Day 93: To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

Movie #59 – To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) - 129 min, cert PG.

A white attorney defends an innocent black man on a trumped-up rape charge in 1930s Alabama.

Based on the Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Harper Lee, the story is told through the eyes of Scout, the 6-year-old daughter of the attorney Atticus Finch (Gregory Peck). The character of Scout is supposedly based on Lee herself, and the novel is semi-autobiographical. This is a story about institutionalised racism, made at the time when the Civil Rights movement was at its height, but set in a time and place when such a movement could not even have been dreamt of.

Atticus Finch is called upon to defend a local black man who has been accused of beating & raping a local white girl. It becomes clear during the trial that the defendant Paul Robinson is entirely innocent, and that the girl in question tried to force herself on him, and was then savagely beaten by her bigoted father as a result. Despite the unequivocal evidence to the contrary, the all-white jury find him guilty, and later we hear that Robinson was ‘shot while trying to escape’.

Maybe I’ve been conditioned by too many gung-ho movie heroes who shoot first and ask questions later, but I kept wishing that Peck’s character would stand up for himself a little more. He seemed to accept everything that went on around him all too readily. He doesn’t react when the guilty verdict is returned, he doesn’t appear to question the dubious circumstances around Robinson’s death. He doesn’t even rise to the bait when, after he has delivered the tragic news to his client’s family, the man who beat his own daughter into framing the innocent Robinson just to save their reputation turns up and spits in his face.

In fact, Finch is pretty ineffectual throughout the whole film. He fails to secure justice in the courtroom, also when faced by an angry lynch mob it is his daughter who shames the men into leaving, and even when his children are attacked towards the end of the film, it is left to the local recluse, Boo Radley (Robert Duvall in his first screen role) to come to their aid.

Overall, I felt the film’s message was  depressingly negative. Maybe it needed to be seen at the time to fully appreciate it, or maybe I’m just an ignorant philistine.

Score – 6/10, quite watchable, but not much more than that.

Next up is Aliens, the sequel to the already seen Alien where Ripley returns to the alien’s nest with a new team. What was I saying about gung-ho heroes? – Michael Biehn’s Hicks is a perfect example.