Even when you’re aware of the extent of Christian fundamentalism in America, it’s surprising to read this news item about the British film Creation not finding distributors in the US because Charles Darwin and evolution are still considered loaded subjects. I was talking recently with a friend about religious intolerance/sensitivity in India probably being greater today than it was 50 years ago, when a revered prime minister was known to be agnostic; today, it’s highly doubtful that an Indian PM or a state chief minister (in north or central India at least) would be able to criticize organised religion or the idea of a personal God as sharply as Nehru did in Discovery of India (a book that was recommended reading for the country’s youngsters). Perhaps this is true of the US too.
A few days ago I re-watched a favourite old film, Stanley Kramer’s Inherit the Wind, about the trial of a schoolteacher arrested for teaching Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. The movie is based on the real-life Scopes Trial of 1925 and it stars one of Hollywood’s most beloved actors, the 60-year-old Spencer Tracy, as a rationalist lawyer who defends the schoolteacher, fiercely challenges literalist interpretations of the Bible and refers to the Book in a decidedly offhand manner. In light of recent developments, this film seems more topical and bolder than ever.
Stanley Kramer (whose work I wrote about in this post) wasn’t renowned for cinematic inventiveness – his films were mainly issue-based, with lots of dialogue – but Inherit the Wind opens with a sinister, visually striking scene, as the camera draws back from the Hillsboro Courthouse. A group of men silently walk across deserted streets, the opening credits appear and the soundtrack plays the gospel song “Give Me That Old-Time Religion”, its lyrics a paean to unquestioning belief:
That old-time religion...
If it’s good enough for Joshua,
It’s good enough for me
If it’s good enough for dad and mother,
It’s good enough for me...
The men are joined by a reverend and there’s something menacing about the group – they’re like a sheriff's posse in a Western, heading in single formation for a shootout, or to haul in a notorious criminal. It turns out that this isn’t far from the truth, except that the “criminal” in question is the mild-mannered teacher Bertram Cates, and his crime is explaining Darwin’s theory to his students and encouraging them to think for themselves.
For townsfolk living in America’s “Bible Belt”, such an act is intolerable. It’s also against the law that states that nothing that contradicts the Bible’s version of Creation can be taught in a school. The incident draws countrywide attention and gets politicized; the veteran conservative politician Matthew Harrison Brady (Fredric March) is called in to prosecute Cates, while the liberal-rights champion Henry Drummond (Tracy) leads the defence. For the duration of the trial, the town turns into a carnival, with barkers sitting about displaying chained monkeys to 
people and handing out placards that say “I’m not descended from no ape!” and “Don’t monkey with us”. Meanwhile, inside the courthouse, the two men go hammer and tongs at each other. “Is nothing holy to you?” asks the exasperated Brady at one point. “Yes. The individual human mind,” replies Drummond. “In a child's power to master the multiplication table, there is more sanctity than in all your shouted ‘amens’ and ‘holy holies’ and ‘hosannas’.”
“An idea,” he continues, “is a greater monument than a cathedral.” This is the nub of the film – Drummond’s impassioned defence of the schoolteacher’s right to think and question, and to encourage others to do the same. "The Bible is a good book," he says, "but it is not the only book."
More than one critic has said that Inherit the Wind scores an easy victory against Creationists by turning Brady – the exemplar of the religious fundamentalist – into a soft target, a caricature. My two responses to this: 1) Anyone who sincerely believes that the earth was created at 9 AM on October 23rd, 4004 BC, and who tries to throw someone else into jail for teaching an alternate theory, is already a "caricature" beyond anything that the drunkest scriptwriter can create (also see Poe’s Law, which states that a parody of a religious fundamentalist can be indistinguishable from the real thing), and 2) Though Brady is deservedly portrayed as a pompous, closed-minded old fool in the courtroom scenes where he gives speeches and stirs up the general public sentiment, the film spares time to show shades to his character. One of the most moving scenes in the film is the one where he quietly admonishes a hellfire-and-brimstone preacher for being too harsh on his daughter (though again, his objection is voiced in Biblical terms): "I know you speak from the great zeal of your faith,” he says, “but it is possible to be over-zealous, to destroy that which you ought to save, so that nothing is left but emptiness...He that troubleth his own house will inherit the wind.”
