Chance's Corner: To Kill a Mockingbird Movie Review

Ever since Hollywood was a thing, books have been adapted into feature films. It's an exciting prospect to see your favorite characters jump off the page and onto the screen, but ultimately film adaptations have been a mixture of the good, the bad and the downright ugly. The old saying is: "The movie is never as good as the book." I'm just going to throw that saying out the window as I reflect on the film adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird. Based upon Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize winning book, To Kill a Mockingbird is a movie marvel that stays true (and rings true) to its source material.

Things start off simple in Maycomb, Alabama, for youngsters Scout and Jem Finch. They laze around in the summer days, rolling around in tires for fun, and concocting wild stories about the Radley boy down the street to frighten their new friend Dill (a caricature of Lee's childhood friend Truman Capote). Things soon heat up, though, when their father, Atticus, a local, well-respected lawyer takes on the case of Tom Robinson, a black man accused of raping a young white woman. Time and fate are stacked against Tom (segregation is firmly in place during The Great Depression) despite Atticus' best efforts to defend him.

Despite the heavy subject matter, the film follows the book's blueprint of humor, warmth and heart. The real showcase is the interplay between child actors, Mary Badham (Scout) and Phillip Alford (Jem), with their onscreen father, Gregory Peck (Atticus). The moments they share are so heartfelt that Harper Lee broke down into tears on set. If that isn't the cherry on top, Peck won an Academy Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role, and Badham became the youngest actress to be nominated for Best Actress in a Supporting Role.

Despite Lee's novel being originally published in 1960, and released theatrically in 1962, the themes of racial prejudice and injustice are still being actively discussed to this very day. To Kill a Mockingbird isn't the product of some long-forgotten, bygone era. It's as relevant as ever, and I believe that it's messages of compassion, courage and tolerance are something we can all still learn from.