To Kill A Mockingbird: The Movie

As the Civil Rights Movement came to fruition in the early 1960s, the book struck a chord. So did the equally classic 1962 movie version, starring Gregory Peck. It was nominated for four Academy Awards, and Peck won as Best Actor. It is still among the most popular and acclaimed movies of all time. Recently the American Film Institute named Atticus Finch as the greatest film hero in the history of movies.

The movie has quite a pedigree behind the camera. Alan Pakula produced it (today perhaps even more renowned as a director), Robert Mulligan directed, Elmer Bernstein wrote the musical score, and the screenplay was written by Horton Foote, the Texan playwright, who had written extensively for television drama and later wrote many acclaimed movie scripts, including Tender Mercies for Robert Duvall.

Harper Lee was a consultant on the movie and present for the filming (mostly on a backlot in California.) She and other participants formed lifelong friendships on that set. She and Gregory Peck in particular remained close. As she watched the first scene being shot she was seen to shed a few tears: he reminded her so much of her father.

Young Mary Badham, who played the six year old “Scout,” also kept in touch with Peck for the rest of his life. She felt close to him immediately on the set, and between takes would be seen hanging onto him in his lap. She called him “Atticus” ever after.

A wide search for children to play Scout and her brother Jem was conducted in various southern cities, but the actors selected, Badham and Philip Alford as Jem, lived within a couple of blocks of each other in Birmingham, though they’d never met.

Mary Badham was herself a “tomboy,” as was her character, and the girl that Scout was based on—Harper Lee. She acted for several more years, and was in one more notable movie (This Property is Condemned, based on a Tennessee Williams play, written by Francis Ford Copolla and starring Robert Redford and Natalie Wood.) She gave up acting by the late 60s but has returned to it in recent years. While Harper Lee is reclusive, living at least part of the time back in Monroeville, it is Mary Badham who represents this movie when it is honored and shown at festivals.

The movie streamlines the story of the novel by collapsing the events into a single year. It very carefully tells the story from the children’s point of view, even in shot selection. Though the subplot of Mrs. Dubose (played by the accomplished actor, Ruth White) was shot, director Mulligan felt it sidetracked the momentum of the film and most of the scenes were cut. It’s said her performance was brilliant.

There are so many indelible images, performances and moments in this movie. Mary Badham was remarkable, especially in a scene of Peck as Attticus putting Scout to bed and talking of her mother (added to the film and not a scene in the book), and then of course in one of the most moving scenes in any film—when she sees Robert Duvall behind the door, and recognizes him, and with a luminous smile says, “Hey, Boo.”

Mary Badham's face in this film is absolutely unique.

And of course, Gregory Peck. In the late 50s and early to mid 60s, he was probably the film actor I looked to most as an adult role model. (Even if I had to learn that his thoughtful, brooding silences played better in close-ups on film than in real life.) What lasts about role models is what they bring out in you that was in you already, and now you have some means to express it, and above all, permission to express it.

I recall him especially in a couple of 1959 releases, the classic On the Beach, and the justifiably forgotten Beloved Infidel, in which he played F. Scott Fitzgerald. (Sorry, but I really liked him in that. He also played several Hemingway stand-ins in other films.) Later in Captain Newman, M.D., and a romantic caper film, Arabesque, and when I caught up to earlier films, especially Captain Horatio Hornblower and Roman Holiday.

As a film actor, Peck was able to project a great deal by not doing very much, by nuance, gesture, tone and simply by presence. The makers of this film understood and complemented this particular power. They allowed him to react without speaking; in a key scene, in which he learns that his client is dead and he must tell others of this, we see him mostly from the back.

But in that amazing year of 1962—JFK in the White House, John Glenn in orbit, James Meredith enters Old Miss, Silent Spring, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Bob Dylan and folk music, and two crusading court room dramas on TV (The Defenders, and The Law and Mr. Jones) –Gregory Peck was clearly the soul of To Kill A Mockingbird.

There was a Kennedyesque quality about him—if he’d been younger, he probably would have played JFK as the World War II hero who rescued his crew in the movie made about the incident, PT-109. He could be wonderfully funny, but in dramatic roles he often brought a sense of rectitude, and the full weight of that accompanied him in this role. I’m sure that when as a teenager I joined the now famous but then somewhat daring (Civil Rights) March on Washington the next year, I carried a bit of Peck as Atticus Finch with me.