Inherit the wind
Inherit the windi is an atrocious assault on the senses just about on the level of Empireii. It debuts with relentless tedium in three notes over five thousand bars accompanied by insistent chanting (of the same, self-repeating, humorless one single solitary line) ; five to six hours in it matures into endless screeching, the shrieking of veteran banshees, incontrovertible monologues delivered into the air for infinite minute after god damned minute... making it through a screening of this thing differentiates the naturally insensible from the actually deaf : the former walk away.
There is no plot in any meaningful senseiii, let alone character development. In fact, the whole thing's a collection of throwawaysiv set to whatever music was left after the orchestra died in a fire and some enterprising squirrels took over the scoring. Theres's some pretty lulzy principal photography, I guess -- but the film's principalonly merit is truly that it is so irritating to the senses, so grating to natural human sensibility that you're almost guaranteed a domestic dispute one, at the most two hours through the screening. It's unavoidable, not because of the subject matter (as indistinctly an' quiantly benign as anyone could design) but because it's not possible to sit through this thing and not want to argue with someone. Doesn't matter what about! Whatever! God damn it, why am I so angry!!!
It's... something, I guess. I'm sure there's worse films ever made, I just can't think of any right now, is all.
———- 1960, by Stanley Kramer, with Spencer Tracy, Gene Kelly. [↩]
- You know, the thing they used to make cinema students watch in the first year, before "student" became female and "feelings" became the
principalonly concern. Feelings can't stay a merely a concern for very long, they always end up the only remaining concern. [↩] - Though the (visibly) desperate attempt of the tin alley hacks involved with the script to somehow carve a niche for the females, to inject their negligible, structurally an' fundamentally disinteresting concerns, preoccupations and activities into the proceedings does provide some light relief. It's almost as if the film is really two halves split-glued together : a bigger one with which they take a piss, and a smaller one with which Mom brushes her teeth. [↩]
- I actually did a triple take just to make sure Rodney Dangerfield wasn't involved in some disimulated capacity. The whole production really evokes the floating debris of his mental space. [↩]