The other great sequence in this vein – and I insist that it's great, even though it plays like a scene that was carefully designed to give two giants of American acting a non-antagonistic moment together – is the one where Drummond and Brady sit together on two rocking chairs late one evening, more old friends reliving the past than courtroom adversaries. "Why is it that you’ve moved so far away from me?" asks Brady. "Maybe it’s you who moved away by standing still," Drummond says laconically. Understanding the implication of this remark, Brady replies that he has no time for “progress” if it means abandoning God. Then he gets reflective, and you see a shadow moving beneath the surface of the Bible-thumper. "These are simple people," he says, “they are poor, they work hard and they need to believe in something ...something beautiful...something more perfect than what they have, like a golden chalice of hope.” (It's an argument often employed by those who believe that religion is essential for the world; even if you don’t agree with the argument, you believe that Brady does.)
“In other words, they’re window-shopping,” snaps Drummond, and he gets the final word with a story about a beautiful rocking horse he had coveted as a child, which turned out to be made of rotting wood. “All shine and no substance, and that’s how I feel about your religion. As long as a prerequisite for that shining paradise is ignorance, bigotry and hate, I say the hell with it.”
March and Tracy are both superb in this scene (arguably even better than in their more flamboyant courtroom confrontations), which is all about two actors listening carefully to each other and reacting, with smiles, grimaces and nods of the head, rather than thinking about their own lines.
In praise of Fredric March
When two different acting styles – one subdued, the other loud – occupy the same frame, there's a kneejerk tendency in some circles to rate the former more highly, even when both performances are completely true to the characters being portrayed. Note: I'm not talking here about personal preference or sympathy for a character. It's one thing to prefer Amitabh's Jai over Dharmendra's Veeru because the former is quiet, intense and ultimately tragic while the latter is boisterous and gets his girl. But it's quite another thing to devalue Dharmendra's superb performance because you're confusing the unsubtlety of the character with that of the actor, or because Veeru's cartoonish romantic exploits don't pull at your heartstrings the way Jai's wooing of the widow does. (Longer post about Dharmendra in Sholay here.)
Fredric March's Brady in Inherit the Wind is a classic example of the sort of performance I'm talking about. It's unsubtle, it plays to the gallery, it's marked by very visible and repetitive character tics ... and it's utterly authentic. Brady is, above all, a showman: as a rabble-rousing politician who has run thrice for president and made numerous self-aggrandizing speeches over the decades, certain traits have become intrinsic to his personality, and March displays this masterfully. One of Brady’s defining mannerisms is when he thinks up a "witticism" (usually something quite banal) in response to something that has been addressed to him, and March's performance allows us to see the whole process: the light-bulb appearing over the man’s head, his “Aha!” moment, and how he ostentatiously says the words for maximum effect.
In his first scene, where he is addressing the adoring masses after arriving in Hillsboro, a man shouts out "We all voted for you, three times!" Brady initially just smiles and looks set to continue his speech, but then he does a sudden double-take, wags a finger at the man and says "I trust it was in three separate elections!" This is followed by a short laugh; it's hard to say whether this is because he's genuinely impressed by his own wit or because he's giving the audience their cue to laugh with him. You see the same thing on a number of other occasions, including when he tosses off the line “I am more interested in the Rock of Ages than in the age of rocks!”, in response to Drummond holding up a fossilized rock and asking him how old he thinks it is.
P.S. March is one of my favourite actors. He was hugely respected by critics and by his peers for his stage and screen work, but he never became part of the star system to the same extent as his contemporaries such as Tracy, Bogart and others did. For anyone interested in seeking out his work, these are some of my recommendations: Nothing Sacred (one of the best screwball comedies I’ve seen, co-starring the great Carole Lombard), A Star is Born (the first of many film versions of the story about an acting couple whose careers follow different trajectories), Death Takes a Holiday, The Best Years of Our Lives, An Act of Murder, The Iceman Cometh.
This month sees the hundredth birth anniversaries of two iconic actors of the last century, both of whom also happen to be personal favourites. I became closely interested in the careers of Laurence Olivier and Katharine Hepburn around 16 years ago, when I first started watching old American and British films. My interest in birth dates being just as strong back then, I knew Olivier was born on May 22, 1907, but I’d always thought of Hepburn as being a November-child and was confused by the subsequent revision of her birthday to May 12 (you expect actors to change years, not months!). There’s an explanation in the Wikipedia entry: apparently, for much of her life she passed off her long-deceased brother Tom’s birthday as her own and revealed the truth only recently.
