|
Fear of Film |
Movies you didn't see in the theater
An Ill Wind
by Art Livingston
Inherit the Wind (1960)
Written by Nedrick Young and Harold Jacob Smith
Based on a play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee
Directed by Stanley Kramer
Last summer our illustrious editor Dale Ahlquist, in his critique of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, observed that a false debate between modern pagans and modern puritans undermines whatever virtues that story may otherwise possess. This was perhaps the closest to a negative film review to appear in the pages of Gilbert Magazine.
Until now.
Inherit the Wind is an important work in that more people have had their
opinions on Charles Darwin's version of evolutionary theory informed by
this movie or play on which it is based than any other source. The only
problem is, I regret to say, that this tale is the result of either gross
ignorance or downright lying, and maybe some of both. And it doesn't matter
which. Its creators shouldn't be allowed to hide behind the canard that
they were making a fiction loosely based on fact. Nonsense. They merely
changed the names of easily identifiable historical persons, places, and
events and portrayed them as being historically accurate. By the time
the film hit the screen in 1960 the play, to much of the audience, had
already become the "facts."
No matter how we rename the characters, Spencer Tracy—with all the gravitas of his screen presence—embodies the celebrated sophist and lawyer Clarence Darrow (by the way, G.K. Chesterton debated Darrow in New York City in 1931, with much attention to evolutionary theory, and handed this darling of the American press his head. When astounded American reporters queried Chesterton how he accomplished this trouncing, he reminded them that Darrow kept aiming his arguments at his fundamentalist maiden aunt).
Fredric March, who was always a good early choice for characters of inflexible stolidity, represented William Jennings Bryan (and looked remarkably like him), while Gene Kelly probably came a little closer than the others to capturing the true spirit of his man, H.L. Mencken, nailing well the aspects of the sage of Baltimore that will ultimately make him remembered as a minor gadfly.
Yes, most of us probably learned our version of what happened during that summer of 1925 in Dayton, Tennessee from this movie. Let us see what it contends. A brave young teacher receives harassment and legal action because of his courage in teaching Darwin's great truths. Acting out of serious regard for truth, a most revered lawyer rides into town on his white steed to defend the teacher and St. Darwin himself against the evil inquisitors right in the town's backyard, which is not too surprising because they live in a land of gapped-toothed imbeciles from "the buckle on the Bible Belt," as the reporter calls it, who mindlessly mutter meaningless religious blather—and probably lynch anyone who voices opposition.
The paragon of law proves the authenticity of Darwin's (oops—almost
said "theory") indisputable science and makes a laughingstock of the old
fogy former presidential candidate, whose religious views are as outmoded
as his religion. Our paragon does this by putting him on the witness stand,
where all the Great Commoner can do is mouth fundamentalist inanities.
He dies a few days later—a broken man utterly disgraced. I left out
much, but this in essence is what everyone leaves the theatre "knowing."
It didn't happen that way. Not even close. As Will Rogers truly said, "It ain't the things you know that will get you in trouble, it's the things you do know that just ain't so." Here is what did occur: The American Civil Liberties Union was looking for a test case to break a largely ignored Tennessee statute against the teaching of natural selection theory. It asked a high school teacher named John Thomas Scopes, who wasn't even a biology teacher, but had subbed a few times, if he would help them out by being their stooge. No one ever threatened Scopes, because everyone knew that the real defendant was the statute, even though all the ACLU could do in the case was to make the Tennesseans look like rubes.
Few people today realize that as late as the time the tracts were written that give fundamentalism its name (circa 1909), its proponents did not speak negatively toward theories of evolution, and never toward microevolution, the truths of which anyone involved in horse or dog breeding understands.
Sometime around Word War I, the idea sunk in with evangelicals that the theory of evolution as espoused by Darwin directly implies as well the evils of eugenics and what was already being called "social Darwinism," and this coincided with opposition to Darwin coming from most traditionalist thinkers across the board, including Chesterton who, in The Everlasting Man, tore Darwinist thinking to shreds. It wasn't just the fundamentalists, then. I have often thought the so-called religion-science war (or evolutionist-fundamentalist war) has really been a palace fight between two types of naive realists. In other words, two types of people who share the same epistemological blunder, and continue to have it out because they understand each other. Did Gulliver see something like this in Lilliput? Or as Dale put it, it is, again, the pagans vs. the puritans.
As to the real Scopes, he couldn't even remember whether he had actually taught from the section of the book on Darwin, couldn't really care less, and had to be fetched from the local swimming hole a few times to make the court dates. That is why he was never put on the stand. Wow, what a beacon of enlightenment!
Just about every other detail in the film is equally skewed. The most important one will suffice to make the point. Only a couple of newspapermen were in the courtroom when Bryan took the stand. Bryan was not as sharp and incisive as Chesterton would have been, but six years before they debated, Darrow made the same mistake with Bryan as he was to do with searing intellect of Top Meadow. Don't forget that Bryan was the most renown American orator of his day, and for good reason. This was the man who made the Cross of Gold speech. Nowhere in his testimony is the Biblical literalism the film puts into his mouth.
Many professional rhetoricians, including major figures such as Richard Weaver, think Bryan by far got the better of Darrow. He spoke with ease and grace; what he said wasn't extracted from him as the script insists. He maintained, for example, that the seven days of creation is metaphor for vast reaches of time. Neither did the crowd turn on him as the story suggests. Far from being a broken man, he was full of plans for the future when his insufficiently medicated diabetes caught up with him five days later.
Bryan is demonized throughout the tale; Darrow is all but canonized.
The reality is that Darrow was a glorified ambulance chaser with a sponsored
soapbox, and is remembered far better than he deserves, whereas the writers
of Inherit the Wind attempted to sully the memory of that last towering
figure representing the old Democrats, the party of Jefferson and Randolph,
Davis and Cleveland—besmirched by those unworthy to speak his name.
Since the trial didn't go the way the ACLU types wanted, they have ever
since simply said that it did happen that way. To paraphrase Dickens,
"Is this pattern strange to you?" Whoever owns the negative of this movie
should melt it down to extract the small amount of silver in it. This
is the only value Inherit the Wind has.