an anti-racist masterpiece

Rating: 10/10 (26 November 1999)

I've just watched this movie for a second time and was reminded of what a cinematic masterpiece it is. The pivotal moment in which the jury returns with its verdict is still a stunner. Released in 1962, but set during the Great Depression, this dramatized depiction of the noble attorney Atticus Finch, his family, and the community in which he practices his profession offers a (still) powerful and necessary indictment of racism as consisting of an entire social system. Just about everything about this film is superb, including the acting of Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch (for which Peck won an Oscar) and Mary Badham and Philip Alford as his children, Scout and Jem, along with the remainder of the cast. The direction by Robert Mulligan also heightens the drama.
What really worked for me here is that TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD generally offers us three dimensional characters (though Boo Radley was not very well fleshed out, and the ending, in which he figured rather prominently was perhaps the film's weakest moment). Like the good courtroom drama that it is, it gets underneath the characters so as to uncover something hidden about them; in fact, as Atticus says more than once to his children, it is necessary to get underneath another's skin so as to be able to understand them. But as a tragic depiction of what the sociologist Gunnar Myrdal called "the American Dilemma" (i.e., a very deep rooted racist social system), it shows us persons who are complex, who are in some senses victims of their own thwarted ambitions and years of poverty's hardship, and who are capable of both lynch mob irrationalities as well as acts of justice and reciprocity. Even the highly moral Atticus seems to recognize his own limited capacity to do much toward changing this world to which he is tied. Some of the more poignant moments also come about as his children, particularly Jem, come to see the world as it really is, i.e., populated with weak beings who commit acts of grave injustice.