To Kill A Mockingbird: Move Review

TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD  By BOSLEY CROWTHER

This is the one adult omission that is regretful in this fine film that Alan J. Pakula and Universal delivered to the Music Hall yesterday.

At the outset, it plops us down serenely in the comfort of a grubby Southern town at the time of the Great Depression, before “desegregation” was even a word. Here we are brought into contact with Scout Finch, a six-year-old girl who is a thoroughly beguiling tomboy; her ten-year-old brother, Jem, and their widowed father, Atticus, who is clearly the kindest man in town.

And for a fair spell it looks as though maybe we are going to be squeezed inside the skin of Scout and Jem as they go racing and tumbling around the neighborhood, shrieking with childish defiance at crusty old Mrs. Dubose, skirting with awe around the dark house where the mysterious Boo Radley lives.

So long as the film is on this level, the director, Robert Mulligan, achieves a bewitching indication of the excitement and thrill of being a child.

It is when the drama develops along the conventional line of a social crisis in the community—the charging of a Negro with the rape of a white woman—that the children are switched to the roles of lookers-on. They become but observers in the gallery as their father, played superbly by Gregory Peck, goes through a lengthy melodrama of defending the Negro in court and giving a strong but adult lesson of justice and humanity at work.

And their roles are still those of bystanders in a subsequent episode when they are attacked by a vengeful Negro-baiter and brought to realize that the strange Boo Radley is not a monster but a friend.

It is, in short, on the level of adult awareness of right and wrong, of good and evil, that most of the action in the picture occurs. And this detracts from the camera’s observation of the point of view of the child.

While this still permits vivid melodrama and some touching observations of the children, especially in their relations with their father, which is the crucial relationship in the film, it leaves the viewer wondering precisely how the children feel. How have they really reacted to the things that affect our grown-up minds?

Horton Foote’s script and the direction of Mr. Mulligan may not penetrate that deeply, but they do allow Mr. Peck and little Miss Badham and Master Alford to portray delightful characters. Their charming enactments of a father and his children in that close relationship that can occur at only one brief period are worth all the footage of the film.

Rosemary Murphy as a neighbor, Brock Peters as the Negro on trial, and Frank Overton as a troubled sheriff are good as locality characters, too. James Anderson and Collin Wilcox as Southern bigots are almost caricatures. But those are minor shortcomings in a rewarding film.

TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD (MOVIE)

Directed by Robert Mulligan; written by Horton Foote, based on the novel by Harper Lee; cinematographer, Russell Harlan; edited by Aaron Stell; music by Elmer Bernstein; art designers, Alexander Golitzen and Henry Bumstead; produced by Alan J. Pakula; released by Universal Pictures. Black and white. Running time: 129 minutes.