Good Movie About a Decent Guy.

Rating: 7/10 (10 March 2008)

Gregory Peck is Atticus Finch, a Southern lawyer who defends a black man (Brock Peters) unjustly accused of rape. (It was almost the other way round.) Peck does his best but Peters is convicted anyway by the all-white jury; this is 1932. In Macon. That's in Georgia. While being transported elsewhere "for his safety," Peters tries to escape and is shot dead. The redneck father responsible for all this mishigas (James Anderson, who must be great pals with Bill McKinney because their parts are interchangeable) holds a grudge against Peck for defending Peters in the first place, and for proving Peters was innocent in the second place, and for thereby impugning the honor of the Anderson family in the third place. Anderson calls Peck "a n***** lover" and spits in his face, but of course Peck would find any response infra dig. Anyway, Anderson sneaks up on Peck's two kids on Halloween night and tries to knife them, but is prevented from doing so -- and is killed -- by Boo Radley (Robert Duvall in a powerful but wordless performance). Peck is told by the Sheriff (the ever-emotive Frank Overton) that, although Duvall may have killed Anderson, well -- Anderson was responsible after all for the death of the innocent Brock Peters. "I say let the dead bury the dead, Mr. Finch."
The story is told from the point of view of Peck's two kids, the eleven-year-old Jem (Philip Alford) and the six-year-old girl, Scout (Mary Badham). It's kind of sweet too, to see these goings on -- both comic and dramatic -- through the eyes of a naive girl like Scout. Kind of like Candide in Georgia. And if Alford gives a pedestrian performance as Jem, Mary Badham does a splendid job with the character of Scout. Credit, too, the direction by Robert Mulligan and the editing by Aaron Stell, who catches Badham's face at precisely the critical moments. (When her brother is in jeopardy and a sudden gun shot is heard off screen, her face jerks and her eyes open wide in an almost perfect take.) It's especially fine work because neither Alford nor Badham are particularly adorable kids. Jem is rather ordinary in a Tom-Sawyerish way. But Badham has a strange face, with keen, slitted eyes, freckles, and a nose that juts out at odd angles. Neither of them is pretty in the usual child-like way, although compared to their friend Dill (John Megna), purportedly based on Truman Capote, they could both be in beauty contests.
Mulligan's direction could hardly be better, given the nature of the story. After lights out in this sleepy Southern household, we hear Badham asking Alford about their mother, who died some years ago. The Mulligan's camera drifts from the delicate lace of the window curtains to Peck sitting alone on the porch swing, his face lowered, his arm draped across the back of the wooden swing, as if he can still feel his wife's presence within the circle of that arm. End of scene. Had more been made of it, it would have been banal.
The moral calculus of the film puzzles me a little. I'm not sure that "the dead" who have "buried the dead" are in quite the same position. An innocent man is shot and killed "while trying to escape." A guilty man is killed while trying to murder two children. I don't know. Does that come out right for you? And Harper Lee, and the screenwriter Horton Foote, are pretty easy on the quiet town of Macon. That lynch mob that shows up at the jail to string Brock Peters up, for instance. They are momentarily stopped by the unflappable and imperious Peck, but what really turns them aside is the appearance of Peck's kids. They don't know what's going on. And Badham cheerfully greets the members of the mob whom she knows. She asks them to say "hey" to their kids, who go to the same school as she does. This innocence is so disarming that the leader of the mob says, "Let's break it up and go home." Really? On the flip side of the coin, if the writers treat the town's peccadilloes a little gently, at least there are no Big Speeches -- no preaching. Peck never gives a speech (not even in his summation) about all men being created equal, and God made all of us, and we'd better get our stuff together if we ever expect to have a team like the Atlanta Braves.
It's a good, sensitive movie. It may or may not sound like it in precis. (Almost all movie kids are repugnant, I'll grant you that.) But it's quite well done, and Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch has become part of our cultural data base.