Review of To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) by Stan D — 22 Jul 2010

I really liked Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird but this film just doesn't quite cut it for me. I don't bag out movies for lack of faith to the book but I have to say, when you leave something out then you gotta back it up.

This movie is about a black man named Tom Robinson (Brock Peters) who is charged with raping a white girl, Mayella Uwel, a crime which he is quite clearly innocent of but in the 1930s what sort of all white all male jury is gunna believe a black? Lawyer, Atticus Finch (Gregory Peck), is hired to take the case and he is all too happy to accept.

The acting in this movie is really good, Gregory Peck does his best performance ever, Brock Peters is good as Tom Robinson and the actors who play Scout and Jem are okay too (better than those kids from Lord of the Flies at least), Dill I found to be annoying acted though.

What I really loved about the book was that it was a courtroom drama that suited the times really well but also it was being observed by the protagonist, Scout, and her brother Jem and her summer friend Dill (whose character drew inspiration from Lee's childhood friend Truman Capote). Through its first person narration it told a brilliantly slow-paced coming-of-age story. In the movie the children are just flat, there's not really much of a hint into Dill's past or the loss of innocence for Scout and Jem and that lovely Miss Dubose subplot was cut totally short.

When taking all that out then really all it is is just a courtroom drama with a few good scenes but overall fairly dry, not boring just dry. It just seems too much like a civil rights rant which suited the left wingers of the 1960s. I wasn't as emotionally involved with this as I was with the book, I most of you were but I wasn't.

I'm giving this 3 out of 5 stars, it was okay, just not great.