The New Pictures

Inherit the Wind (Stanley Kramer; United Artists). On July 10, 1925, at the height of a heat wave that fairly boiled the Coca-Cola in the jury's veins, a 24-year-old school teacher named John Thomas Scopes went on trial in the hill-country town of Dayton, Tenn. ("the buckle of the Bible Belt") while half the world wondered and a fair cross-section of it sat sweating in the courtroom. The charge: that Schoolteacher Scopes, by propounding Darwin's theory of evolution to his classes, had violated a Tennessee statute that refused him the right "to teach any theory that denies the story of divine creation of man as taught by the Bible." Attorney for the prosecution: William Jennings ("The Great Commoner") Bryan, the most famous political orator of his generation, three times (1896, 1900 and 1908) the Democratic nominee for President, and in private life a man who had fanatically kept the faith of a fundamentalist. Counsel for the defense: Clarence Seward Darrow, the most famous trial lawyer of his generation, a showcase liberal who had often made public profession of agnosticism.

Colorfully and tendentiously described by such angry hotshot reporters as Baltimore's H.L. Mencken--who called Bryan "a tin-pot pope" and lamented that Darrow might as well be "bawling [his eloquence] up a rainspout in the interior of Afghanistan"--the monkey trial made screamlines all over the U.S. and Europe. Bryan and Darrow put on a spectacular sideshow, bellowing like snake-oil salesmen, crassly subverting judge, jury and the rules of evidence as they addressed their elocution to the larger court of public opinion. "We have the purpose," Darrow thundered, "of preventing bigots and ignoramuses from controlling the education of the United States." And Bryan roared: "If evolution wins, Christianity goes!" Both judge and jury were impregnably prejudiced against Darwin, and the defendant was found guilty and ordered to pay a fine of $100 (a higher court reversed the conviction on a technicality). Five days later, exhausted by the heat and burden of the trial, Bryan died.

Out of this gaudy material Playwrights Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee worked up a courtroom melodrama (TIME, May 2, 1955) that stayed in style for two full seasons on Broadway--partly because, like the trial, it was sure-shot theater, mostly because Paul Muni, who played Darrow, developed his role into an unforgettable set piece of libertarian tirade. Thanks to Producer-Director Stan ley Kramer, Inherit the Wind has now been made into a movie that retains al most nothing of the play but its flashy, trashy script.

Instead of the hard-paced, sharp-edged direction that Herman Shumlin brought to the play, there is in the film a sluggish, confused manipulation of ideas and players. Instead of Actor Muni there is Spencer Tracy, the Hollywooden archetype of the wise old man, who as the years and pictures go by acts less and less and looks more and more as though he had been carved out of Mount Rushmore. Instead of Ed Begley in the role of Bryan there is Fredric March, who has somehow been persuaded to portray that unbalanced genius of the spoken word as a low-comedy stooge who at the climax catches a faceful of agnostic pie.

Bryan, of course, is not called Bryan in the picture; all the principal characters are given false names. But their historical identities, emphasized by the makeup department and in the script, are never in doubt, and the flagrant distortion of their qualities and motives may therefore seem all the more reprehensible to moviegoers who hold these serious and important men in memory. Mencken, for example, is portrayed by Gene Kelly as a lip-curling, hat-tilting city-room slicker who talks the sort of typewritten tarradiddle that does less than justice to the rich, organic vocabulary of the author of The American Language.

Worse still is the distortion of what happened at the trial. The script wildly and unjustly caricatures the fundamentalists as vicious and narrow-minded hypocrites, just as wildly and unwisely idealizes their opponents, as personified in Darrow. Actually, the fundamentalist position, even when carried to the extreme that Bryan struck when he denied that man is a mammal, is scarcely more absurd and profitless than the shallow scientism that the picture offers as a substitute for religious faith and experience.

I Aim at the Stars(Charles H.Schneer; Columbia), which opened in Washington at a benefit attended by the First Lady and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, aims to tell the life story of Wernher von Braun, the German-born rocket expert who has become the best-known U.S. missileman. The picture starts with some noisy experimentation conducted by a teen-aged Von Braun (somewhat less than convincingly portrayed by a middle-aged Curt Jurgens), then cuts to Peenemunde, a remote marsh in western Prussia where the Wehrmacht in 1937 established a Raketenentwicklungszentrale for the German rocket buffs. Von Braun, then only 25, was put in charge of the technical side of the program. When the Reich collapses. Von Braun & Co. flee south to offer their secrets and services to the U.S. Army. Set up in White Sands. N. Mex., the rocketmen start plodding down the long trail of tests that leads at last to the launching of the first U.S. satellites.

Unhappily, the second stage of this cinema vehicle fails to fire. Instead, it explodes in a splatter of platitudes about the moral dereliction of the scientific community--personified in Von Braun. The moviemakers, nervous perhaps about possible public reaction to Von Braun's Nazi record and the responsibility he shares for the V-2 attacks on London, have leaned over backward to stress his war guilt, with the unhappy result that the hero comes off as a jolly accomplice in mass murder, an affable fanatic who cares everything about rockets and nothing about the people they happen to kill. In the end, his moral indifference is shown to be dubiously justified by his scientific success. Von Braun possibly has ground for a libel suit, but then he might do better to ignore the picture. So might everybody else.

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