Average Rating: 
Rating:  - A magnificent adaptation of a timeless classic
Alan Pakula, Robert Mulligan and Horton Foote have made an absolutely terrific movie of one of the greatest books in contemporary fiction. The three years covered in the book are compressed into one year in the movie, and almost everything of importance is kept in the film version. Shooting the movie in black and white was inspired. It symbolizes the stark reality of black vs. white that is at the core of the novel. The acting is extraordinary across the board. Of Gregory Peck, so much has been said that further praise is redundant; suffice to say that after Peck's performance, no one else will ever be able to play Atticus Finch. The children are wonderful, so real that they hardly seem to be acting at all. Mary Badham is absolutely perfect as Scout. Phillip Alford is excellent as Jem, and John Megna is fine as Dill. The lesser actors live up to the lead roles. I especially liked Collin Wilcox as Mayella Ewell; James Anderson brings out all the ugliness and cowardice in Bob Ewell, and Alice Ghostley is a funny and wacky Stephanie Crawford. The three characters who didn't live up to their counterparts in the book were Miss Maudie, Calpurnia, and Tom Robinson. Ms. Maudie is a very intriguing character in the novel, a ditzy, wise, funny woman of bedrock integrity; in the movie, she comes across as just another next door neighbor. Calpurnia's part was far too small in the movie; in the book she plays a major role in the family, almost like a surrogate parent. Estelle Evans is a fine actress and deserved a bigger role to give her talent more scope. And Tom Robinson is almost too saintly to be believed in the film version, over-acted by Brock Peters. But Robert Duvall in a non-speaking movie debut is just right as Boo Radley, and Scout's recognition of her formerly scary neighbor, with her tentative smile followed by 'Hey Boo', is one of the most affecting moments in the picture. I still remember when Peck won the Oscar for best actor; in his acceptance speech, his first words were 'Thank you, Harper Lee.' The movie 'To Kill A Mockingbird' is a labor of love of bringing a timeless classic to the screen, and Harper Lee must have been very gratified at the results.
Rating: - An American classic classically rendered on DVD
The film, truly an American classic and, for my money, one of the 10 best American films ever made, is spendidly rendered here with a mint-condition print, one reportedly transferred from a preservation negative especially created for this DVD, which was released two years ago to commemorate the film's 35th anniversary.This DVD, one of the first issued with supporting materials, remains superior in its mix of additional features, most especially the remarkable documentary, "Fearful Symmetry," by Charles Kiselyak, and compellingly unassuming commentary by the director, Robert Mulligan, and the producer, the late Alan J. Pakula. Besides interviews with them, the documentary, filmed elegantly in black and white, includes interviews with the actors, both non-professionals who played the children, Mary Badham as Scout and Phillip Alford as Jem, as if to remind us that we, too, have grown older. Also a joy are interviews with the screen writer, Horton Foote; the composer, Elmer Bernstein; and Gregory Peck, who played Atticus, a role for which he won an Academic Award--one of eight for which the film was nominated in 1962. Both Peck and Bernstein, Kiselyak tells us, regarded "To Kill a Mockingbird" as their best work. Adding to the documentary's richness still further are interviews with several residents of Monroeville, Ala., the real Maycomb, to round out our sense of the town "then and now." Among the revelations in the commentary is that the production designer, Henry Bubstead, masterfully recreated the children's neighborhood on the Universal backlot at the relatively modest cost of $225,000, salvaging perhaps a dozen houses that would have been demolished by the construction of a freeway--an expense made necessary because Monroeville had become too modern to play itself in the film. This is the oppostie of its equally remote cousin, Marquette, Mich., which Otto Preminger used to great effect in filming "Anatomy of a Murder." Bumstead, who also designed Alfred Hitchcock's venerable "Vertigo," won an Academy Award for his achievement in "To Kill a Mockingbird." The main titles, by Stephen Frankfurt, with Elmer Bernstein's eloquent, elegiac theme, capture brilliantly not only the essence of the film but also an essence of childhood, about which both Harper Lee's timeless, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel and the film itself are very much concerned. The film, a rare, nearly perfect distillation of a book, almost certainly would have won an Academy Award as best picture had it not been up against "Lawrence of Arabia," one of the other great epics of the American film canon. Only later in "To Kill a Mockingbird," after the titles have led us to that pristine neighborhood, do we discover the nature of that blend of innocence and experience alluded to in the William Blake poem, "The Tyger," from which Kiselyak takes the title of his documentary. It is, after all, the great, sad sense of both loss and love that Scout and Jem encounter, first at the hands of Robert Ewell and then of Boo Radley. My only regret is that Harper Lee, though she helped Kiselyak in producing the documentary, declined to be interviewed for it, denying us the sound of her voice. In its stead, however, we have another evocation, that of Ms. Lee's rich tone of nostalgia and reminiscence, very much akin to that of Sam Clemens in the Tom and Huck books, with which Charles Kiselyak infuses his own small but mighty masterpiece.
Rating: - a masterpiece of american cinema
Gregory Peck was entirely deserving of the recognition that he got for playing Atticus Finch (including the Oscar for Best Actor), the strongest role in the movie was actually that of Scout (played by Mary Badham). Badham was nominated for an Academy Award, and I feel that it is on the strength of Scout that this movie was carried. While Peck may have been the moral backbone of the movie, it is Badham that is the heart of the movie and whom the film truly does revolve around. To Kill a Mockingbird is the film adaptation of Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize winning novel of the same title. The story deals with racism and morality in a very humanistic way. When a black man is accused of raping a white woman, Atticus Finch takes the case to defend Tom Robinson (the man accused). This is a story about race relations as well as community relations and in the end, about doing the right thing. The house next to the Finch home is the Radley house. There are stories and rumors and prejudices against the hidden Radley boy, Boo Radley (the screen debut of Robert Duvall). Somehow, the stories about the Radley home come together with the trial of Tom Robinson and the moment where Scout gently says, "hey Boo" is truly a beautiful moment. I could probably heap praise on this movie until my fingers can't type anymore, but I am simply going to end by saying this is a movie than anybody who wants to watch a great movie needs to see this. Both the book and the movie are truly American classics.
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