OF DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE. March won the Acad- emy Award for Best Actor for his portrayal of the title character(s) in Rouben Mamoulian’s DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE (1931); a decade later, Tracy assumed the role(s) in Victor Fleming’s 1941 version. When Stanley Kramer cast these two ac- tors as the main stars in INHERIT THE WIND, the first film version of the 1955 hit play that drama- tized the Scopes Monkey Trial, he was either ex- hibiting a dark sense of humor or acting as an unwitting agent of synchronicity.
This film, by shining a spotlight on a subject that was merely subtext in the horror films of the Golden Age, seemed to put an end to the inces- sant cycle of ape-man movies that preceded it— everything from THE APE MAN, in which Lugosi himself was half-ape, to the proverbial BELA LUGOSI MEETS A BROOKLYN GORILLA. Once the subject had been addressed in a literal fashion in such a popular medium as film, perhaps there was no reason to cloak the subject behind the veneer of metaphor. The poster for INHERIT THE WIND is worth mentioning. The stars of the film are dwarfed by the comical image of a monkey wearing a man’s reading glasses. This exact image could have been used as the poster for one of Bela Lugosi’s occa- sional forays into slapstick comedy without seem- ing out of place at all. It’s as if the people who designed the poster for the film understood that the picture’s main draws were neither Spencer Tracy nor Frederic March, but the monkeys from which the human race evolved. Subtext becomes text, metaphor becomes reportage. By the late 1950s and early 1960s, the author- ity of the Motion Picture Production Code had weakened considerably with the release of such films as Billy Wilder’s SOME LIKE IT HOT (1959), which became a blockbuster despite not being approved by the Code. The Code finally gasped its last in 1968, by which time controversial sub- jects such as civil rights, homosexuality and drug use had swelled to the forefront of public con- sciousness, long since pushing evolution off the map of cultural taboos.
Except for the occasional “throwback” such as
the Planet of the Apes series (1968-1973), which is really more about civil rights and the political upheavals of that era than about evolution, the “man-into-ape” film more or less fades away from
To mate with Camille, Erik must ascend the evolutionary chain, but the best he can do is climb with her to the rooftops of Paris in the film’s climax.
the cinema as an active and vital subgenre. Of course, the subject of evolution is by no means resolved in modern society. In his 2006 review of INHERIT THE WIND, film critic Roger Ebert wrote: “Seen 46 years after its release, but only a few months after Darwin was once again on trial in Dover, Penn., INHERIT THE WIND is a film that rebukes the past when it might also have feared the future. Beliefs that seemed like ancient history to [Stanley] Kramer have had a surprising resil- iency; two recent polls show that 38 percent of American teenagers believe ‘God created humans pretty much in their present form within the last 10,000 years or so,’ and 54 percent of American adults doubt that man evolved from earlier spe- cies. There is hardly a politician in the land with courage enough to state that they are wrong.” What is taboo for one generation is accepted wisdom in the next. And what is not accepted wis- dom can only be discussed in popular forms un- der the guise of metaphor. What is not accepted wisdom is the unexamined, the unknown. What is unknown is often the object of fear. Therefore, what is not accepted wisdom mani- fests itself in the popular imagination as horror: stories to be feared.
Fear gives birth to taboos and taboos give birth to horror. At their very best, stories of any kind are a means of inoculation against both the present and the future—inoculations that not only help people deal with the uncertainties of the now, but also allow the coming generation to transform the unknown into accepted wisdom. Horror stories, perhaps moreso in film than in any other medium, combine both functions into one.
As Dr. Mirakle once said, way back in 1845, “Do they still burn men for heresy? Then burn me, Monsieur. Light the fire. Do you think your little candle will outshine the flame of truth? My life is consecrated to great experiment!”
Charles Darwin, Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, Robert Florey and Bela Lugosi might have said the very same thing—except, for them, the great experiment in question would have been that of reflecting the face of humanity back at it- self in the form of the grotesque and the arabesque, the horrifying and the fantastic, the unexamined and the unknown.
To read Robert Guffey’s additional thoughts on Darwinism in such later horror films as THE APE, THE APE MAN, THE MONSTER AND THE GIRL and KONGA, seek out our special expanded “web exclusive” version of this article at:
www.videowatchdog.com/web/mirakle.
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