AWARDS:
WINNER: 1963 Academy Awards USA: Best Actor - Gregory Peck; Best Adapted Screenplay; Best Art-Direction
WINNER: 1963 Golden Globes USA: Best Actor - Gregory Peck; Best Score; Best Film Promoting International Understanding
SYNOPSIS:
A beautiful and deeply affecting adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Harper Lee, this classic film retains a timeless quality that transcends its historically dated subject matter of racism in the Depression-era South, and remains powerfully resonant in present-day America with its advocacy of tolerance, justice, integrity, and loving, responsible parenthood. As Atticus Finch, the small-town Alabama lawyer and widower father of two, Gregory Peck gives one of the finest performances of his career with his impassioned defense of a black man (Brock Peters) wrongfully accused of the rape and assault of a young white woman. While his children, Scout (Mary Badham) and Jem (Philip Alford), learn the realities of racial prejudice and irrational hatred, they also learn to overcome their fear of the unknown as personified by their mysterious, mostly unseen neighbor Boo Radley (Robert Duvall, in his brilliant, almost completely nonverbal screen debut).
What emerges from this evocative, exquisitely filmed drama is a pure distillation of the themes of Harper Lee's enduring novel, a showcase for some of the finest American acting ever assembled in one film, and a rare quality of humanitarian artistry in Horton Foote's splendid screenplay and Elmer Bernstein's outstanding score. Ranked 34 on the American Film Institute's list of the 100 Greatest American Films, To Kill a Mockingbird is quite simply one of the finest family-oriented dramas ever made.
REVIEW:
Set in a small Alabama town in the 1930s, the story of TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD focuses on scrupulously honest, highly respected lawyer Atticus Finch, magnificently embodied by Gregory Peck. Finch puts his career on the line when he agrees to represent Tom Robinson (Brock Peters), a black man accused of rape. The trial and the events surrounding it are seen through the eyes of Finch's six-year-old daughter Scout (Mary Badham).
While Robinson's trial gives the film its momentum, there are plenty of anecdotal occurrences before and after the court date: Scout's ever-strengthening bond with older brother Jem (Philip Alford), her friendship with precocious young Dill Harris (a character based on Lee's childhood chum Truman Capote and played by John Megna), her father's no-nonsense reactions to such life-and-death crises as a rampaging mad dog, and especially Scout's reactions to, and relationship with, Boo Radley (Robert Duvall in his movie debut), the reclusive "village idiot" who turns out to be her salvation when she is attacked by a venomous bigot.
Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning autobiographical novel was translated to film in 1962 by Horton Foote and the producer/director team of Robert Mulligan and Alan J. Pakula. TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD won Academy Awards for Best Actor (Peck), Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Art Direction. nytimes
