Or, everything I know about the Scopes Monkey Trial I learned from Inherit the Wind.
I was first exposed to the Scopes Monkey Trial during my freshman year in high school during my speech class. We were performing an excerpt from the play, Inherit the Wind, by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Lee. We were told the play was a fictionalized account of the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial, and while I’m not sure it was ever specifically stated, I got the impression that it was a true account of the incidents involved with the trial; that only the names had been changed to protect the innocent, so to speak.
Imagine my surprise to discover I’ve been lied to all these years. That fact was driven home when I watched the dandy little indie film, Alleged. At first glance I thought it was going to be just another needless remake of Inherit the Wind (the 1960 version with Spencer Tracy stands on its own and certainly doesn’t need a remake, although there are plenty of them out there). But Alleged is not a remake. It is an original film that looks at the Scopes trial through a completely different, and it appears, more accurate lens.
The film centers around the career of talented young reporter Charles Anderson (Nathan West) and his romance with Rose (Ashley Johnson), a woman of questionable parentage. Their hometown, tiny Dayton, Tennessee, has been hit hard by the impending Great Depression and is rapidly becoming a ghost town. That is until local businessmen hatch a scheme to put Dayton back on the map. Seeing an advertisement placed by the ACLU in a Tennessee newspaper seeking a public school teacher willing to testify that he had violated the state's new anti-evolution law, they convince local math teacher, John Scopes, to lend his name to the endeavor. The resulting trial draws national attention, and involves a clash of the titans as Clarence Darrow (Brian Dennehy) arrives to defend Scopes while popular statesman and three-time presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan (Sen. Fred Thompson) joins the prosecution.
There are significant differences between the way the trial is portrayed in Alleged and Inherit the Wind; significant enough that it put me on a quest to discover the truth of the trial for myself. What I discovered astounded me. I won’t tell you what those differences are. You’ll have more fun finding out for yourself. Suffice it to say, I feel like a fool for swallowing the party line all these years.
Beautifully filmed and convincingly acted by an excellent cast, Alleged has emerged one of my favorite indie films of the year. It is available now on DVD and Blu-ray.
Comments