Quartile rating: 8/10 · 1 rating
Schoolteacher Bertram Cates is arrested for teaching his students Darwin's theory of evolution. The case receives national attention and one of the newspaper reporters, E.K. Hornbeck, arranges to bring in renowned defense attorney and atheist Henry Drummond to defend Cates. The prosecutor, Matthew Brady is a former presidential candidate, famous evangelist, and old adversary of Drummond.
Inherit the Wind is a towering courtroom drama based on the fictionalized Scopes Monkey Trial. The plot is razor-sharp, using the clash between science and religion as a vehicle for exploring intellectual freedom, demagoguery, and the courage of conviction. Spencer Tracy and Fredric March deliver career-defining performances in the Drummond-Brady showdown, with Gene Kelly offering a surprisingly sharp turn as the cynical Hornbeck. The cinematography is competent black-and-white studio work — serviceable and atmospheric but not visually distinguished. The film's novelty lies less in formal innovation and more in the sheer force of its rhetorical combat and its pointed Cold War-era allegory about McCarthyism; it's distinctive in voice but not a radical reinvention of the courtroom genre. The ending, with Drummond quietly weighing both books, is one of cinema's most eloquent closing images — humanist, ambiguous, and deeply felt.