The CCC Movie Group is open to all! Watch the movie(s) on your own, then join the group on Zoom at 7:00 pm on “Movie Mondays” to discuss.  Please contact Lynn Horton for the Zoom link, if you have questions, or if you have difficulty accessing the movie!

Monday, 4/22 – “Inherit the Wind” (1960) An American drama film directed by Stanley Kramer and based on the 1955 play of the same name, “Inherit the Wind” is a parable that fictionalizes the 1925 Scopes “Monkey” Trial as a means to discuss McCarthyism. Written in response to the chilling effect of the McCarthy era investigations on intellectual discourse, the film (like the play) is critical of Creationism. Stars include Spencer Tracy as lawyer Henry Drummond (patterned after Clarence Darrow) and Fredric March as his friend and rival Matthew Harrison Brady (William Jennings Bryan). Also featured are Gene Kelly as E. K. Hornbeck of the Baltimore Herald (patterned after Henry L. Mencken), Dick York as Bertram T. Cates (patterned after John Scopes), Harry Morgan as Judge Merle Coffey (patterned after Judge John T. Raulston), Claude Akins as Rev. Jeremiah Brown, Donna Anderson as Rachel Brown, Noah Beery Jr. as John Stebbins, and Florence Eldridge as Sarah Brady (patterned after Mary Baird Bryan). In a 1996 interview, one of the writers of the original play, Jerome Lawrence, stated that the play’s purpose was to criticize McCarthyism and defend intellectual freedom. According to Lawrence, “we used the teaching of evolution as a parable, a metaphor for any kind of mind control … It’s not about science versus religion. It’s about the right to think.”