Word: darrow
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...prosecution: William Jennings ("The Great Commoner") Bryan, the most famous political orator of his generation, three times (1896, 1900 and 1908) the Democratic nominee for President, and in private life a man who had fanatically kept the faith of a fundamentalist. Counsel for the defense: Clarence Seward Darrow, the most famous trial lawyer of his generation, a showcase liberal who had often made public profession of agnosticism...
Colorfully and tendentiously described by such angry hotshot reporters as Baltimore's H.L. Mencken-who called Bryan "a tin-pot pope" and lamented that Darrow might as well be "bawling [his eloquence] up a rainspout in the interior of Afghanistan"-the monkey trial made screamlines all over the U.S. and Europe. Bryan and Darrow put on a spectacular sideshow, bellowing like snake-oil salesmen, crassly subverting judge, jury and the rules of evidence as they addressed their elocution to the larger court of public opinion. "We have the purpose," Darrow thundered, "of preventing bigots and ignoramuses from controlling...
...this gaudy material Playwrights Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee worked up a courtroom melodrama (TIME, May 2, 1955) that stayed in style for two full seasons on Broadway-partly because, like the trial, it was sure-shot theater, mostly because Paul Muni, who played Darrow, developed his role into an unforgettable set piece of libertarian tirade. Thanks to Producer-Director Stan ley Kramer, Inherit the Wind has now been made into a movie that retains al most nothing of the play but its flashy, trashy script...
Worse still is the distortion of what happened at the trial. The script wildly and unjustly caricatures the fundamentalists as vicious and narrow-minded hypocrites, just as wildly and unwisely idealizes their opponents, as personified in Darrow. Actually, the fundamentalist position, even when carried to the extreme that Bryan struck when he denied that man is a mammal, is scarcely more absurd and profitless than the shallow scientism that the picture offers as a substitute for religious faith and experience...
...instinctive chill. The hair on the back of my neck almost stood up. The idea was that good." Allen's brainstorm: a 19-minute "Meeting of the Minds" inserted in his hour-long TV variety show, featuring Allen and actors playing Aristotle, Dostoevsky, Montaigne, Hegel, Freud and Clarence Darrow, the lot of them hashing over the wisdom of the ages. But NBC, unable to see in such a cerebral panel the laugh riot customarily expected of Comic Allen, summarily vetoed Thinker Allen and his sham philosophers. It was, allowed the network, perhaps a fine idea for some other spot...