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DARWIN ON FILM: INHERIT THE WIND
WEDNESDAY 1 APRIL
8PM
THE BLACK BOX
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£6 / £5.50
BOOK ONLINE
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“I am more interested in the 'Rock of Ages' than I am in the age of rocks.”
It was described as 'the trial of the century'. For twelve days in July 1925, the world's press reported every word that emerged from a courthouse in Dayton, Tennessee. TIME magazine said it was a 'fantastic cross between a circus and a holy war', a collision between the modern science of Charles Darwin and the ancient worldview of the Bible.
The trial of the 24-year-old schoolteacher John Scopes, on the charge of teaching the theory of evolution to his Clark County High School class, represented the first major battlefield in one of America's noisiest culture wars. But what really happened at the Scopes 'Monkey Trial'? It is now widely accepted that most Americans in the period after 1960 misread this crucial episode in the history of the creation-evolution controversy through the lens of Stanley Kramer's now classic film, Inherit the Wind, a fictionalized account of the trial.
The BBC journalist William Crawley will offer a reading of both the Dayton trial and Kramer’s film, and will make the case for recognising Inherit the Wind as one of the most culturally-significant films in the history of western Cinema, ahead of this rare theatrical screening of a picture that was so popular in its day that it was chosen as the world’s first in-flight movie.
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1960 / Director: Stanley Kramer
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