The Great Movies III

Inherit the Wind is typical of the films produced and directed by Stanley Kramer (1913-2001), a liberal who made movies that had opinions and took stands. He was dismissed by some critics for saddling his films with pious messages, for preferring speeches to visual style and cinematic originality, but he stuck to his guns. Although his films like On the Beach (1959),Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), Sbip ofFools (1965), Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967), and Bless the Beasts and Children (1971) took predictable positions on nuclear war, the Holocaust, interracial marriage, and the preservation of species, they blended ideas and entertainment in a persuasive mixture. If his messages were predictable, they were also forthright; some of today's message movies, for example the splendid Syriana, are so labyrinthine that viewers must sense the message almost by instinct.

Strange that forty-six years after it was made and eightyone years after the Scopes trial, it is Inherit the Wind among all of Kramer's films that seems most relevant and still generates controversy. Tracy's character of Drummond in particular seems boldly drawn. There are times when he seems to be veering toward a safe harbor on the religion-versus-Darwin issue: "What goes on in this town is not necessarily the Christian religion," he says, and one of the witnesses he is not allowed to call is a Christian minister who sees no conflict between evolution and his church.

But Drummond is unswerving in his emotional courtroom scenes, arguing that "fanaticism and ignorance is forever busy, and needs feeding." When he is asked if he finds anything holy, he replies, "The individual human mind. In a child's ability to master the multiplication table, there is more holiness than all your shouted hosannas and holy of holies."

Note especially his final argument to the jury, which he performed in an unbroken shot. In the last scene of the film, Drummond stands in the empty courtroom, picks up a Bible in one hand and Darwin's On the Origin of Species in the other, smiles, claps them together, and packs them both under his arm. How should we take this scene? Has he reconciled the two books, or does he think he'll need them both for the appeal?

icholas Ray's Johnny Guitar (1954) is surely one of the most blatant psychosexual melodramas ever to disguise itself in that most commodious of genres, the Western. Consider: no money was lavished on the production. The action centers on a two-story saloon "outside town," but we never even see "town," except for a bank facade and interior set. So sparse are the settings that although the central character (Joan Crawford) plays the tavern owner and goes through a spectacular costume charge, we never see her boudoir-she only appears on a balcony above the main floor, having presumably emerged from the sacred inner temple.

A cheap Western from Republic Pictures, yes. And also one of the boldest and most stylized films of its time, quirky, political, twisted. Crawford bought the rights to the original novel, Nicholas Ray signed on to direct, and I wonder if they even openly spoke of the movie's buried themes. One is certainly bisexualism; Crawford's tavern-owner Vienna is, it is claimed, in love with "Johnny Guitar" (Sterling Hayden), but has not seen him in five years. She effortlessly turns tough hombres into girly-men, and her bartender observes to Johnny, "I never met a woman who was more man."

Her archenemy, Emma (Mercedes McCambridge), is allegedly in love with "The Dancin' Kid" (Scott Brady) and is jealous because he is allegedly in love with Vienna ("I like you, but not that much," Vienna tells him). But there is hardly a moment when Emma can tear her eyes away from Vienna to glance at the Kid. All of the sexual energy is between the two women, no matter what they say about the men. Crawford wanted Claire Trevor for the role, but the studio, perhaps having studied the script carefully, insisted on McCambridge, who was not a lesbian but played one, as they say, in the movies.

That casting led to more Crawford bitch legends, as on the day when she threw McCambridge's costume in the middle of a highway. The chemistry of loathing is palpable, as it was between Crawford and Bette Davis in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane. Both women wear fetishistic black leather, silk, and denim costumes that would have been familiar enough to students of 1954 pornography: the tightly corseted waists, the high boots, the long shirts, the tight bodices, the lash of lipstick give us Meg Myles in Satan in High Heels.

McCambridge, said to be a "cattle baron" (not baroness), dominates her posse of cowboys and lackeys, standing before them in a wide, challenging stance. She's shorter than they are, but is always strutting in the front while they almost cower. Crawford often appears from above on her balcony, worshipped by the camera in low-angle, adored by her loyal employees, ordering Sam, her croupier, "Spin the wheel. I like the way it sounds."