Hepburn and Olivier were friends, or at least close associates (in fact Hepburn was the impromptu maid-of-honour at the hush-hush late-night wedding ceremony of Olivier and Vivien Leigh in 1940) and their long acting careers came close to intersecting on a couple of occasions, especially after Olivier overcame his initial disdain for cinema. However, they acted together only once, late in their careers, in a lightweight made-for TV movie titled Love Among the Ruins. It’s probably just as well; too much star power can cause film stock to ignite.
As expected, these centenaries are being celebrated with the release of special DVD box-sets (if only I’d had more time in that HMV store last week...) as well as screenings and festivals in many parts of the world. To mark the occasion in my own small way, here are notes on two cherished, dog-eared books.
Tracy and Hepburn: An Intimate Memoir
by Garson Kanin
“We do not remember chronologically but in disordered flashes,” says playwright/screenwriter Garson Kanin in the Preface to this tender, wonderfully personal account of his long friendship with Hepburn and her favourite leading man Spencer Tracy. What Kanin achieves in this book is astonishing, especially considering that it isn’t a structured account of two lives. Instead, he hands the page over to his free-flowing memories of Hepburn and Tracy over a 30-year association with them. This results in a collection of seemingly patternless anecdotes that add up to much more than the sum of their parts, with the two giants coming alive in a way that wouldn’t have been possible in most conventional biographies.
As a friend and confidant, Kanin was uniquely placed to comment on the quirkier aspects of Hepburn’s personality, the things that made her a willing misfit among the media-savvy, politically correct movie stars of her time. (She was designated “The Most Uncooperative Actress of the Year” by the Hollywood Women’s Press Club a number of times, which, given the nature of celebrity journalism then as now, we can take as a high compliment.) This vantage point also allowed him to relate delightful little stories such as the one where she raises her hand dramatically and swears on her mother’s life while telling a blatant lie (to Cary Grant), and later coolly says to Kanin: “It’s an arrangement I have with my mother. She swears on my life too. All the time.”
What eventually emerges is a picture of an very private person living, usually on her own terms, in the public gaze; a maverick in the truest, most un-put on sense of the word – this was a woman who wore trousers and smoked on Hollywood sets (unheard of for an actress in the 1930s) without turning it into a statement – and, of course, an outstanding actress.
Laurence Olivier: A Biography
by Donald Spoto
But if we’re talking conventional biographies, they don’t come much better than Spoto’s comprehensive, well-researched but compact account of Olivier’s life and career. This book is equal parts a life history and a psychological profile of a very complex man who was always trying to raise the bar for himself and for his profession. Almost by default, it’s also an illuminating portrait of the English theatre (and, to an extent, Hollywood) in the 20th century, especially between the 1920s and the 1960s.
Spoto is particularly good at contrasting “Larry” with “Lord Olivier” – that is, setting the humbleness of Olivier’s origins against his eventual status as a revered public figure and a knight of the British Empire. In making this contrast, he captures the man’s deep-rooted insecurities about being under-educated (which led him to indulge in much grandstanding later in his life - making florid, often incomprehensible speeches at ceremonies under the belief that this was how a Peer was expected to talk), his obsessive need to be the very best in his field and his often churlish attitude towards his great rival John Gielgud, who was of more genteel stock.
In fact, Olivier’s unorthodox approach – spitting out Shakespeare’s words instead of reciting them mellifluously; interpreting Iago as a homosexual driven by his feelings for Othello – probably came from the need to defy the classical tradition that Gielgud was a flagbearer for. Here’s an account of the famous 1935 production of Romeo and Juliet, in which Gielgud (an established actor at the time) and Olivier (still the young upstart) alternated the roles of Romeo and Mercutio:
The settled tradition was to stress the poetic lyricism of Shakespeare’s verse. But from the first reading, Olivier spoke his lines as if they sprang from blunt feeling and were not lines of venerable iambic pentameter: he was clearly preparing to play Romeo as a hot-blooded adolescent seething with sexual eagerness. Cast and director heard the verse as if it were not verse at all, but a spontaneous rush of passionate desire, impossible to suppress. “He felt that I was too verse-conscious and exhibitionist,” Gielgud reflected years later. “Of course, he was a great exhibitionist himself, but in quite a different way – daring, flamboyant and iconoclastic.”
