To Kill a Mockingbird
Academy Award × 3·AFI #25·National Film Registry
Rent/Purchase
Scout Finch, 6, and her older brother Jem live in sleepy Maycomb, Alabama, spending much of their time with their friend Dill and spying on their reclusive and mysterious neighbor, Boo Radley. When Atticus, their widowed father and a respected lawyer, defends a black man named Tom Robinson against fabricated rape charges, the trial and tangent events expose the children to evils of racism and stereotyping.
What critics thought
Broadly celebrated on release and still widely admired, the film earns its reputation chiefly through Gregory Peck's performance and the warmth of the father-children relationship — though a persistent counter-argument holds that its liberal comfort with the material lets both the period and its Black characters off far too lightly. The white-savior framing that felt earnest in 1962 reads, to later eyes, as evasion.
“Horton Foote's script and the direction of Mr. Mulligan may not penetrate that deeply, but they do allow Mr. Peck and little Miss Badham and Master Alford to portray delightful characters.”
Bosley Crowther·The New York Times
“It expresses the liberal pieties of a more innocent time, the early 1960s, and it goes very easy on the realities of small-town Alabama in the 1930s.”
Roger Ebert·Chicago Sun-Times
“Peck was better than usual, but in that same virtuously dull way. (There was the suspicion that Peck was being rewarded because the Lincolnesque lawyer shot a rabid dog and defended an innocent black man accused of raping a white woman.)”
Pauline Kael·5001 Nights at the Movies
Genres
Crime, Drama
Cast & Crew
DirectorRobert Mulligan
StarringGregory Peck, Mary Badham, Phillip Alford, John Megna, Frank Overton
ComposerElmer Bernstein
To Kill a Mockingbird
Academy Award × 3·AFI #25·National Film Registry
Scout Finch, 6, and her older brother Jem live in sleepy Maycomb, Alabama, spending much of their time with their friend Dill and spying on their reclusive and mysterious neighbor, Boo Radley. When Atticus, their widowed father and a respected lawyer, defends a black man named Tom Robinson against fabricated rape charges, the trial and tangent events expose the children to evils of racism and stereotyping.
What critics thought
Broadly celebrated on release and still widely admired, the film earns its reputation chiefly through Gregory Peck's performance and the warmth of the father-children relationship — though a persistent counter-argument holds that its liberal comfort with the material lets both the period and its Black characters off far too lightly. The white-savior framing that felt earnest in 1962 reads, to later eyes, as evasion.
“Horton Foote's script and the direction of Mr. Mulligan may not penetrate that deeply, but they do allow Mr. Peck and little Miss Badham and Master Alford to portray delightful characters.”
Bosley Crowther·The New York Times
“It expresses the liberal pieties of a more innocent time, the early 1960s, and it goes very easy on the realities of small-town Alabama in the 1930s.”
Roger Ebert·Chicago Sun-Times
“Peck was better than usual, but in that same virtuously dull way. (There was the suspicion that Peck was being rewarded because the Lincolnesque lawyer shot a rabid dog and defended an innocent black man accused of raping a white woman.)”
Pauline Kael·5001 Nights at the Movies
Genres
Crime, Drama
Cast & Crew
DirectorRobert Mulligan
StarringGregory Peck, Mary Badham, Phillip Alford, John Megna, Frank Overton
ComposerElmer Bernstein
Rent/Purchase