The Old Gray Bird Ain't What She Used To Be

Rating: 7/10 (19 July 2001)

One hates to be the skunk at the garden party but this movie simply isn't as good as its reputation might suggest. It is extremely dated and calculated in ways that are now obvious but probably worked back in 1962. The dialogue has a tendency to go on for too long in almost every scene, as points are hammered home continuously, didactically, but aside from the scenes that belong only to the children the film is dramatically leaden and top heavy in what were at the time 'dangerous' and 'radical' ideas about racism and injustice (though they were fashionable in Hollywood), and frequently the movie feels like a sermon, and a self-congratulatory one at that.
As the story of children growing up in the Deep South during the Depression the film works fairly well. It is beautiful visually and the photography by the underrated Russell Harlan is flawless. The performances of the actors who play the children are superb. Had the movie stuck to being their story it might have been a masterpiece. The part about the elusive, ghostly Boo Radley struck a chord, and I suspect that most of us can remember a spooky neighbor or two and the stories we used to make up about them. So far, so good. But when the black man accused of rape entered the picture a different movie emerged: preachy, obvious, self-consciously genteel about bigotry being the preserve of poor, ignorant rural folks, and above all obvious. This is when it becomes a star vehicle for Gregory Peck, who delivers an extraordinarily self-righteous summation to the jury complete with "for the love God!", and I stopped believing what I was watching and I began thinking about some of the shabbier Rod Serling Twilight Zones of long ago, with their 'messages' about 'little people' at the end. The film shifts into high gear in the last act, with the attack on the children, which I still find frightening, but the damage had been done, and even with Boo (blessedly) back in the story the poetic mood of the earlier parts of the movie was recaptured only fitfully, and I had a feeling of having been set-up.

Some of the problem with the film is obviously the Harper Lee novel it was adapted from. Miss Lee wrote a good book but as a writer was a far cry from Faulkner or even Eudora Welty, and having reread large portions of it a few years ago I must say that it dates as badly as the movie. She was trying to do too much with her wistful story, and got her politics and poetics mixed up, and the result is an unsatisfactory stab at greatness, though I must say it's a good try. But alas she missed the mark, and so does the film. There's a good deal of sponantaneous feeling in the stuff about the kids, but when it shifts to grown-ups neither Miss Lee, director Robert Mulligan or screenwriter Horton Foote seems to know how to make things work. Suddenly the story turns moral with a vengeance. It's not easy to treat the issue of a man falsely accused of rape any other way, for sure, but it ruins the magical tone so meticulously built up in the earlier scenes. Yes, the world of childhood has as much to do with imagination as reality, and especially with imagination applied to reality as a means of interpretation, which in adults seems the preserve of artists and no one else. The move from childhood to adulthood is often tragic, as life's unpleasantries become unavoidable. Art at its best provides a respite from this as well as another way of seeing life, of feeling things differently and of thinking deeper thoughts. In art we have the opportunity to recapture at least some of the affect of childhood, but to do so with wisdom and understanding.
In To Kill a Mockingbird we see a liberal take on childhood, as imagination is tranformed, in the course of the narrative, into a sense of civic responsibility. Children, mockingbirds and black folks are metamorphosed into a kind of helpless class. Only they, it seems, are truly in touch with nature, truth and the meaning of life. The adult whites are either good or bad, interesting only inasmuch as they have all the power and often use it badly. The trick, as the film implies, is to get these blinkered white grownups to appreciate the pure world of freedom and ease that the children, mockingbirds and blacks enjoy, and all will be well, or at least a whole lot better. But alas the reason the white grownups are so dull and moralistic, in good and bad ways, come from their sense of responsibility, which comes with power, and which children, mockingbirds and blacks don't have. When they do get power (viz. Lord Of the Flies) they prove as capable as adults of doing foul, nasty things. I think that Lee, Mulligan and Foote are aware of this contradiction, if only subconsciously, which is why the prevailing mood of the story is one of sadness.