Anniversary of Inherit the Wind
On June 26, 1960, as part of the Berlin International Film Festival, the premiere of the film "Inherit the Wind" directed by Stanley Kramer took place. A few days later, on July 7, the world premiere of this film took place at the Astoria Theater in London.
The film was based on the play of the same name by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee. In turn, this play written in 1955 was based on the so-called "Monkey Trial", held in the state of Tennessee, USA, in 1925-1926. The essence of this trial was the attempt of religious fanatics to sue a schoolteacher whose whole fault was the teaching of Darwinian theory of evolution.
At the Berlin Film Festival, Stanley Kramer’s film competed for the grand prize - the Golden Bear - but the festival’s jury, chaired by the American comedian Harold Lloyd, preferred the Spanish film "El Lazarillo de Tormes". The film “Inherit the Wind” ended up in the same company of relative losers with the film “A bout de souffle (Breathless)” by Jean-Luc Godard. And like the film of Godard, it did not stay without festival awards. Firstly, it received a special award as the Best Feature Film Suitable for Young People, and secondly, the Silver Bear Prize was awarded to Fredrick March.
The next year, 1961, the movie “Inherit the Wind” was nominated for the American Golden Globe and the British BAFTA Award. The Golden Globe film by Stanley Kramer lost to "Spartacus" by another Stanley - Kubrick. And the British Award was lost to the movie masterpiece of Billy Wilder “The Apartment”.
In my opinion, the main feature of this, according to Bosley Crowther,
"one of the most intelligent, respectful, and entertaining motion pictures of this year" (The New York Times),
is its steady and global relevance.
Roger Ebert drew attention to this relevance in his review which he wrote 46 years later (!) after the film was released on the screens:
""Inherit the Wind" is a film that rebukes the past when it might also have feared the future".
However, Ebert is not sure that Kramer deliberately warns the future about the dangers of religious fanaticism:
"Beliefs that seemed like ancient history to Kramer have had a surprising resiliency; two recent polls show that 38 percent of American teenagers believe "God created humans pretty much in their present form within the last 10,000 years or so," and 54 percent of American adults doubt that man evolved from earlier species. There is hardly a politician in the land with courage enough to state that they are wrong."
Interestingly, are there many such politicians in modern Russia?
The continued relevance of this film is also confirmed by the high rating of the film by modern cinema viewers: 73% of IMDB and Kinopoisk users around the world rated this film from 8 to 10.
Given the success indicators listed, the rating of the film "Inherit the Wind", according to FilmGourmand, is 8.878, which allowed the picture to take 196th place in the Golden Thousand.
