Monthly Archives: June 2015

  • To Kill a Mockingbird

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Robert Mulligan  (1962)

    This adaptation of the Harper Lee book is absorbing and the story is well told. In the first third of the picture, the focus is on the escapades and emotions of tomboy Scout and her brother Jem, the two children of the widowed lawyer Atticus Finch, and their friend Dill.   The gradual emergence as the movie’s centrepiece of the trial of Tom Robinson, a black man accused of the rape of a white woman (in Alabama, in the early 1930s), whom Finch agrees to defend, is skilfully handled.  But the film gets very pious during the courtroom proceedings – which Robert Mulligan, Horton Foote (who did the screenplay) and Alan Pakula (who produced, several years before the start of his own directing career) clearly see as the heart of the matter.  Jem and Scout are in the public gallery with Dill but, except for a couple of reaction shots, they virtually disappear from view – emotional view anyway – at this point.  When, after the trial is over, they resume centre stage (if you didn’t know the source material was a novel, you’d think it was a three-act play), the transition feels clumsy, although the film recovers its balance in the closing stages.  Tom Robinson, found guilty by the incorrigibly racist jury in spite of the lack of evidence against him, is ‘accidentally’ shot dead by police when he tries to escape while being transported from one prison to another (for his own safety).  Of course the film’s preoccupation with the racial aspects of the material is understandable, given the salience of civil rights and Deep South race crimes on the American political agenda of the early 1960s; yet it’s the quality of childhood experience in a particular time and place that’s a more distinctive element in To Kill a Mockingbird – the way in which we see Jem apprehending and reacting to the meaning of what’s going on, and Scout taking it all in less obviously but no less deeply or permanently.  The title refers to Atticus Finch’s advice to his children that it’s fine for people to ‘shoot all the bluejays they want’ but ‘it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird’ – which, like Tom Robinson and the Finch’s reclusive neighbour Arthur ‘Boo’ Radley, who frightens and fascinates the children, does no harm to other living creatures.

    The contrasts in tempo in the first part of the film are satisfying.  In the small town of Maycomb (a fictional setting, according to Wikipedia) there’s an insidious edge to the lethargic heat, which plays off against the children’s rapid, noisy exuberance – the doors of the Finch home seem always to be swinging and slapping to and fro.  The kids’ spying on Boo Radley’s house until they scare themselves and daren’t go further is convincing.  When Scout and Jem are settling down to sleep one night, she asks him questions about their mother, who died when Scout was two.  Robert Mulligan cuts to Atticus sitting reading on the porch and hearing the voices from inside – what we see and hear is eloquent about the different kinds of loss felt by the husband, the daughter and the son.    Gregory Peck as Atticus is very good in these early scenes:  he hints at a streak of pomposity running through the man’s civility and uprightness, at a kernel of loneliness within his imposing and, to his children especially, reassuring presence.  I liked Peck much better in the family scenes than in the courtroom, where his identification with Atticus Finch’s righteous determination and his grasping the opportunity for ‘fine’ acting becomes self-conscious and relatively inexpressive.   The longer the trial goes on, the more studied Peck’s playing becomes and this carries over into his display of moral outrage when Finch learns of the death of Robinson.  (This made me wonder if that interestingly pompous air at the start was the actor’s rather than the character’s.)   But Gregory Peck, through his height and his strong voice and his steady but sensitive handsomeness, very successfully embodies what the other characters, including his few enemies, see in Atticus.

    Watching the juveniles here is evidence that child acting has evolved largely in the right direction since 1962.  All three of Phillip Alford (Jem), John Megna (Dill) and Mary Badham (Scout) are accomplished but the two boys perform in a practised way that doesn’t leave much to the imagination – although Alford is nicely alert (he’s particularly good reacting to the moment when his non-violent father shoots a mad dog) and Megna looks extraordinary (as if he might have grown up into Rick Moranis). Mary Badham is a different matter:  she has a strong personality and a lovely relaxed quality.  When Scout starts school and has to wear a dress instead of dungarees, she’s amusingly denatured.  The voice of the adult Scout narrates the story in an unfortunately superior tone – I was a bit shocked to discover that an uncredited Kim Stanley was responsible for this.

    Sometimes the silence in court adds to the tension but Tom Robinson’s trial must be one of the least interrupted – in terms of objections from either side or interventions from the judge – in cinema history.   It’s here that the picture’s liberal self-righteousness most affects the acting, and not in just in Gregory Peck’s performance.  Brock Peters as Tom is strong when he breaks down giving evidence but he’s too aware of his character’s tragic innocence.  (As Pauline Kael said, he ‘flares his nostrils mightily’.)    Collin Wilcox, as Mayella Ewell, the dim-witted, hysterical girl Tom’s accused of raping, also makes too much of her moment in the witness box and James Anderson, as her father, overdoes the drunken redneck malignity.  Nevertheless, it could be argued that these performances are properly scaled to the Southern Gothic aspects of the material – and it’s important to remember, watching the film nearly half a century after it was made and getting on for eighty years after the Great Depression, that characters like Bob Ewell wouldn’t have seemed anything like as unusually rebarbative then as they do now.   The outstanding adult performance in the supporting roles comes from Robert Duvall, in his big screen debut, as Boo Radley.   When Boo saves the day in the final act and appears from behind Jem’s bedroom door, the effect is powerful and Mary Badham’s connection with Duvall in this moment is lovely.  Elmer Bernstein’s score is a bit intrusive, although the fault is more in its overuse than in the music itself.

