'It's a sin to kill a mockingbird, since all they do is sing for us.'

Rating: 10/10 (2 May 2013)

This is one of the classic films of its time, and its subject is as valid now as it was then. It is based upon the famous novel by Harper Lee describing her childhood in Monroeville, Alabamba, in 1932, when people were still reeling from the Great Depression and racial tensions were at their height. This film came out at the time of the civil rights marches and it thus became a beacon of the liberal movement. Gregory Peck, solid as a rock, perfectly plays the heroic local lawyer named Atticus Finch. People often wonder about the name. It has nothing to do with Attica in Greece (the region of Athens). In the old Confederacy, there was a tremendous admiration for classical learning, and people were often given Greek or Latin names of famous classical figures, in the same way that they were often named after George Washington. It was a tradition of the Old South. Atticus was the best friend of Cicero, the ancient Roman author and orator, and a very large number of personal letters between Atticus and Cicero survive, so that Atticus is very famous to classical scholars. And that is the origin of the name. The character is modelled on Amasa Lee, Harper Lee's father, who defended a black client in 1923, as IMDb Trivia informs us. This is certainly one of the most famous films made by the magical partnership of Robert Mulligan, director, and Alan Pakula, producer. I never met Mulligan. But I met Pakula a few times. I once asked him directly why he had taken so long to get around to directing but had spent so many years producing instead. He admitted that he was shy and hesitant about it, that although he had always wanted to direct from the very beginning, he was a slow starter. It was easier to let Mulligan go on directing, while Pakula could stand back and produce and learn more about the craft of directing by watching Mulligan do it. This shows what a quiet, modest and unegotistical man Pakula really was. One of the famous and spectacular performances in this film is of course that of the child actress Mary Badham as 'Scout'. She was nominated for an Oscar. So was Peck, and he won his. Mary Badham's swan song on screen was probably her finest performance ever, four years after this, in the stunningly brilliant film THIS PROPERTY IS CONDEMNED (1966, see my review), a film everybody should see, written by Tennessee Williams. One of the interesting aspects of MOCKINGBIRD today is to see all the children of the town wandering round 'free-range' without any adult supervision or concern. That is what life used to be like. We should all take note of this, because we now live in such a degraded and decadent era when everyone is in a permanent state of cowardly terror about everything. Nowadays, children are being raised indoors like hothouse plants. No wonder they are all allergic to everything, as they are never allowed outside their hermetically-sealed bubbles to gain any immunities. They are being programmed to be fearful of all strangers. Imagine what kind of societies will exist when they all grow up and are so terrified of one another that they cannot cooperate or even talk to one another. The future public is being 'atomised' into cloned 'loners'. They are the ones who go and shoot their friends at school, by the way, because they have been turned into pathological narcissists to whom other people do not exist in any real sense, any more than, say, those pop-up people they 'kill' all day long in their computer games. Yes, we are creating a psychopathic world, and it is time somebody said it. This film makes a timely antidote to the imaginary fears at which we all tremble today, and focuses us instead on genuine social problems to do with prejudice. I daresay, racism has not really diminished at all, it has merely gone underground, because people no longer feel comfortable displaying their prejudices, but conceal them. Racism is part of animal behaviour. After all, rival tribes of chimps don't like each other, and small differences of appearance in humans arouse hysteria. It is not for no reason that people who don't fit in are called 'black sheep'. However, growing up as a species and overcoming prejudice is not being facilitated by the Age of Terror in which we now live, it is making things worse. The story told in this film is too well known to need any repeating by me, that is for sure. But how many people like Atticus exist now? I suspect the time is coming when there will be none at all.