Unsung Performances: Fredric March, Inherit The Wind

The more I see of Fredric March’s work, the more convinced I become that he’s one of the best actors ever to grace the screen. In an era when even the best actors tended to play strict “types,” March played a diverse array of characters across many genres. Watch Inherit The Wind, The Best Years of Our Lives and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde back-to-back-to-back and you’ll find yourself shocked that the same actors appears in all three. He disappears so completely into his characters that you never really know what to expect from him.

In Inherit The Wind he plays one of his best characters and renders one of his best performances, but went unrecognized for his work. The nominees for Best Actor that year were his costar, Spencer Tracy, Trevor Howard in Sons and Lovers, Jack Lemmon in The Apartment, Laurence Olivier in The Entertainer, and the eventual winner, Burt Lancaster in Elmer Gantry. If it were up to me, I'd move Howard to the Supporting Actor category and make room for March, who should have at least been nominated, even though he did already have two Best Actor Oscars under his belt at that point.

In the film March plays Matthew Harrison Brady, the conservative antagonist to Spencer Tracy’s heroic civil liberties fighter Henry Drummond. Brady represents the close minded forces hindering social progress, the stubborn old order trying to keep the culture anchored in place. There is never any question, from the film’s point of view, that he’s the villain and it would be easy to play him in a black-and-white way, as stubborn, backwards, and stupid. Certainly he is stubborn, but March plays him with enough nuance and humanity that he never seems backwards or stupid, nor does he seem heartless. He becomes instead a tragic figure, a man who has the world in his hands one moment and nothing in the next, and his sad end is one of the more resonant aspects of the film.

Brady starts the film strong, welcomed into town with a parade, already crowned the conquering hero in the battle between God and science. He passionately defends the Creation theory, preaching to the choir and holding court while Drummond dodges slings and arrows. Brady is sure of himself but not arrogant and in the scenes between him and Drummond there is a palpable sense of respect, of two men who disagree with each other’s politics but don’t take it too personally. March and Tracy play off each other incredibly well throughout the film, each equal to every challenge that the other throws up. Watching these two great actors playing these two strong, distinct characters is one of the film’s great pleasures.

Where March truly excels is at the film’s turning point, when Brady begins to unravel and finds himself unceremoniously knocked from his pedestal. In an instant he goes from being revered to being loathed, all because he has the audacity to be human and fallible. For my money there are few scenes that are sadder or more memorable than that in which Brady attempts to sermonize to the people who have already turned against him and they resolutely ignore him. The same people who once hung on his words now refuse to so much acknowledge his presence and his voice grows increasingly desperate as he practically begs to be heard. No character in the film is more vulnerable, more openly frail, than Brady is in this moment and March’s handling of the scene is expert. It is in this scene that we realize that the villain isn’t Brady after all, but knee-jerk reactionaries and fair-weather believers. Brady is not a bad man, even if you do disagree with his ideas and politics; he’s a man, plain and simple, with good traits and bad and March conveys this simply and effectively in a performance of great power.

I really can’t articulate just how much I love this performance. In a lesser film with this character portrayed by a lesser actor, Brady is a character you wouldn’t think twice about. He’d be a monolithic representation of prejudice, a straw opponent against whom the film could take cheap, easy shots to advance its point of view. When an actor gives a character like this dimension and a filmmaker reserves some of his sympathy for him, then cheap shots are impossible. As he does so often, Tracy carries this film on his noble shoulders, but March is key to the story’s ultimate success. The final moments, when Drummond symbolically demonstrates that science and religion ought to be able to coexist peacefully, would ring absolutely false if March couldn’t make Brady a redeemable and understandable character. As good as everything else about the movie is, it simply would not work without March.

