A Film Canon

Inherit The Wind translates the basic legal conundrum of the 1925 Scopes "Monkey Trial" - how to build a case upon testimony (zoological, geological, anthropological, archaeological) that can't be admitted - into a formal problem - how to construct a courtroom without a courtroom drama, and transform a fundamentalist confrontation into a liberal conversation. Rhetorically, the answer lies in defense counsel Henry Drummond's persistent attempt to counter prosecuting counsel Matthew Harrison Brady's (Fredric March) baroque sermonising with vernacular adversary; narratively, through a series of rupturing gestures that are unorthodox, but not illegal, including calling Brady to the stand as a witness, temporarily resigning from the case, and including the jurors and audience in his denunciatory summations. More strikingly, Kramer presents the dissolution and reconstitution of the courtroom as the central dramatic spectacle, through an application of that lurid, tipsy, carnivalesque quality that remains the most enduring stylistic signature of The Defiant Ones. Radiating out from the gradual collapse of Christian, agnostic and atheist - or, more concisely, from Drummond's observation to Brady that "all motion is relative - maybe it's you who have moved away by standing still" - this interpersonal and ideological elasticity starts as a gentle swaying, murmur and rocking of bodies ("...he's the only man I know who can strut sitting down"), gradually transplants the parade and fairground of the opening scenes into the courtroom, and culminates with the hysterical, hallucinatory chaos that precedes the verdict. Although the resultant ideological vacuum is ostensibly filled, and the courtroom restored, in the person of Drummond, and his quiet confession of liberal agnosticism once everyone but reporter E.K. Hornbeck (Gene Kelly) has left the trial, it is difficult to decide whether the film's virtual elevation of Darwinism to a religion doesn't contribute to a relocation, rather than an eradication, of fundamentalism; or to what extent Drummond escapes Kramer's memorable presentation of the town as an evolutionary bestiary, heated by a banker's unicellular commitment to "the principle of practical reality."