Rereading these books, I realised that this was what Hepburn and Olivier had in common apart from the levels of excellence they achieved: they were both nonconformists, both way ahead of their time. It’s hard to believe they would have been turned hundred this month, so fresh are their legacies and personal styles.
P.S. John Wayne was yet another Hollywood legend born in May 1907. I admired a lot of his work – especially in Red River, The Searchers, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and The Quiet Man – without being a big fan. Coincidentally, Hepburn’s only film appearance with Wayne (in Rooster Cogburn) was the same year in which she did Love Among the Ruins with Olivier. Wayne and Olivier never acted together – indeed, it would be difficult to imagine a film of any quality that could accommodate both of them, though they each appeared in bloated multi-cast war dramas late in their careers.
In the heftily titled but excellent book Conversations with the Great Movie-Makers of Hollywood’s Golden Age at the American Film Institute by George Stevens Jr (himself the son of one of those great directors), I came across an interview with producer-director Stanley Kramer. Kramer was known as a maker of “socially conscious films” – in the 1950s and early 1960s he directed a number of solid dramas that dealt with such issues as racism (The Defiant Ones), nuclear fallout (On the Beach) and the Scopes Trial (Inherit the Wind), in addition to producing such classics as The Caine Mutiny and The Wild One. [Later, taking a break from all the seriousness, he also made the overblown slapstick comedy It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World.]
Like many other independent-minded directors working in the US at the time, Kramer didn’t have the freedom to be an auteur in the true sense of the word. Given that he wanted his films to reach a wide audience, his goals had to be realised while working within the constraints of the studio system. This often meant populating his films with well-known actors (some of whom were, in the Hollywood tradition of the period, Star Personalities – associated with a certain type of role in the average moviegoer’s mind). And though the scripts that he worked with were weightier and more nuanced than those in the typical studio film, critics haven’t always been kind to him – his work has sometimes been dismissed as bloated and self-conscious, with contrived resolutions and simplistic treatment of important issues. In short, “Hollywoodised”.
In the interview I mentioned, Kramer himself shows humility and introspection about these aspects of his career. An excerpt:
“When I began work as a filmmaker I wanted desperately to be an artist. From my standpoint, I never came close. The reason was that I was born into film at a time when to make my mark and to do what I wanted to do, I had to take on the establishment within the Hollywood firmament…To get On the Beach made, I made a deal with United Artists that I would use two stars and UA would finance the picture. This has happened to me twenty times. I always had to work on such large canvases to get the film made at all…
I didn’t want Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner in On the Beach because they made it much less realistic for me. The presence of the stars made the film less powerful, less to the point…For me, a film like Hiroshima Mon Amour which was about being able to sustain life on a planet faced with atomic warfare, was more powerful than On the Beach. The difference is that I’m an American [studio director]. I made On the Beach and it was seen by millions of people. Hiroshima Mon Amour got a limited release and was seen by a select audience.”
It’s commendable that Kramer could make these self-critical remarks, but I think he’s being hard on himself. His best work still holds up quite well 
today (unless your idea of good cinema is restricted to indie films that are entirely uncorrupted by studio money). Among the movies that he directed, the one I’m fondest of is Judgment at Nuremberg, his stark three-hour epic about the Nazi war trials shortly after the end of WWII.
I first saw it as a 14-year-old when I was trudging from one video library to another with the Leonard Maltin Movie and Video Guide in my hand, picking up any pre-1970s movie that the reviewer had given a rating of 3 or more stars (how strange this seems, given my supercilious attitude to the rating system now). I loved the film unqualifiedly back then. Watching it allowed me to combine two seemingly irreconciliable interests: a) the historical period in question – WWII, the Holocaust and its aftermath, and b) the careers of actors such as Spencer Tracy, Marlene Dietrich, Burt Lancaster and Montgomery Clift.
Shot in austere black and white, Judgment at Nuremberg opens with the ageing Judge Haywood (Tracy), an American freshly arrived in Nuremberg, being driven to his quarters. Haywood looks around him at this wasted city that hosted grand Nazi rallies at the height of the Third Reich; later, he will go for a walk in a deserted quarter, observe the wary quietness of the few people around, and imagine hearing Hitler’s rabble-rousing speeches – the sense of decay is almost palpable, and resentment and guilt seem to exist side by side.
