In the following review, Gillett offers a mixed assessment of the film version o/Inherit the Wind.
It was clearly only a matter of time before some enterprising producer turned his attention to Tennessee's famous "Monkey Trial" of 1925, when Clarence Darrow defended a schoolteacher accused of teaching Darwinism against the hell-fire attack of the noted attorney and presidential candidate, William Jennings Bryan. Its theatrical potentialities were clearly demonstrated in the play written around the trial by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee. And, apart from historical interest, it was easy to draw a contemporary parallel, with the latent forces of McCarthyism standing in for the bigoted fundamentalists of thirty-five years ago.
Stanley Kramer's Inherit the Wind takes full advantage of all these conflicts and adds some of its own. Its best scenes conjure up an atmosphere.....
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