They took something out of the tree to make this film, but they out something back into it too.

Rating: 10/10 (2 March 2006)

A film classic adapted from a literary classic. Harper Lee's To Kill A mockingbird is one of my all-time favorite novels and Horton Foote successfully turned that novel into an Academy Award winning Best Screenplay for 1962. This film was nominated of 8 Oscars and won two. Besides Best Screenplay it earned Gregory Peck the Best Actor Oscar in the role of Atticus Finch. Child actress Mary Baham as Scout was nominated for best Supporting Actress but ironically lost out to another child actress Patty Duke for her role in The Miracle Worker. This is Peck's movie but it's also Badham's. Both are superb. This film was made in the contemporary time of the Pulitzer awarded novel and took on a giant task of bringing to the screen a beloved novel. It wasn't rushed to the screen however. This was done right. Robert Mulligan beautifully captured the look and feel of the book in this screen adaptation skillfully crafted by Foote. Perfect casting in Peck and Badham. A good supporting cast here with Robert Duvall, Alice Ghostley, William Windom, Frank Overton, Brock Peters and Estelle Evans. What can you say about this? Beloved, poignant, superb, timeless, endearing, artful, uplifting, heartwarming, tender, tragic? Say them all and give it a 10 out of a possible 10.