotry. It ought to be watched if for no reason other than what Henry Drummond states with righteous anger in the courtroom:
"I say you cannot administer a wicked law impartially; you can only destroy, you can only punish. And I warn you, a wicked law, like cholera, destroys everyone it touches; its upholders as well as its defiers. Can't you understand? That if you take a law like evolution and you make it a crime to teach it in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools? And tomorrow you may make it a crime to read about it? And soon you may ban books and newspapers. And you may turn Catholic against Protestant. And Protestant against Protestant. And try to foist your own religion upon the mind of man! If you can do one, you can do the other! Because fanaticism and ignorance is forever busy, and needs feeding."
From where I sit, it seems that fanaticism and ignorance have been given a feast in the form of the lives of the American people, be it the way we have been exploited in the name of the War on Terror and its evasion and destruction of the Bill of Rights or the way we were literally sacrificed in the name of industry and profit in the face of COVID-19 and the pandemic that still rages. Or the way that bigotry has been made the rule of the land, where it is okay to threaten transgender people and call in bomb threats to hospitals for performing surgeries they dislike, even when they don't know why they dislike it or what they even know about it. Thinking has been jettisoned while our world is torn asunder by Brady sorts, who see it as their God-given right to take and take and take from the American people, while promising us that things will get better if we just trust them.
And what do we get? We only inherit the wind.
*This movie is also discussed by Roberts with Dwayne Monroe and Dennis Claxton on their podcast Film Conversations. The video of this first episode is below:
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