Inherit the Wind
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DVD Cover Information Actor: Dick York, Donna Anderson, Fredric March, Gene Kelly, Spencer Tracy Director: Stanley Kramer Brand: Sony Cinematographer: Ernest Laszlo Editor: Frederic Knudtson Writer: Jerome Lawrence Writer: Robert E. Lee DVD: Region Code 1 Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; Spanish (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; French (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; Spanish (Dubbed), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono Format: Black & White, Closed-captioned, Dubbed, DVD, Letterboxed, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen Picture Format: 1.66:1 Running Time: 128 minutes DVD Release Date: 2001-12-11 Audience Rating: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested) Studio: United Artists |
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Movie Reviews of Inherit the Wind
Movie Review: A classic? Yes. A fair portrayal? Hardly.
Summary: 1 Stars
This film includes some of the best writing, acting, and directing around. In terms of technical achievement, it is the quintessence of the classic film. The reason I give it only one star is that it is also little more than melodramatic propaganda. And politically manipulative cinema well-done is worse even than B-movie vulgarity.Spencer Tracy's Clarence Darrow is sage, debonair, and self-effacing. He gets all the witty and eloquent dialogue. Conversely, Fredric March's William Jennings Bryan is a self-righteous, maniacally-bumbling troglodyte. Who wouldn't love Darrow and loathe Bryan after such a depiction? These are not people but caricatures right out of a political cartoon.
What's wrong with giving such a biased representation? Nothing-unless you're trying to pass it off as a serious and objective portrayal. Even if this film is meant as a metaphor for the McCarthy witch hunts, it uses the insidious techniques of propaganda in presenting that metaphor (unlike the admirable metaphorical treatment of the same subject in Arthur Miller's The Crucible). Instead of carefully and responsibly depicting its characters as complex and real human beings, it portrays one as the flawless hero and the other as the inferior villain with a convenient disregard for fact or subtlety. Regardless of what "true life" situation it is used to portray, melodrama can only provide a simplistic distortion of that situation. And when it treats a political controversy with such an exaggerated imbalance, it becomes propaganda, calculated to dupe an audience into rating a cause by its advocate's personality traits instead of by the merits of the cause itself.
In this sense the renowned and talented Stanley Kramer (as well as the playwright of the original stage drama) are no better here than D. W. Griffith's was when, with his classic Civil War epic The Birth of a Nation, he effectually portrayed the Ku Klux Klan as knights in shining armor and the blacks as conniving devils.
Good film making? Yes. Intellectually insulting? Also, unfortunately, yes.