    9 February 2010

  • Broken Blossoms (or The Yellow Man and the Girl)

    Old YorkerFilm review

    D W Griffith (1919)

    While it’s not unusual to be surprised by the modernity of an antique talkie, I never feel that way about silent pictures, however ahead-of-their-time the director’s insights or techniques or the acting may seem to be.  The live piano accompaniment (provided for this BFI screening of Broken Blossoms by Cyrus Gabrysch) doesn’t make a silent movie any less silent.  The absence of human voices, especially, confers an archaeological quality on the images on the screen.  The antiquity of Broken Blossoms is part of what makes its early scenes in particular – a prologue in China, scene-setting in the Limehouse area of London – so compelling.   You have the sense of not only entering the time and place visualised by the film-maker but also looking direct into the ancient history of film-making.  The fascination of these sequences is also the result, of course, of D W Griffith’s imaginative staging and his economical choice of arresting detail:  an elderly local street vendor in the Chinese scene; the raw realness in East London of a careworn mother and a hard-faced streetwalker – both of whom warn the teenage heroine Lucy against their respective ways of life.  The character who links China and Limehouse is Cheng Huan, the titular ‘yellow man’ of the film’s alternative title.  He comes to England ‘to spread the gentle message of Buddha to the Anglo-Saxon lands’.  The Chinese prologue also features some ‘skylarking’ American sailors.  Their boisterousness is a mild foreshadowing of the viciousness and violence of Limehouse – qualities epitomised by Lucy’s father, the pugilist Battling Burrows, who, when not fighting in the ring, is tyrannising and abusing his daughter in their cramped, bare lodgings.  Cheng Huan makes a living as a shopkeeper but, disillusioned by his failure to make a peaceful difference to Limehouse life, also spends time moping in an opium den – until his life is reanimated by his love for the ‘broken blossom’ Lucy Burrows.

    The racial elements of Broken Blossoms are doubly interesting – in relation to the notorious racism of Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation and as an expression of contemporary attitudes more generally.  The screenplay, by Griffith and Thomas Burke, is adapted from ‘The Chink and the Child’, part of Limehouse Nights, a collection of stories by Burke (a Briton) which was published in 1916.  Griffith’s reputation as a racist and the derogatory title of the source material hardly prepare you for his respectful characterisation of the yellow man and excoriation of the forces that confront him in Limehouse.  Not only is Battling Burrows’s declared hatred of immigrant ‘Chinks’ shown as reinforcement of his malign unreason.  Griffith also criticises Christian assumptions of superiority, in a sequence in which two Christian missionaries, about to leave England in order to convert heathens in China, give Cheng a pamphlet on Hell, which they clearly assume is his destination.  Buddhism is presented relatively positively from the start – as ‘peace loving’ and a ‘do as you would be done by’ ethic – although it’s striking too that the intertitles (which are consistently moralising) liken the advice that Cheng receives, before leaving China, from a priest in a Buddhist temple to the advice that would be given to any young American man preparing to travel internationally.  It’s a tragic irony of the story, nevertheless, that Cheng, in order for justice to be done, is left with no option but to commit a fatal act of violence (and, finally, to use a knife to take his own life).

    For the twenty-first century viewer, a more persistent racial problem is Richard Barthelmess in the role of Cheng.  It’s a salient piece of casting for two reasons.  First, the minor Chinese characters in Broken Blossoms are impersonated by actors and extras who are either Asian or apparently of Asian ancestry.  Second, Barthelmess’s efforts to construct a creature of ‘exotic’ appearance, movement and gesture are so obviously painstaking that his technique draws attention to itself and sets up an emotional distance between the audience and the man Barthelmess is playing.  This is not at all the case with the two other principal actors, Lillian Gish as Lucy (also referred to as ‘The Girl’, in accordance with the film’s alias) and Donald Crisp as Battling Burrows.  Crisp melds, to remarkable effect, an expressionist study of Battling’s benighted soul and vivid behavioural details; it’s especially startling when Battling’s instinctual anger is occasionally eclipsed by sadism of a more jocular kind.  Lillian Gish was in her mid-twenties when she made this film but the combination of her artistry and her slightness enables her to convince physically as an adolescent.  Her character’s spiritual age is a more protean thing:  Gish sometimes presents the face of a child; Lucy blooms when she takes refuge in the beautifully decorated room above Cheng’s shop; but there are times too when the girl’s face, described in an intertitle as ‘tear-aged’, suggests an old woman worn out by years of oppression.   Lillian Gish makes Lucy’s terror at the prospect of another beating from her father shockingly real.  A particularly brilliant invention on her (or the director’s?) part is the way that Lucy repeatedly pushes up the corners of her mouth in order to make a smile.  Griffith’s hand-tinting of the film distinguishes both indoor and outdoor scenes and major emotional shifts in the narrative. The momentum of the cross-cutting in the closing stages makes for a gripping climax.  The hierarchical cast list refers to ‘Miss Lillian Gish’ and ‘Mr Richard Barthelmess’ but no other actor’s name gets this formal treatment.

    Postscript:  The running time of ninety minutes advertised by BFI (also indicated on Wikipedia and IMDB entries for the film) proved to be a large overestimate – Broken Blossoms lasted less than eighty.   Dominic Rafferty explained, in a typically clear and gently apologetic way, that the discrepancy had come to light when BFI played their print in advance of the screening proper and was thought to be the result of a ‘transfer issue’ rather than a matter of missing footage.

    9 June 2015

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