The last time I saw this movie, which was the first time I saw it, it played on TV when I was a kid, in the 1960s. I appreciated even then that it was a good movie, with fine acting, but it was a history lesson: a story about bigotry and ignorance in a part of the country that had been bigoted and ignorant back in the 1920s. Looking at it from a northern suburb in the 1960s, it was a source of laughter. How could those bible-thumpers have been so ignorant as to have denied science? In 2007, when polls show that 40+ percent of Americans - not just small town Southerners, but Americans in general - believe the story of the creation of the world as told in Genesis, when state after state finds itself debating whether "creationism" should be taught along side science in public schools, Kramer's film is if anything more powerful and prophetic than when he first made it. It demands the right of men to think freely, to be different, and that right has never been more under attack in this country.
This is truly a film that, unfortunately, has gotten "better" with age.
This is truly a film that, unfortunately, has gotten "better" with age.