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To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

Director: Robert Mulligan

Average user rating
9 reviews

Movie review

From Time Out Film Guide

Tackling Harper Lee's novel, Stanley Kramer would have hit us over the head with a hammer, so perhaps we can be grateful that Mulligan merely suffocates with righteousness. The film sits somewhere between the bogus virtue of Kramer's The Defiant Ones and the poetry of Laughton's Night of the Hunter, combining racial intolerance with the nightmares of childhood, born out of Kennedy's stand on civil rights and Martin Luther King's marching. In Alabama in the early '30s, Peck is a Lincoln-like lawyer who defends a black (Peters) against a charge of rape, while loony-tune Duvall scares the shit out of Peck's kids. It looks like a storybook of the Old South, with dappled sunlight and woodwormy porches, and Peck is everyone's favourite uncle. But screenwriter Horton Foote does less well by Harper Lee's novel than Lillian Hellman did by Foote's The Chase for Arthur Penn. That movie really was a pressure-cooker; this one is always just off the boil.

Author: ATu

Time Out Film Guide


User reviews of this film

  • Dakota said...
    Posted on Feb 24 2011 18:16 I completely agree with you. The movie will never compare to the excellent novel. Not to mention how many important parts it skips in the movie
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  • James said...
    Posted on May 07 2009 00:41 This movie is really bad in comparison to the novel. The plot was way too condensed. Entire events were skipped and scenes which were supposed to be separate, took place at the same time. There was such a lack of detail in the plot that if I hadn't read the book, the movie would have been unreasonably simple and very boring to watch. The orchestra music was very cheezy, because it was trying to make the audience have emotion when the scenes were not properly portrayed. For a 1960's movie it's ok, but a book like To Kill a Mockingbird deserves a remake.
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  • Bootlebarth said...
    Posted on Dec 21 2008 16:08 Hmmm. Dissenting views should be considered even if they're misguided. A classic book doesn't guarantee a classic film. The first hour, dominated by three hyperactive and barely intelligible children is very, very tedious and would have been unwatchable without the interludes involving Gregory Peck.
    The courtroom scene is riveting and Robert Duvall's wordless life-saving loony at the end is a treat. Harper Lee generally liked the film adaptation, so who are we to disagree? No great subtlety was needed in the book to expose the institutionalised injustice prevalent in the 'Land of the Free'. The black and white film shows black and white characters acting blackly and whitely, so to speak.
    The book is rightly celebrated, being written at a time when injustice and racialism were still on open display. But the film is far from perfect. The child's eye view might work well enough in the book (with a few reservations about precocity) but it translates uneasily to celluloid. A version losing about 30 minutes of infantile antics would be a massive improvement.
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  • i hate you said...
    Posted on Dec 11 2008 00:43 wow you are so stupid. i didnt get a word you said. To even think that this is a bad movie, is unfathamable. jesus... wow.
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  • Red said...
    Posted on Sep 03 2008 05:26 There's always somebody that likes to be different... even if different means completely unabashed, unfathomable ignorance. Your 'review' is unintelligible refuse. Get it together man.
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  • Matthew said...
    Posted on Sep 01 2008 20:51 A truly fatuous review. Don't be misled by the fool who wrote it. (Heed instead the other users' comments.) Anyone inclined to watch the film should do so; you'll enjoy one of the two or three greatest works ever produced in American cinema.
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  • GERALD said...
    Posted on Jun 09 2008 03:48 I didn't get a single point you said in this review... All you did was compare it with different movies and rate it 3 stars..
    If I was to rate your review, it really would be 1 star... Consider writing reviews that aren't a waste of life.
    You obviously didn't get the broad message of the story, next time, mouth shut please...
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  • Scott said...
    Posted on Jun 08 2008 16:52 One of the best film adaptations of a novel, period. I love how the reviewer smugly throws around his knowledge of film by insulting Stanley Kramer, who made some pretty good movies himself. Those who can do, and those who can't write snide and disparaging reviews. I suppose some people simply have hearts of stone.
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  • Darren said...
    Posted on Oct 29 2007 06:16 Well... I guess the world needs people who are wrong, too.
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