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Bookmark this pageTo Kill a Mockingbird (1962)
Director: Robert Mulligan
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
User reviews of this film
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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...
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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... - Report as inappropriate
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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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Cast & crew
Director: Robert Mulligan
Producer: Alan J Pakula
Cast: Gregory Peck, Mary Badham, Philip Alford, John Megna, Frank Overton, Rosemary Murphy, Brock Peters, Robert Duvall, Kim Stanley full cast
Duration: 129 mins
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