To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)
Directed by Robert Mulligan
Scout Finch, 6, and her older brother Jem live in sleepy Maycomb, Alabama, spending much of their time with their friend Dill and spying on their reclusive and mysterious neighbor, Boo Radley. When Atticus, their widowed father and a respected lawyer, defends a black man named Tom Robinson against fabricated rape charges, the trial and tangent events expose the children to evils of racism and stereotyping.
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What critics compared To Kill a Mockingbird to
It's a child-on-the-way-to-becoming-an-adult story that recalls such classics as "To Kill a Mockingbird" and "Shane" (including a nod to the boy's cries of "Sha-a-a-ne"), and I do not throw around those titles loosely.
Echoing The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , but also evoking the predatory menace of The Night of the Hunter and other books and films ( To Kill a Mockingbird comes to mind) where children become immersed in an adult and dangerous world, Mud finds Matthew McConaughey at the top of his game.
Originality is pretty much a no-show, as I kept clicking off movies in my head like “Shane,” “Stand by Me,” “Sling Blade,” “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “The Beasts of the Southern Wild,” “A Perfect World” … Even the outstanding work by Matthew McConaughey, playing a scraggly good ol’ boy with love on his mind and the law on his tail, seemed much too familiar.
"Mud" runs deep with undercurrents from American movies and literature: " Tom Sawyer ," "Huckleberry Finn," " The Night of the Hunter ," " To Kill a Mockingbird ," "Moby Dick," " Cool Hand Luke ," the films of Nichols' fellow Austin-resident Terrence Malick (" Badlands ," " Days of Heaven ," " The Tree of Life ").
Families can talk about the similarities between Mud and other stories about kids who befriend enigmatic older characters, like Huckleberry Finn or To Kill a Mockingbird .
She makes you imagine that this might be how Scout from Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird might have turned out had she become a journalist: Too inquisitive, sensitive and empathetic not to brush aside the common wisdom of the day to see eternal truths about human beings.
Skeeter's book, when it arrives, is credited to "Anonymous," which makes it a group effort as well as a Skeeter ego-boost, and emphasizes the notion that Skeeter is a collaborator and partner rather than a superior (such as Sandra Bullock in "The Blind Side" or even taciturn Gregory Peck in "To Kill a Mockingbird").
This is the kind of heartfelt liberal picture that Robert Mulligan (“To Kill a Mockingbird”) or Martin Ritt (“Sounder”) would have made forty or fifty years ago, but with a different subject—what black women working for wealthy white families in Mississippi in the early nineteen-sixties (and, by extension, at any time and place) felt about their lives and about their female employers.
This flawed adaptation of Kathryn Stockett’s best-selling novel about black maids and their white employers in early-1960s Jackson, Miss., aims for “To Kill a Mockingbird” significance, but lands in “Steel Magnolias” territory.
Skeeter’s exposé is meant to empower both the subjects and the author, but “The Help’’ joins everything from “To Kill a Mockingbird’’ to “The Blind Side’’ as another Hollywood movie that sees racial progress as the province of white do-gooderism.
Like many Spielberg movies this harkens to earlier movies, quietly liberal classics like "Judgement at Nuremberg" and "To Kill a Mockingbird" – the idea that everyone deserves justice.
“Bridge of Spies” is rather like a version of “To Kill a Mockingbird” set against the backdrop of McCarthyism, Sputnik and the Bay of Pigs rather than southern racism.
The American Film Institute ranked Schindler’s List the third most inspiring picture ever, behind only It’s a Wonderful Life and To Kill a Mockingbird .
We have a suspicion writer Lowry was just cashing in on a familiar theme and that maybe the school curriculum should go back to “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
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The movie borrows from "To Kill a Mockingbird," casting Ernie Hudson (the forgotten Ghostbuster) as a mentally retarded handyman who is not permitted to touch the children.
Benjamin Wallfisch contributes a score that’s nicely varied—an idyllic sequence at a quarry lake recalls Elmer Bernstein’s wondrous “To Kill a Mockingbird”—though the choice of period songs at a few points is questionable.
It's a sequence that has drawn comparisons to the grotesque photography of Joel-Peter Whitkin and the experimental self-aware filmmaking of Stan Brakhage, and its format has been likened to Stephen Frankfurt's title design for Robert Mulligan's 1963 adaptation of the courtroom thriller To Kill a Mockingbird , which also features close-up photography of personal items to describe the psyche of one of the film's key players.
Consider the philosophical and moral argument it starts to make, that "pop culture" (broadly and rather reductively conceived in the film to include Bob Dylan album covers, Beach Boys and Peter Gabriel tunes, Macy's Thanksgiving Day balloons, and Gregory Peck in To Kill A Mockingbird) shapes contemporary lives and selves.
We first meet her long before William heads off on tour; she takes him to a screening of To Kill a Mockingbird, where he is impressed by Atticus Finch’s honesty and sense of justice.
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Sling Blade effectively asks, "What if Boo Radley from To Kill a Mockingbird was dangerous, his protective instinct leading to murderous rages?"
Head housekeeper Mrs. Wilson (Helen Mirren, "Greenfingers") explains to visiting American valet Henry Denton (Ryan Phillipe, "The Way of the Gun") that he will be referred to by the other servants with the name of his employer, Mr. Weissman (Bob Balaban, "The Majestic"), a film producer researching country house parties for his upcoming "Charlie Chan in London."
Surprise of surprises, the spot-on direction is by 40-year veteran Robert Altman, the distinctive and distinctly American filmmaker responsible for Nashville, M*A*S*H and The Player.
It is not, let's be clear, in the same lofty league as such great movies made from such phenomenon novels as "Gone With the Wind," "From Here to Eternity," "The Godfather" and "To Kill a Mockingbird" -- movies that not only capture and enhance their literary source but touch the sky with a special magic all their own.