Thanks to Producer-Director Stan ley Kramer, Inherit the Wind has now been made into a movie that retains almost nothing of the play but its flashy, trashy script.
Instead of the hard-paced, sharp-edged direction that Herman Shumlin brought to the play, there is in the film a sluggish, confused manipulation of ideas and players. Instead of Actor Muni there is Spencer Tracy, the Hollywooden archetype of the wise old man, who as the years and pictures go by acts less and less and looks more and more as though he had been carved out of Mount Rushmore. Instead of Ed Begley in the role of Bryan there is Fredric March, who has somehow been persuaded to portray that unbalanced genius of the spoken word as a low-comedy stooge who at the climax catches a face-full of agnostic pie.
Bryan, of course, is not called Bryan in the picture; all the principal characters are given false names. But their historical identities, emphasized by the makeup department and in the script, are never in doubt, and the flagrant distortion of their qualities and motives may therefore seem all the more reprehensible to moviegoers who hold these serious and important men in memory.
Mencken, for example, is portrayed by Gene Kelly as a lip-curling, hat-tilting city-room slicker who talks the sort of typewritten tarradiddle that does less than justice to the rich, organic vocabulary of the author of The American Language.
Worse still is the distortion of what happened at the trial. The script wildly and unjustly caricatures the fundamentalists as vicious and narrow-minded hypocrites, just as wildly and unwisely idealizes their opponents, as personified in Darrow. Actually, the fundamentalist position, even when carried to the extreme that Bryan struck when he denied that man is a mammal, is scarcely more absurd and profitless than the shallow scientism that the picture offers as a substitute for religious faith and experience.
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