To Kill a Mockingbird (Pakula-Mu9lligan Productions, Brentwood Productions, Universal-International, 1962)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Badlands Turner Classic Movies showed another great American film under the rubric of movies that shaped the consciousness of an American immigrant and shaped their expectations of what life would be like in the United States. The film was the 1962 adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird, based on the novel by Harper Lee, who was born (in 1928) and raised ini Monroeville, Alabama. In 1960 she moved to New York City and there began the first draft of her book, which was called Go Set a Watchman and was set in the 1950’s. Every publisher she submitted it to rejected it, but one book editor at Lippincott liked the passage in which Jean Louise Finch, nicknamed “Scout,” reminisced about her childhood in the 1930’s in the middle of the Great Depression. The editor suggested that Lee expand this flashback scene into an entire novel, which became To Kill a Mockingbird (whose working title was Go See a Mockingbird). Lee ultimately allowed Goi Set a Watchman to be published in July 2016, a year and a half before her death, and it aroused controversy because the central character of both books, attorney Atticus Finch (Scout’s father), was revealed in Go Set a Watchman as the sort of Southern moderate who believed that Black Americans were not ready for full racial equality and needed to “prove” their worthiness to live among whites before racial segregation could be ended. Readers of To Kill a Mockingbird and viewers of the film, in which he was unforgettably played by Gregory Peck (for whom it was a personal project), no doubt saw it as an allegory of the African-American civil rights movement, since the basic plot concerns Atticus Finch accepting an appointment to serve as defense counsel for Tom Robinson (Brock Peters), a young Black man accused of raping white woman Mayelle Violet Ewell (Collin Wilcox).

Mayelle’s father Bob (James Anderson) leads a lynch mob to kill Tom before he can even be tried, but Atticus Finch stands heroically against the would-be lynchers and talks them out of it by reminding the members of the mob of the various favors he’s done for them over the years. The case proceeds to trial based largely on the testimony of the Ewells, including Mayelle’s account of how she was allegedly strangled by the sex-mad Tom – who, it turns out, actually couldn’t have attacked her the way she says he did because his left arm was injured in an accident at a cotton gin when he was 12 and since then it’s been almost totally useless. I first saw To Kill a Mockingbird when it was first in theatres at the Sequoia in Mill Valley when I was 10, and all I remembered was the horrific scene of Scout Finch (Mary Badham) and her older brother Jem (Phillip Alford) fleeing for their lives after a Hallowe’en party at school in which the kids were supposed to dress in costumes representing the various farm products of Monroeville, Alabama, where the film is set (and where the location work was done in Harper Lee’s own home town). I remembered Scout’s preposterous costuming as a ham, in which she’s forced to head home because she somehow lost her dress at the party and has nothing else but her underwear and the ham suit.

Since then I’ve seen To Kill a Mockingbird at least twice – including once before with my husband Charles when I showed him a videotape I’d recorded off a previous TCML screening – and this time around it seemed awfully didactic at first but I soon got into it and it worked its familiar magic on me. Harper Lee’s story, expertly adapted for the screen by writer Horton Foote (himself a Southerner, born March 14, 1916 in Wharton, Texas), works best when it subtly contrasts the childhood innocence of Scout, Jem and their friend Dill Harris (John Magna) with the momentous racial issues confronted by their father. When Atticus takes the appointment from his friend Judge Taylor (veteran character actor Paul Fix), the unspoken assumption is he’s supposed to mount just a token defense so the uppity Black man can be safely railroaded in a proceeding with the barest appearance of justice. When Atticus insists on mounting a proper defense, he gets called a “nigger-lover” (we’ve become so used to not hearing the “‘N’-word” that it’s a shock to have it on the soundtrack, bright as day, at least twice). He puts Tom Robinson on the stand and from his account, it actually sounds more like Mayelle was trying to rape him. Despite Atticus’s best efforts, including a moving closing argument, the jury finds Tom Robinson guilty after only a couple of hours – and it turns out he’s not even allowed to live long enough to be placed in a proper jail so Atticus can mount an appeal. Instead he’s shot down “while attempting to escape” – obviously the whites in the town have managed to lynch him after all – ahd Atticus has the unpleasant task of telling his family that he’s dead.

What struck me most about this film today is the extent to which, even though To Kill a Mockingbird is not a horror film, director Robert Mulligan, working on the Universal lot where so many great horror films were made in the 1930’s and 1940’s, fills the film with many scenes reflecting the Gothic atmosphere of the studio’s great horror classics. Much of the film’s first half takes place at night as Scout, Jem and Dill make their way through the shadow-drenched town streets and the woods that surround it, especially the home of “the meanest man in town,” Mr. Brouckoff – oops, I mean Mr. Radley (whom we never actually see), though the descriptions of his house reminded me an awful lot of Meet Me in St. Louis – who has reportedly locked his crazy son Boo (Robert Duvall, in his first film) in a basement until he got sick from the mold on the walls. Boo turns out to be a deus ex machina who saves the Finch kids from the attempt by Bob Ewell to murder them by stabbing Bob to death – whereupon the sheriff, Heck Tate (Frank Overton), who turns out ot be a good guy after all despite his testimony against Tom Robinson at the trial, announces his report will say that Bob Ewell accidentally stabbed himself with his kwn knife because prosecutirng Boo, whose furst name is Arthur, for an assault \that was obviously justifiable would be like, you guessed it, killing a mockingbird.

To Kill a Mockingbird holds up surprisingly well – indeed, with racism once again ascendant in this country’s politics it seems more cruelly relevant than ever given the lies and hatreds being stoked by Donald Trump and his acolytes – and the quiet dignity and strength of Gregory Peck’s performance as Atticus Finch won him a well-deserved Academy Award. This film was shown on TCM under the same rubric as Badlands, with the co-host being Nepalese immigrant Sashim Barakuti, who’s made her living in the non-profit sector both in Nepal and since she arrived here. She does most of her work with an organization helping fellow Nepalese immigrants adjust to life in the U.S., and while it would have been more interesting if a Black immigrant would have co-hosted this, she came across as both intelligent and caring, the sort of person whom you’d love to have over for dinner – especially if she provided the recipe for the meal.