an amazing film

Rating: 10/10 (4 January 2006)

It's hard to express what an emotional experience seeing this movie was for me. How something done so simply can be so profound is beyond my limited abilities, but that's what "To Kill A Mockingbird" is, a simple, beautiful film with profound messages. It takes one back in time, to 1932 - and you don't for a minute doubt that you're there, in a small southern town. It shows us, through the eyes of imaginative and energetic children, what life was like. It also shows us a great man, Atticus Finch, and demonstrates through action the values with which this widower has raised his children: by the respect he shows his black housekeeper, in his taking of a controversial case involving the alleged rape of a white woman by a black man, and in the way he tells them what his father said, that it's wrong to kill a mockingbird, because they are only on earth to give joy and harm nothing and no one.
The acting, of course, from top to bottom, is superb. The children - Mary Badham, Philip Alford, and John Megna, are perfect. Brock Peters gives a marvelous, sympathetic performance as the defendant. Gregory Peck delivers the performance of his lifetime in the role of anyone's lifetime.
I'm glad to see that TCM has this film in its educational package for schools, because it should be seen by everyone.
There are tough lessons in this world, Atticus points out. One of the toughest is one of the messages in this film, that it's not the Boo Radleys of the world we need to fear. Evil is, as Edmund Burke said, when good men do nothing. Atticus Finch wasn't one of them.