But most of the action in this fictionalised version of the Nuremberg Trials takes place in the courtroom, where Haywood is presiding over the trials of four Nazi judges, men of influence and high standing during the Nazi regime but now war criminals being asked to account for their actions. Among the accused is the solemn Dr Ernst Janning (Burt Lancaster), a respected figure in his day and central to the film’s theme that in times of severe political change and uncertainty, even well-intentioned people can end up doing things foreign to their essential natures. Other principals include the attorneys for the defence and the prosecution, and witnesses such as a baker who was forcibly sterilised by the Nazis and a hausfrau whose elderly Jewish friend was put to death on the charge of having an “improper” relationship with her.
There are no villains in Judgment at Nuremberg, or rather, there are no individual villains: as screenwriter Abby Mann says in an interview on the DVD, “the film’s real villain is patriotism” – that is, people believing that they needed to do certain things collectively for the good of their country or state, without examining their consciences. And the idea of shared guilt is central to the script. (Some scenes reminded me of the great ending of Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog, where people at different levels – concentration camp guards, commandants, generals – shift the responsibility for the Holocaust on to someone else, and the narrator asks plaintively, “Who is responsible?”)
But the film doesn’t cop out when it comes to fixing responsibility. In what may seem a contrived resolution, the courtroom drama climaxes with Ernst Janning responding to the call of his conscience and making a tidy little speech condemning himself and his associates for complying with events that they knew were wrong. Some critics have suggested that this scene, involving as it does one of Hollywood’s biggest stars, Burt Lancaster, is a sympathy-generator. But this is a ludicrous allegation, for just a few minutes earlier we have been shown documentary footage of the brutalities of the Nazi regime (this is hard-hitting stuff straight out of the concentration camps – certainly not something you’d expect to see in a mainstream Hollywood film of the time). Though the film has sympathy for people who were swept along by the dark current of history and made momentary decisions that they would regret for the rest of their lives, at no point does it suggest that the guilty mustn’t be held accountable.
What the script does manage to convey is the ambiguity surrounding the actions of practically everyone involved in the rise of Nazi Germany. When Judge Haywood pronounces his verdict at the end, we agree with his insistence on making individuals accountable for their acts; but at the same time we never lose sight of the points the defence attorney makes in his closing speech – about moral relativism, about Churchill’s praise of Hitler while the Third Reich was building its strength, about American complicity in the growth of industrial Germany, about the long and complex series of events that allowed the horrors of Auschwitz to take place.
Today, more than 15 years after I first watched Judgment at Nuremberg, it’s easier for me to see the flaws – for instance, that some scenes are static and heavy-handed. But it was very courageous for the time, and it certainly didn’t pander shamelessly to the box-office or attempt to spoon-feed a mass audience. And while some of the courtroom scenes are clumsily shot (you can almost sense that the cameraman was running out of places to put his equipment in this claustrophobic setting), it still looks good as a whole and its most powerful moments haven't dated at all.
Star power
Kramer says in his interview:
Do you think United Artists wanted to make Judgment at Nuremberg, the story of a Nazi trial? They weren’t at all interested in those people in the ovens and the crooked judges. I studded it with stars to get it made as a film so that I would reach out to a mass audience.
Given those conditions, I think he did extremely well. It’s all very well to condemn a film for having too many big names in it, but why not simply judge the performances on their own terms? Watching Judgment at Nuremberg, hardly ever does one get the impression that star power is intruding on the film’s basic function. Spencer Tracy, that master of understatement, is the anchor here as the old judge, showing as he so often did that great acting doesn’t have to be about flashy, attention-grabbing moments (the sort that run with the nomination announcements at award shows) or playing a variety of characters with different looks and accents. In Tracy’s best work, everything could hinge on a single glance, or on the way his character listened to and responded to something said by someone else – and there are many such moments in this film; the moral dilemmas Judge Haywood faces give the actor a lot of scope for internalising his feelings.
