Inherit the Wind (Stanley Kramer, 1960): Last week a fire at a college library in Tennessee destroyed William Jennings Bryan's copy of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species. This is as good an excuse as any to make Inherit the Wind my Guy Movie of the Week.

The lack of gunfights or naked, large-breasted women may make this an odd choice of a guy movie, but think about the cast . . . you've got Spencer Tracy squaring off against Fredric March, while Gene Kelly hangs around the sidelines making snide comments. The battle is free-thinking vs. provincialism and anti-intellectualism, or more specifically, science vs. religion.

The year is 1925, and a teacher, Betram Cates (Dick York) has been arrested for teaching evolution in his classroom. Two hot-shot lawyers volunteer to try either side of the case. Henry Drummond (Spencer Tracy) is the thoughtful, reflective defense attorney, and Matthew Harrison Brady (Fredric March) is the staunch Southern Baptist witless for the prosecution. This is all, of course, based on the famous Scopes monkey trial, where Clarence Darrow went head to head with William Jennings Bryan. He lost the trial, but won the argument that Christian Conservatives are idiots, so it's hard to fault him.

The actual Scopes case culminated with an erudite 12-hour oratory by Darrow which probably didn't do much to win the hearts of the jury of farmers and porch-swing banjo players. In these days of Hurricane-esque prettifications of the truth, Scopes would have been presented as Scopes, Darrow would have been presented as Darrow, and the speech would have been unapologetically pared down to about 90 seconds. He might have even had tears in his eyes. This flick had the class to change the names. It's way better than reality anyway, as movies usually are, so I won't harp on the point.

Lots of familiar faces from TV pop up in this movie version. Not just Dick ("Bewitched") York, but also Harry ("M*A*S*H") Morgan as the judge, and Norman ("Mr. Roper") Fell as a court reporter. Gene Kelly plays a straight (you know, non-singing, non-dancing) role as E. K. Hornbeck, a newspaper man from up North. He believes that it's the duty of a newspaper to "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable", and to that end spends most of the movie running around being obnoxious, which is an awful lot of fun to watch.

So what's it mean, "inherit the wind"? Well, it comes from Proverbs. The line is, "He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind," which is sort of a Biblified version of the old saw, "don't shit where you eat." An unlikely sentiment to be embraced by a bunch of Jesus freaks, but they were always an odd sort. Watch them get their comeuppance in this terrific movie.