Review of To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) by Katherine J — 10 Dec 2015

To Kill a Mockingbird was #1 on the list of movies no one could believe I had never seen until now. I always knew I would, I just never got to seeing it.

One of the problems, as I mentioned in my comments about The Third Man, is that if you wait too long to see such an essential movie, you'll know all about it before you do, and that first-time experience can be lost. Don't worry about it. It didn't matter that I knew every beat in this movie before I saw it, I was still blubbering like a goddamn baby at the end.

I have scarce little new to say about it, but I'll make a few notes.

A movie centered on children can be difficult because the kids can either be terrible actors, or even worse, really good professional child actors. Years ago, after a friend had seen the 1994 reboot of The Little Rascals, I asked him if the kids looked like kids or like child actors. He said, "Child actors." That's all I needed to know. I've never seen it and doubt I ever will.

Happily the children in To Kill a Mockingbird are note-perfect. As Scout, Mary Badham carried the furrowed brow of a young girl trying to figure out what all this meant, how her well-taught respect for elders could possibly comport with the abominations to which she bore witness. Scout is a little girl swept up in an event much larger than her scope of understanding.

The actress Mary Badham could probably strongly relate, being a young actress in the making of a movie that was itself a cultural touchstone. The role of Scout is possibly the 20th century version of Huck Finn, the quintessential American literary character of its culture.

Gregory Peck, of course, is also note-perfect. I have little to say about him that hasn't already been said in excess. It is the role of a lifetime for any actor.

There is one inherent problem to the movie, and that is a problem that has been around for a long time in our movies. That is the tendency of movies on the theme of racism against blacks to be more about how that racism affects whites. In no sense is To Kill a Mockingbird about a black man unjustly accused of rape, a man ultimately killed by police (thank God that doesn't happen anymore, right?). It is about the white lawyer who defends him, and whose only physical injury comes when a redneck spits on him. Just as the Steve Biko movie wasn't about Steve Biko, it was about the white man who wrote about him. Just as The Help wasn't about black housekeepers, it was about the white woman who wrote about them.

This is not anomalous. It happens all the freaking time.

It should not be ignored that for at least the first fifty years of movie history, the two largest box office successes in America were emphatically supportive of Southern racists - Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind. To Kill a Mockingbird is high on the crest of the wave of socially conscious movies that emerged in the '50s and '60s. It cannot be interpreted as anything but a searing indictment of racial bigotry. But if it was not focused on a white man, the movie might never have been made at all.