Every bit as good as they say (B&W). Still POWERFUL. 10/10. Spoilers.

Rating: 10/10 (20 October 2002)

Horton Foote's Oscar-winning screenplay is so good, it really supplants the 1960 Harper Lee book. I've recently re-read the novel, and it seemed weighed down and paced with backwoods vernacular and situations right out of the 1930s, that are shockingly removed from the 21st century. My goodness. I hope it doesn't strike others so, because the book is a gem too. It's just in need of ...updating perhaps, which is what the 1962 movie excels at; it translates the Depression Era for us. The characters (played, eg by Gregory Peck and Brock Peters in their signature roles) seem so much better-depicted on screen than merely in my own imagination from having read the book!

Only Arthur/'Boo' Radley (a peroxided Robert Duvall) seems at first a jarring casting choice to me; but in the end all seem terrific.
Now THESE child actors, Mary Badham ('Scout'), Philip Alford ('Jem'), and John Megna (as 'Dill'), should've won Oscars. I'm sure they're all better than Haley Joel Osment, who strikes me as 'studied'. These kids are just natural, completely oblivious of the camera. Unbelievable. Actually, I wonder what genius DID do the casting, because the film gives no casting credit. I guess in 1962 the CSA didn't exist yet... That casting director deserves an Oscar too.
This is what great filmmaking is all about; when several areas of perfection are jointly present a film that reaches into your heart and yanks you up and down. Those were real acting jobs, not the cretinous drivel passing for 'work' these days. The reason we don't see too many better movies than Das Experiment is because post-modernism has long encamped in Hollywood (it set up a Starbuck's years ago).
The first scene instantly captures Scout's world. She's learning fast at the shoulder of her loving widower lawyer father that she shouldn't embarrass people who are even poorer than they are; and Jem is tantrumming up a tree because he can't brag about his dad's non-existent cool to his friends. Jem demands Atticus play football(!) for the Mets, or more uproariously as Scout tells it, for `the Methodists', hahahaha. (Can we picture Methodists in a sackrace? How many Methodists does it take to change a lightbulb?)
The Boo Radley story arc is much better paced in the movie than the book; but because I want to focus on the race-relations arc, I will only make passing comment on Boo: he is gently painted in both the book and movie as another previously dismissed but highly virtuous person, who deserves to be analogized with the fragile, hopeful beauty of the mockingbird.

The harrowing exploration of entrenched injustice through various acts of racist violence are adult themes that really couldn't be explored well in a book constrained by the first person narrative of a 7-yr-old little girl. The movie is able to show the Tom Robinson court case much more objectively. Robert Mulligan's direction quickly telegraphs Bob Ewell's shifty creepiness with the scene of his slovenly leering at Atticus' children in the car. Collin Wilcox is also heartrending as Mayella, the ignorant, uneducated and abused daughter of Bob Ewell. Inexplicably, Gregory Peck's cross-examination scene is not quite as sensitive as Atticus is in the book; Peck never reveals that flash of pain at having to destroy Mayella's false testimony.

Little Scout's key scene, where she embarrasses the lynch mob (collectively no better than Tom Ewell alone) just with her amiable child's chatter, is EVERY BIT as powerful and stressful as in the book. Probably more, because body language is a much better form of expression for a scene like this.
Brock Peters' Tom Robinson is the archetypal decent black man who, YES, felt sorry for a brutalized white woman, as we all ought to. Don't bother debating `what if he was guilty', because TKAM is not a whodunnit; it's an expose of what used to happen WHEN a black man was innocent. The heartbreaking destruction of Tom Robinson's proverbial mockingbird is our collective shame, even now, because similar dismissive laziness still happens. It's every person's character that matters, not whether they're `Methodists'.
We do construct our identities as part of various groups. But no group membership, or belief about it, makes any person categorically virtuous. That still hinges on a person's strengths, and crucially, their weaknesses. A person's bad character will overwhelm whatever beliefs they hold; their good character will enhance them. We are all free to act better, or worse, than our beliefs; we're NOT powerless over them, so no-one should ever die over a belief. Cooler thinking than mere violence must rule, or else objective justice will never materialize. And it's only justice if the judgement is accurate; but accuracy requires the abolition of the sort of intellectual/societal laziness that regularly befalls the weakest subgroups of society. Well, we all saw the intellectual rigour of that lynch mob. Would you trust them to tell the time? You might not feel happy trusting even the sheriff (Frank Overton), testifying in court but no better than a hick himself: `Oh, I guess that would make it her LEFT'. Those powerful imbeciles stood in judgement over some societally fragile people, like Tom, and yes, like Mayella.
It's still powerful how Tom's hammering as sarcastic legal argument by the prosecutor (William Windom) served to bring home Tom's societal fragility; and we're humbled at the quiet dignity of the entire black population who soberingly stood in the rafters to honor Atticus' failed attempt. The movie was made in 1961, some 7 years before the martyrdom of Martin Luther King Jr, yet in the light of recent gang-related violence, it's clear there are still many who think their group belonging excuses/masks their brutality as people. It does not. And the brutality came first.
This movie needs to be seen by the young, to open their hearts to humanity, and their standards for their own personal character, for the rest of their lives. 10/10.