I once loved Stanley Kramer's Inherit the Wind (1960). Of course I did. Hollywood has never produced a more entertaining courtroom drama. The acting, the directing, the script, all of it is top-notch. But, over the years, I have come to realize the sad truth: Inherit the Wind is the most dishonest historical film ever made.
John T. Scopes, the high school teacher at the center of the notorious Scopes Monkey Trial, was a fraud foisted upon the public by the American Civil Liberties Union, who was desperate to slap together a case that could effectively challenge Tennessee's Butler Act. No one dragged Scopes out of a classroom for teaching Darwin's Theory of Evolution. The fact is that Scopes never taught his students evolution. The teacher admitted this bitter fact to a reporter, William Kinsey Hutchinson, once the trial had ended. His lawyers had coached students to lie on the stand to corroborate a wholly invented scenario. Student after student stated in open court that they had attended a lesson that never really occurred.
The film is tomfoolery designed to depict Christians as angry, insane fanatics.
Little about the film is true.
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