Words To Live By: Inherit The Wind

Great movie speeches speak for themselves:

100 Days, 100 Movies: Inherit The Wind (1960)

Director: Stanley Kramer
Starring: Spencer Tracy, Frederic March

Generally speaking, Stanley Kramer is a filmmaker who always just falls short for me. His films always have their hearts in the right place, and they always have ideas, but the problem is that rather than dramatize those ideas, his films often explain them, and do so in a way that’s so intensely didactic that it verges on overbearing and patronizing. Inherit The Wind is the exception, perhaps because it’s a courtroom drama and therefore more easily and naturally suited to his less than subtle style of preaching.

The film is based on the Scopes trial where Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan fought it out over the teaching of evolution in public schools. Spencer Tracy plays Henry Drummond, the defence attorney based on Darrow, and Frederic March is Matthew Harrison Brady, the prosecutor based on Bryan. Dick York is Bertram T. Cates, the teacher on trial, and Gene Kelly is E.K. Hornbeck, a reporter for the paper funding Cates’ defence. Kelly is good as the cynical and sarcastic reporter, and York does what he can with a role that is essentially part of the scenery. This is really Tracy and March’s film where they face off on a number of different occasions, in different sets of circumstances and with different outcomes.

Kramer makes his own position, and the opposing position of the local community, apparent immediately. The local population is clearly on the side of Brady and Creationist theory – they harass Cates when he’s locked in his cell, they throw Brady a parade, and they generally think the trial itself is a waste of time. The film, however, places itself clearly on the other side, and the viewer has little choice but to follow when the community is shown to be bigoted, reactionary and anti-intellectual. What saves this from being a “big city thinker” versus “backwoods hicks” fight is the character of Drummond himself, who isn’t arguing for the validity of one way of thinking over another, but rather for the right of a person to decide for themselves what they think. In one of the many great speeches that Tracy must have relished, Drummond sums his argument up thusly: “If you take a law like evolution and you make it a crime to teach it in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools. And tomorrow you may make it a crime to read about it. And soon you may ban books and newspapers… And soon, with banners flying and with drums beating, we’ll be marching backward - backward - through the glorious ages of that Sixteenth Century when bigots burned the man who dared bring enlightenment and intelligence to the human mind.” To Drummond this is not the moral issue that it’s been framed as; it’s an issue of intellectual freedom, and of the responsibility of every human being to think for his or herself.

Brady gets to make speeches too, but is always one-upped by Drummond’s retorts. What’s interesting about the way Kramer presents the story is that, even though Brady is on the other side of the argument and even though he’s characterized as impeding intellectual progress, he isn’t the villain. It’s the community that is villanized, not just by the way that they treat Cates and Drummond, but by the way that they treat Brady as well. The most tragic moment in the film is not the verdict, which inevitably finds Cates guilty, it’s the moment when Brady realizes that he’s lost his audience, that those people who were so quick to give him a parade could turn on him with equal quickness the second they realized that he, too, is just another imperfect human being. He stands in the court, attempting to make a speech while the people who once listened to him with rapt attention turn on him in disgust and the only person listening anymore is Drummond. Whether you agree with Brady or not, it’s difficult not to feel for him at this moment.

The court room scenes are the best in the film – alternately funny, frustrating and heartbreaking – but there are also quieter, more private moments that are very moving. Brady and Drummond, though adversaries in the court, have a long and friendly history outside of it. There’s the suggestion that Drummond harbours an unrequited love for Brady’s wife who is, perhaps, a little in love with him, too, though she’s devoted to her husband. And there’s a conversation between Drummond and Brady where they set out their basic arguments and it feels more like two old friends in a healthy debate than it does like mortal enemies poised to destroy each other’s world view. These scenes are important because they make the characters more human, rather than broadly letting them be painted as “Good Guy” and “Bad Guy.”

I can’t stress enough how good this movie is, especially from an acting standpoint. Tracy is solid and dependable as always, bringing his special combination of gravitas and lightness to the role, and March – an actor who is under-rated perhaps because he’s such a chameleon that you don’t always realize that it’s him (watch this film, The Best Years of Our Lives and The Sign of the Cross and you’ll get what I mean) – is equally great. It’s their movie, their showcase, and it’s a wonder to behold.