To Kill a Mockingbird

“[It’s] a sin to kill a mockingbird…mockingbirds don’t do anything but make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat people’s gardens, don’t nest in the corncrib, they don’t do one thing but just sing their hearts out for us.”

One of the things some people cite as a weakness of the 1962 film To Kill a Mockingbird is, in my opinion, one of the strongest aspects of this film. This is a story told from the perspective of a woman reflecting on her life with her widowed father when she was six years old. Her father seems filled with platitudes and pearls of wisdom, almost a caricature of the wise older man who does nothing but act noble and fill their conversations with moralizing messages. What we are seeing is her father from her perspective, not the everyday conversations that were likely a part of their daily lives together, but the moments that had a lasting impact on her years later. This is a brilliant bit of storytelling that hearkens back to the original Harper Lee prose. This is this character’s father as she saw and remembers him.

Harper Lee’s novel was required reading when I was in school. Amazingly, it still is in lots of schools, even in our world where people try to forget that racism existed in the world, at least when discussing history. Books like this have a tendency to get banned for the use of racial slurs with those doing the banning forgetting that this, too, is a part of our history and we need to come to terms with it rather than ignore that it happened. My son, who is not yet twenty, informed me as I was preparing to write this that he was required to read it in the 8th grade so it hasn’t gotten completely ignored since I was in school. That’s encouraging because the themes of this work are as relevant today as they were when Harper Lee first wrote it. 

The story takes place during the Great Depression in a fictional town in Alabama. Siblings Scout (Mary Badham) and Jem (Phillip Alford) live with their widowed father, Atticus Finch (Gregory Peck), a white middle-aged lawyer who often represents the poor farmers in the area who have been heavily affected by the depression. In lieu of monetary payment, the farmers pay him with whatever they have, including produce or firewood. 

Jem and Scout befriend Dill (John Megna), a young boy staying with his aunt during the summers. The three of them spend their days running around the neighborhood while their father is busy at the courthouse. While showing Dill around, they discuss how they are frightened and intrigued by their reclusive neighbor, Arthur “Boo” Radley (Robert Duvall), a simple man who is rumored to be chained up in his house by his father and only allowed out at night. They tell tall tales about the man and try to come up with ways to get him to come outside. Eventually, they begin finding small gifts left in the knot of a tree outside the Radley house. This ends abruptly, though, when Boo’s father cements over the knot hole. 

Atticus is appointed to defend Tom Robinson (Brock Peters), a black man accused of raping and beating a white woman. This crime has incited some angry people in town who are ready to convict Tom without any real evidence. It also places Atticus in the crosshairs of some people who feel he shouldn’t be trying to defend Tom at all, let alone legitimately try to get him acquitted. When Tom is brought to town before the trial, Atticus learns of a plan to storm the jail and lynch the man. He camps outside the jail in anticipation of this and is saved from the mob when his children, who suspected something and followed him there, show up and Scout, through her innocence and penchant to speak her mind, shames one of the farmers in the mob, causing the mob to disperse. 

But when the trial does commence, despite the plethora of evidence suggesting that Tom couldn’t possibly be guilty of the crime he is accused of, he is still convicted; this is the Deep South in the 1930s after all. Up in the balcony, where the black people are segregated from the white, Jem watches on, seeing his father at work for perhaps the first time. In many ways, he sees and understands what many of the adults do not.

This is a time capsule into a different time. It is easy to forget that we are watching a film from the 1960s rather than one from the 30s or 40s. Everything about it feels like the golden age of Hollywood, right up until the first time we hear a character use the N-word to describe Tom Robinson. That’s when it hits home that this is a more recent film, one that released within the lifetime of my parents. That is when it becomes important to realize that this film was being made during the Civil Rights movement. This story was written in 1960 during a time of great political upheaval when Black people were marching and being beaten down just for asking for the same rights as everyone else. This film asks us to look at two men, Tom Robinson, and his accuser, Robert E. Lee Ewell (James Anderson), and know almost immediately that the accuser is the guilty party, not the defendant. 

To accomplish this, the film uses some shorthand to paint a picture of the events in dispute. First, when we are introduced to Robert E. Lee Ewell (That name is very much intentional), he is drunk and rambling on about how he cannot believe Atticus would take Tom’s word over his own. Ewell is an angry man who makes his opinions on Black people perfectly clear when he drives out to Tom Robinson’s family home to harass them. He has no problems with his daughter lying on the witness stand to send an innocent man to his death, nor of drumming up an angry mob to lynch him before a trial can even happen. 

All of this is told through the eyes of the children and can be seen as filtered through those eyes. It allows for the concepts to be simplified without feeling like the movie is talking down to its audience. There is a lot of complexity to the situation at this time, but it is shown and explained in a way the kids would be seeing it. Even the moments, few that there are, where Scout is not present, we can infer that she has either been told about some things at a later date or is filling in the blanks from her own imagination. Either way, it works for this narrative. 

If this film can be faulted for something, it is in how neatly everything gets wrapped up in the end. While we know that Tom Robinson’s story isn’t going to end on a happy note, his accuser, Robert E. Lee Ewell, gets his own sort of punishment for his part in it. Nothing is said about what finally happens to his daughter, who is equally complicit, though. Robert’s demise comes at the hands of Boo Radley, the man we don’t finally see until the end of the film, who stabs him with a knife to stop him from attacking Jem and Scout. Boo, who is no more a boogeyman than the scary old neighbor in Home Alone, saves Scout and Jem as they are walking home. Ewell dies in the altercation, and Boo is a hero, albeit one that can never be publicly acknowledged as one. The sheriff, realizing what has really happened, states that “Bob Ewell fell on his knife - he killed himself. There’s a black man dead for no reason. Now the man responsible for it is dead. Let the dead bury the dead this time…”

This is one of those films that has endured now for over sixty years, becoming a staple in school classrooms where we are taught lessons on how viewing things through the lens of hatred and racism can lead to the innocent being accused and persecuted. It also tells us that our children are not as ignorant to what is going on around them as we sometimes think they are. Like Atticus, we are here to teach them how to be the people they will eventually grow up to be. They may not remember the mundane conversations and the boring day-to-day events, but they will remember when we teach them life lessons and how to see the world from the other person’s point of view. Those are the times they will remember when they grow up and think about their upbringing. This film perfectly nails what it is like to be a child, so much so that it brought back memories of when I was that age, living in a time when I was free to roam my hometown all summer long, only required to check in before the streetlights came on at night. 

Academy Award Nominations:

Best Picture: Alan J. Pakula

Best Director: Robert Mulligan

Best Actor: Gregory Peck (won)

Best Supporting Actress: Mary Badham

Best Adapted Screenplay: Horton Foote (won)

Best Art Direction: Alexander Golitzen, Henry Bumstead, and Oliver Emert (won)

Best Cinematography: Russell Harlan

Best Original Score: Elmer Bernstein

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Release Date: December 25, 1962

Running Time: 129 Minutes

Not Rated

Starring: Gregory Peck, Mary Badham, Phillip Alford, Ruth White, Paul Fix, Brock Peters, Frank Overton, and James Anderson

Directed by: Robert Mulligan