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
