The Male Animal

The Male Animal is a Warner Brothers film starring Henry Fonda, Olivia de Havilland and Joan Leslie. The film was based on a hit 1940 Broadway play of the same name written by James Thurber and Elliott Nugent. The screenplay was written by Stephen Morehouse Avery, Julius J. Epstein, and Philip G. Epstein, based on Nugent and Thurber's play. The film was also directed by Elliott Nugent. Tommy Turner is an English teacher at football-crazed Midwestern University in this comedy-drama. Although he is uninvolved with the politics of the day, Turner suddenly finds himself the center of a... free-speech debate on campus. An editorial in a student magazine reveals that he plans to read Bartolomeo Vanzetti's sentencing statement to his class as an example of English composition. The school's conservative trustees threaten to fire him if he doesn't withdraw the reading from his lecture. The subject of free speech and Turner's dilemma of conscience anchor the film's drama.
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