Inherit the Wind is a 1960 American drama film directed by Stanley Kramer and based on the 1955 play of the same name written by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee.

It stars Spencer Tracy as lawyer Henry Drummond and Fredric March as his friend and rival Matthew Harrison Brady.

It also features Gene Kelly, Dick York, Harry Morgan, Donna Anderson, Claude Akins, Noah Beery Jr., Florence Eldridge, Jimmy Boyd and Gordon Polk.

[5] Written in response to the chilling effect of the McCarthy era investigations on intellectual discourse, the film (like the play) is critical of creationism.

Matthew Brady, statesman, three-time presidential candidate and Biblical scholar, volunteers to assist Prosecutor Tom Davenport.

Hornbeck of the Baltimore Herald, an influential newspaperman, seizes the opportunity to announce that Cates' defense attorney will be the equally well-known Henry Drummond, one of America's most controversial legal minds and a notorious agnostic.

Brady admonishes Brown by quoting Proverbs 11:29: "He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind", and sends the crowd home.

Taking advantage of her confiding to him and Sarah, Brady calls Rachel to the stand, forcing her to tell how Cates left the church when her father declared that a child who drowned was not worthy of heaven because he was not baptized.

In an impassioned speech, Drummond paints a grim picture of the consequences of allowing a wicked law to prevail and asks to withdraw from the case.

Brady welcomes this challenge, but becomes increasingly flustered by Drummond's questions, until he is forced to confess that some Biblical passages cannot be interpreted literally.

The characters of Matthew Harrison Brady, Henry Drummond, Bertram Cates and E. K. Hornbeck correspond to the historical figures of William Jennings Bryan, Clarence Darrow, Scopes, and H. L. Mencken, respectively.

However, Lee and Lawrence state in a note at the opening of the play on which the film is based that it is not meant to be a historical account,[8] and many events were substantially altered or invented.

[9][10][11] For instance, the characters of the preacher and his daughter were fictional, the townspeople were not hostile towards those who had come to Dayton for the trial, and Bryan offered to pay Scopes' fine if he was convicted.

When Darrow, in his closing remarks, called upon the jury to find Scopes guilty so he could appeal the verdict, Bryan was prevented from delivering his summation.

The film grossed $2 million ($20,000,000 in 2022) worldwide and recorded a loss of $1.7 million ($17,500,000 in 2022)[3] Thomas M. Pryor of Variety described it as "a rousing and fascinating motion picture ... roles of Tracy and March equal Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan who collided on evolution ... a good measure of the film's surface bite is contributed by Gene Kelly as a cynical Baltimore reporter (patterned after Henry L. Mencken) whose paper comes to the aid of the younger teacher played by Dick York.

"[18] Harrison's Reports praised the cast as "superb", but cautioned that "it will be difficult to sell the average movie-goer unless the limited romantic sequences are exaggerated.

Direction is top-notch; photography, excellent..."[19] In 2006, Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times added it to his "Great Movies" collection, referring to it as "a film that rebukes the past when it might also have feared the future".