Friday Night Film Series

The Evolution vs. Creationism argument is at the center of the Jerome Lawrence-Robert E. Lee Broadway play Inherit the Wind. Lawrence and Lee's inspiration was the 1925 "Monkey Trial," in which Tennessee schoolteacher John Scopes was arrested for teaching Darwin's theory of evolution in violation of state law. Scopes deliberately courted arrest to challenge what he and his supporters saw as an unjust law, and the trial became a national cause when The Baltimore Sun, represented by the famed (and atheistic) journalist H. L. Mencken, hired attorney Clarence Darrow to defend Scopes. The prosecuting attorney was crusading politician William Jennings Bryan, once a serious contender for the Presidency, now a relic of a past era. While Bryan won the case as expected, he and his fundamentalist backers were held up to public ridicule by the cagey Darrow. In both the play and film versions of Inherit the Wind, the names and places are changed, but the basic chronology was retained, along with most of the original court transcripts.

Accattone , Pier Paolo Pasolini's first feature, is also his first semidocumentary study of "the little homelands": the small, often squalid cultural pockets in the remotest provinces of Italy. Using nonprofessional actors for his leading characters, Pasolini concentrates on Franco Citti, a rural pimp who falls in love with virtuous Franca Pasut. Having previously led an aimless existence, Citti takes a job-and, it is implied, a bath—in hopes of impressing his new girl. It isn't long, however, before Citti gives up both job and Pasut, degenerating into a life of violent crime. As was the case with most of his subsequent films, Pasolini both directed and wrote Accattone, adapting the screenplay from his own novel.

Director Barbara Kopple's look at a 13-month coal miners' strike that took place between 1973 and 1974 in Harlan County, KY, is one of the great films about labor troubles, though not for a sense of objectivity. Kopple lived among the miners and their families off and on during the four years the entire story played out, and it's clear in every frame of the film that her sympathies lie with the miners and not their bosses at Eastover Mining, owned by Duke Power Company. Kopple's camera focuses on the desperate plight of people still living in shacks with no indoor plumbing and working dangerous jobs with little security and few safety rules. The miners are determined to join the United Mine Workers, and the company is determined to break the strike with scabs, who are even more desperate than the men with jobs.

A touching tragi-comic portrait of a Roman prostitute, Nights of Cabiria is a showcase for the talents of Giulietta Masina, director Federico Fellini's wife. With movements that echo Chaplin's Little Tramp, the diminutive Masina is a tough-talking working girl, ready to start fighting the moment she is revived from a near-drowning incident at the hands of her boyfriend. She is not afraid to do dancehall moves in a crowd at a pretentious nightclub or join in fights with rival prostitutes. Yet she is fragile and vulnerable, seeking redemption from the Virgin Mary and always on a quest for love. Elements of Fellini's later visual style seem to be developing here; the exotic dance routine in the nightclub and the circus-like processions reappear in his famed La Dolce Vita. Nights of Cabiria was reworked into the sentimentalized musical Sweet Charity by Bob Fosse. In 1998, Nights of Cabiria was restored and re-released with an additional scene.