There isn’t a major weak link in the cast. The prosecuting attorney is played by Richard Widmark, another consummate professional, the fiery defence attorney Hans Rolfe is played by Maximilian Schell (who won the best actor Oscar for this role despite being the least-known member of the cast – or perhaps because of it). There are short but very effective cameos by Judy Garland and Montgomery Clift as Nazi-regime victims who testify in court. (If you’re at all interested in acting styles, it’s fun to contrast Clift’s attention-grabbing Method performance with Tracy’s naturalistic one.) And on the sidelines is the magnificent Marlene Dietrich (all of 60 at the time but looking ageless as ever) as a German general’s widow who forms a wary friendship with Judge Haywood.
Burt Lancaster is the only member of the cast who seems out of place to me, but even his casting wasn’t simply a means of adding star value to the film. Around this time Lancaster had in fact started branching out into character roles – something he would do very successfully in films like Birdman of Alcatraz, The Leopard and The Swimmer. (That said, it would have been brilliant if Kramer had got Laurence Olivier – his first choice – to do the role.)
P.S. I have conflicting views on this idea of star power undermining the credibility of films that deal with social issues, or that are “realistic” in the usual sense of that word. In this post, I mentioned that the non-mainstream Amitabh Bachchan starrer Main Azaad Hoon, his honest attempt at doing something different, didn’t work for me because much as I adored AB, I could never see him as John Doe or Everyman. The quality of Amitabh’s performance was beside the point, since his reputation and screen image would be a mental block for a viewer regardless: for the film to truly achieve what it wanted to achieve, the lead role would have had to be played by an unknown actor, or at least someone who didn’t have iconic status.
However, attractive though this idea is – that star personalities shouldn’t be allowed to mix with Serious Cinema – it’s also very exclusivist, besides being impracticable of course. Another post on that sometime.
A few days ago I re-watched a favourite old film, Stanley Kramer’s Inherit the Wind, about the trial of a schoolteacher arrested for teaching Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. The movie is based on the real-life Scopes Trial of 1925 and it stars one of Hollywood’s most beloved actors, the 60-year-old Spencer Tracy, as a rationalist lawyer who defends the schoolteacher, fiercely challenges literalist interpretations of the Bible and refers to the Book in a decidedly offhand manner. In light of recent developments, this film seems more topical and bolder than ever.
people and handing out placards that say “I’m not descended from no ape!” and “Don’t monkey with us”. Meanwhile, inside the courthouse, the two men go hammer and tongs at each other. “Is nothing holy to you?” asks the exasperated Brady at one point. “Yes. The individual human mind,” replies Drummond. “In a child's power to master the multiplication table, there is more sanctity than in all your shouted ‘amens’ and ‘holy holies’ and ‘hosannas’.”
More than one critic has said that Inherit the Wind scores an easy victory against Creationists by turning Brady – the exemplar of the religious fundamentalist – into a soft target, a caricature. My two responses to this: 1) Anyone who sincerely believes that the earth was created at 9 AM on October 23rd, 4004 BC, and who tries to throw someone else into jail for teaching an alternate theory, is already a "caricature" beyond anything that the drunkest scriptwriter can create (also see Poe’s Law, which states that a parody of a religious fundamentalist can be indistinguishable from the real thing), and 2) Though Brady is deservedly portrayed as a pompous, closed-minded old fool in the courtroom scenes where he gives speeches and stirs up the general public sentiment, the film spares time to show shades to his character. One of the most moving scenes in the film is the one where he quietly admonishes a hellfire-and-brimstone preacher for being too harsh on his daughter (though again, his objection is voiced in Biblical terms): "I know you speak from the great zeal of your faith,” he says, “but it is possible to be over-zealous, to destroy that which you ought to save, so that nothing is left but emptiness...He that troubleth his own house will inherit the wind.”
The other great sequence in this vein – and I insist that it's great, even though it plays like a scene that was carefully designed to give two giants of American acting a non-antagonistic moment together – is the one where Drummond and Brady sit together on two rocking chairs late one evening, more old friends reliving the past than courtroom adversaries. "Why is it that you’ve moved so far away from me?" asks Brady. "Maybe it’s you who moved away by standing still," Drummond says laconically. Understanding the implication of this remark, Brady replies that he has no time for “progress” if it means abandoning God. Then he gets reflective, and you see a shadow moving beneath the surface of the Bible-thumper. "These are simple people," he says, “they are poor, they work hard and they need to believe in something ...something beautiful...something more perfect than what they have, like a golden chalice of hope.” (It's an argument often employed by those who believe that religion is essential for the world; even if you don’t agree with the argument, you believe that Brady does.)
