Postcard History

Berlin, Germany                                           June 24, 1960

The tenth International Berlin Film Festival opened today with twenty-five films in a competition for the “Golden Bear” (the first prize of the festival). The entries arrived from nineteen different “production countries” and totaled 4,125 minutes of film. The jury consists of eleven members: Harold Lloyd, an American actor, is the president. Others, from across Europe and Asia include two other actors, three composers, two historians, and three producers/filmmakers.

The two entries from the United States are both dramas. One is Wild River, directed by Elia Kazan. Kazan’s film stars Montgomery Cliff as a new executive who has countless struggles with the long-time owners of property in a river valley where the Tennessee Valley Authority wants to create a large hydroelectric power generation dam. The other is Inherit the Wind, directed by Stanley Kramer.

Inherit the Wind was a blockbuster success in 1960 when three of Hollywood’s finest actors were teamed together to tell the story of a Dayton, Tennessee, schoolteacher’s opposition to the state law the forbade the teaching of scientific theory that seemed to be the antithesis of creationism, a long-established practice in the area.

                               Spencer Tracy          Harry Morgan          Fredric March

The film was based on the 1955 Broadway play of the same name. The name comes from a line in the script when the Bible Book of Proverbs (11:29) is quoted by the character Matthew Harrison Brady (March). The verse states, “He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind: and the fool shall be servant to the wise of heart.”

Inherit the Wind fictionalizes the 1925 Monkey Trial held in the Dayton Court House. The film (like the play) makes no pretense to hide the playwright’s or the screen writer’s distain for creationism.

Spencer Tracy, in character as lawyer Henry Drummond and Fredric March, as Drummond’s friend and rival Matthew Harrison Brady had several memorable scenes together that have come to be classic moments on film. Others in the cast were Harry Morgan as the judge, Gene Kelly as a newspaper reporter, Dick York as the teacher, and Claude Akins as the Reverend Brown.

Since the movie first appeared the story continues to be told. There have been three television remakes and at least one revival of the Broadway play, starring Charles Durning and George C. Scott. Tony Randall was the production’s understudy.

Curiously, the legal reason for this famous trial was nearly lost due to the publicity given the lawyers and the commotion that they generated.

John Thomas Scopes was a 24-year-old teacher in Dayton who was charged with violating Tennessee’s Butler Act, which prohibited the teaching of human evolution in Tennessee schools. His trial ended in a guilty verdict and he was fined $100.

It is interesting to note that the principals in the 1925 legal battle were both larger-than-life people. The characters, Drummond and Brady were based on the lawyers Clarence Darrow and William J. Bryan.

Darrow was frequently characterized as the lawyer for the damned. In 2011, the noted historian John A. Farrell published a biography of Darrow with those very words as his title. The book includes a partial transcript of the Scopes trial.

Other defendants represented by Darrow in his long 52-year career were Nathan Leopold Jr. and Richard Loeb and Eugene V. Debs.

William Jennings Bryan was equally well-known as an American lawyer. He was a dominant force in the Democratic Party, running three times as the party’s nominee for President of the United States in the 1896, 1900, and 1908 elections. Because of his faith in the wisdom of the common people, Bryan was often called “the Great Commoner.”  Because of his rhetorical power and early fame as the youngest presidential candidate in history, he was also known as “the Boy Orator.”

Bryan died only a few days after the Scopes trial on June 26, 1925.

Darrow died in 1938.

Spencer Tracy died in June 1967.

John Scopes lived until 1970.

Frederic March who is best remembered for his 1932 Academy Award for Best Actor as “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” died in 1975.

Harry Morgan lived to be 96, he died in December 2011.