Live stream preview

Watch this video and more on The Criterion Channel

Watch this video and more on The Criterion Channel

Start your free trial

Already subscribed? Sign in

Inherit the Wind

Leaving November 30 • 2h 7m

Directed by Stanley Kramer • 1960 • United States
Starring Spencer Tracy, Fredric March, Gene Kelly

One of the twentieth century’s most spectacular trials—the 1925 Scopes “Monkey” Trial, which pitted the theory of evolution against creationism in a battle over intellectual freedom—is vividly dramatized in this sterling adaptation of the classic Broadway play. When Southern schoolteacher Bertram Cates (Dick York) is put on trial for teaching evolution in a public school, famed attorney Henry Drummond (Spencer Tracy, playing a Clarence Darrow–like figure) steps in to defend him, going up against prosecutor Matthew Harrison Brady (Fredric March), who represents the forces of Christian fundamentalism, in a showdown that will captivate the nation.

Up Next in Leaving November 30

  • Old Boyfriends
    1:43:01
    Old Boyfriends

    Old Boyfriends

    Directed by Joan Tewkesbury • 1979 • United States
    Starring Talia Shire, Richard Jordan, Keith Carradine

    The sole theatrical feature directed by Joan Tewkesbury—whose screenplays for NASHVILLE and THIEVES LIKE US yielded two of Robert Altman’s finest films—is an endlessly intriguing, shaggy-dog ...

  • The Lights Are On, No One’s Home
    10:27
    The Lights Are On, No One’s Home

    The Lights Are On, No One’s Home

    Directed by Faye Ruiz • 2021 • United States
    Starring Faye Ruiz, Adriana Acedo-Campillo, Grisel Wilson

    Mar, a young trans woman, returns to her childhood home. Finding a neighborhood she once knew intimately drastically altered by gentrification, she is forced to reckon with a place that has see...

  • Seconds
    1:47:23
    Seconds

    Seconds

    Directed by John Frankenheimer • 1966 • United States
    Starring Rock Hudson, Salome Jens, John Randolph

    Rock Hudson is a revelation in this sinister, science-fiction-inflected dispatch from the fractured 1960s. SECONDS, directed by John Frankenheimer, concerns a middle-aged banker who, dissatisfi...

×