Robert Mulligan | To Kill a Mockingbird / 1962

when jem waked up

by Douglas Messerli

 

Horton Foote (screenplay), based on the novel by Harper Lee, Robert Mulligan (director) To Kill a Mockingbird / 1962

 

Almost every US school child and millions of adults know Harper Lee's classic novel of 1960 and the film, scripted by Horton Foote, based on the novel. As Joseph Crespino wrote in an essay in 2000: "In the twentieth century, To Kill a Mockingbird is probably the most widely read book dealing with race in America, and its protagonist, Atticus Finch, the most enduring fictional image of racial heroism."

 

    Lee's novel and the film, moreover, are etched in American consciousness; the racial violence of 1936 in the small-town Alabama it recounts dovetailed perfectly with the changes occurring in American minds and the radical challenges of Southern prejudice which became a major issue of the 1960s. And in this sense the book, perhaps, effected more middle-class Americans than any other of its time. Even at a personal level, I remember being impressed when my mother, who read primarily female romances, hosted a book club during this period; my father, brother, sister, and I were consigned to the basement, but I recall creeping up to the doorway, listening in as one book club member dramatically read the scene in which lawyer Atticus Finch is spat upon by the evil Bob Ewell on a downtown Maycomb, Alabama street. When the movie premiered, I was in attendance.

      I first read the book a few years later, in 1964, while living in Norway. I recall devouring it in a single afternoon, wiping away the tears as I completed its last pages. There was no question in my mind that it was extremely sentimental—for most of that year I had been reading the very dark and dour works of Thomas Hardy and Henrik Ibsen—but I recognized it for its high moral tone and its gentle nostalgia nonetheless.

      With the news of the screenplay writer Horton Foote's death on March 4th of this year, 2009, I decided to revisit both the novel and picture. For the most part, Foote's adaptation of Lee's book is successful, far moodier and grittier than the more comedic original. Harper Lee was said to have been immensely pleased with Foote's version. But that is not to say there are no crucial differences between the film and novel.

     Mulligan's black and white images, helped by Elmer Bernstein's broodingly lyrical score, and Stephen Frankfurt’s brilliant opening credits creates a darker tone than the novel evokes.

     Foote's decisions to focus the action on the Finch house, the courtroom, and the back country lanes where the Ewells and Robinsons live, along with his deletion of characters such as Aunt Alexandra and the larger role in the novel played by their childhood friend Dill (based on Lee’s own childhood friendship with Truman Capote), isolates, however, the Finch and Radley families from what is clearly a highly bigoted community.

     Moreover, by deleting much of the relationship between Dill and the obvious tomboy Scout the film strongly dilutes the truly important homosexual / lesbian relationship made clear in Lee’s original fiction and in its mirror image in Carson McCuller’s 1946 fiction, The Member of the Wedding, encapsulated in the theatrical version in 1950, becoming an influential film in 1952.

     It is almost as if, in Foote's version, Atticus and the children are not given leave to walk the streets of Maycomb. The children's two outings are a nighttime scramble to protect their father from a lynching mob and a hidden attendance in the black only upstairs gallery of the courthouse proceedings. Even Ewell's open act of hatred, his spitting upon Atticus's face on a downtown street now occurs in front of the Robinson's shack. Given Atticus's moral separation and their neighbor Boo Radley's secretive ways, there is almost a claustrophobic quality to Jem and Scout's life in Foote's rewriting of the work, not at all represented in the original fiction which, despite the town prejudices, did not limit Atticus or the children’s movements.

      That sense of isolation, moreover, changes everything by pitting the people on the Finch's street against the entire community (epitomized by Scout's several school-yard scuffles, which also are not explained as the young lesbian, later feminist we see in her perhaps superior fiction, published late in her life, Go Set a Watchman of 2015), a fact emblematized in the appearance of a rabid dog, clearly wandering into their cul de sac from some other part of town.

 

     To the children's surprise, their father—who notably refuses to play baseball with the other city fathers and seems to not share any of the “athletic” abilities—shoots the animal dead, amazingly protecting his loved ones. If he warns them not to kill those animals who imitate human speech and communication, he's perfectly ready to shoot dead the rabid beast who enters his territory, endangering his family's life, all which comes dangerously close to a kind of embedded racist theory, metaphorically accepting the imitator while denying entry into the obviously unfriendly, angry and sick intruder. 

      Similarly, when Ewell attacks the Finch children (Ewell's attacks in the novel also include Tom Robinson's wife), their neighbor Boo, like the father, comes to their rescue. It is notable that the sheriff of this hateful town, argues against his lawful duty, proclaiming that the truth—the fact that Boo Radley has killed Bob Ewell—would harm the mentally “retarded” man:

 

              I never heard tell it was against the law for any citizen to do his utmost to

              prevent a crime from being committed, which is exactly what he did. But

              maybe you'll tell me it's my duty to tell the town all about it and not to

              hush it up. Well you know what'll happen then? All the ladies in Maycomb

              including my wife will be knocking on his door bringing angel food cakes.

              To my way of thinking, taking the one man who's done you and this town

              a big service and dragging him with his shy ways into the limelight—it's a

              sin. And I'm not about to have it on my head. ...Bob Ewell fell on his knife.

 

      Like the figures of the musical Oklahoma! described in My Year 2003, the authorities of this southern town decide to bend truth, something very near to what Scout has earlier on defined —mistakenly, so Atticus insists—as a "compromise."

     Frankly, given the outcome of Tom Robinson's trial, we may find it hard to imagine that the "good" ladies of Maycomb would award the murderer of Bob Ewell with anything but dismissal, given the fact that Ewell has evidently convinced their kind that his daughter has been raped by a black man. Is it any wonder then that Tom Robinson, despite Atticus's advice to "not lose faith," runs "like a rabbit" to escape the police? The fact that he is shot and killed, despite the deputy's proclamation that he meant just to wound him, I would argue, is inevitable.

      Given the events of both film and novel, particularly the more enfolded fiction of Foote's script, it is clear that—despite any moral lessons and perceptions gleaned by the Finch children and the audiences of this film—the world to which Jem will awaken in the morning (the familiar last lines of both novel and film being the adult lesbian Scout's words about her father: "He turned out the light and went into Jem's room. He would be there all night, and he would be there when Jem waked up in the morning") will see the sun rise on a better day than the one in which he was nearly killed that night.

      Lee’s original fictional offering, rejected by her agent, played no such games, revealing even Atticus as a supporter of the Ku Klux Klan. My mother, who so thoroughly embraced this work, had never even met a black person in her life.

     While it may be true that there were no real alternatives in 1936, and that both novel and the film merely reiterate the truth of that reality, it is the imitation of the facts, the bland realism boiled up with heavy doses of nostalgia and romance, that ultimately disturbs me. Perhaps a more passionate response might be a fantasy where one could celebrate change.

      Revising this essay yet again in 2024, I am almost in tears as I realize what a truly astounding film this might have been, and how wonderous the original fiction might have portended if Lee, Foote, and Mulligan had been permitted or allowed themselves to fully explore the interconnections between the racial bigotry of this small town in the US South and the fears faced by a young “tomboy” and an effeminate young queer in the same community. Perhaps only the famed formalist approach by the noted filmmaker Martin Arnold (see my essay from the film's 1993 release) was able to deconstruct the film’s true social and political dimensions, silenced by the conventions of the period.

      

Los Angeles, March 13, 2009, revised June 7, 2024

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2009) in different form.