Summer of '42

 

Director Robert Mulligan

Author Herman Raucher

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SUMMER OF ‘42                  B-                                                                                                    USA  (104 mi)  1971  d:  Robert Mulligan                                                                                                                                                          Forever known as the director of To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), a phenomenally successful film that helped generate a spirit of racial tolerance during the violently conflicted times at the dawn of the Civil Rights era, yet this film inexplicably generated 4 times the box office profits of that film, a nostalgic piece of romantic schmaltz that was extremely popular when it was released, tapping into similar territory as Arthur Hiller’s LOVE STORY (1970) released a year earlier, using Erich Segal’s rather sappy best-selling novel to hype the interest, where the media was simply infatuated by Ryan O’Neil and Ali MacGraw at the time, endlessly replaying the musical love theme on the radio, Theme From Love Story YouTube (3:20), literally saturating the markets, making gobs of money for everyone involved with that project.  This film was hugely successful as well, very photogenic, shot on the pristine beaches of a picturesque ocean, revealing a coming-of-age theme that turns into a memory play, where the entire film is a flashback into an ephemeral universe that happened long ago, recalling it like a snapshot in time, where events are recalled as you might want them to be remembered, not as they actually happened, becoming a wish-fulfillment fantasy where an idyllic first love is turned into a dreamlike reverie, given enormous personal significance even after the passage of time, winning an Academy Award for a generic, overly romanticized theme song written by Michel Legrand, Michel Legrand - The Summer Knows (End Title Theme From ... YouTube (1:47). This film features a subjective camera identifying with the protagonist, seeing only what he sees, even indulging in slow-motion and stop-motion shots with soft focus, capturing the essence of what is now routinely shown in ultra-chic fashion or perfume commercials, an offshoot of an elegantly romanticized style utilized in Bo Widerberg’s sumptuously beautiful ELVIRA MADIGAN (1967), accompanied by the Adagio movement of Mozart: Piano Concerto No. 21 in C Major, K. 467 - 2. Andante YouTube (7:15), one of the most exquisitely beautiful musical compositions ever written.  Those films actually provide the cinematic backdrop to this film, which is a flashback to earlier times, narrated by the director himself, signifying the degree of dramatic importance this one event has had in his life, like no other, a memory of first love, revealed in an idealized setting, supposedly Nantucket, an isolated island off Cape Cod, but it’s actually shot on the opposite coast in the picture postcard town of Mendocino, California, an enchanted place with a Main Street running along a cliff overlooking the ocean, where the alluring beauty is simply unsurpassed, also featured in Elia Kazan’s EAST OF EDEN (1955), where not much has changed in the interim years in this tiny coastal community, where the fog rises off the ocean every morning covering the town in a mist, featuring the same wooden towers (2,048 × 1,536 pixels) and incomparable views of the ocean. Very few films capture the rugged beauty of the coastline in symbiotic relation to the ocean like this film, where it’s an utterly spectacular setting.      

Herman Raucher wrote the screenplay, with seven years of rejections before finally finding a willing director in Mulligan, written in tribute to a grade school friend, Oscar Seltzer, who was drafted into the Korean War as a medic but was shot down while saving the life of another American soldier, awarded the Silver Star posthumously.  As kids, their respective parents visited Nantucket in the summer of 1942, recalling autobiographical childhood events, but changing the first person emphasis to his own character, beautifully integrating the tragic death of a soldier, as that’s the life-altering event that leads to the stunning finale, much of it told wordlessly.  Leading up to that, however, is a completely different style of film with horny and rambunctious teenagers who seem to have only one thing on their minds, sex, becoming obsessed with the subject, which literally dominates most of the early dialogue.  The trimmed down budget didn’t have enough money to pay the screenwriter, so they offered him a percentage of the movie while suggesting he write a novel of the story to help publicize the picture, becoming a national best-seller released prior to the movie, both of which made him a wealthy man for the rest of his life.  In total contrast to the social turbulence of the 60’s and early 70’s, the film helped jump start the nostalgia craze, though largely overshadowed by the car-crazed, radio-infused American Graffiti (1973), bearing similarities to Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show (1971), both filmed by the same cinematographer Robert Surtees, one in black and white and one in color, both poignantly using older women as a sexual outlet for younger, emotionally confused male teenagers, with both women offering exceptional performances, each given credit for helping them grow and evolve into young men.  One tragedy of the film is the annoying sexual banter, accepted as typical juvenile behavior, but much of it is hard to stomach.  American raunchiness stands in stark contrast to Louis Malle’s MURMUR OF THE HEART (1971), a more overtly observed film released the same year thriving on the ease and naturalism of the performances, where the French even have a way of making “incest” feel natural, like an extension of parental affection.  Similarly, this film romanticizes what might otherwise be described as statutory rape, as sex with a minor is never viewed as morally acceptable, no matter what era, hence, Roman Polanski’s exile to Europe following a criminal conviction of having sex with a minor about the same time this film was made.  What we find instead is an extended portrayal of sexual immaturity, 15-year old Hermie (Gary Grimes), and his best friends Oscy (Jerry Houser) and Benjie (Oliver Conant), described as “the terrible trio,” growing up during WWII, yet there’s no sign of parents and only a single reference to war, suggesting these kids are largely insulated from reality.  Spending their days roaming around the beach, one scene in particular stands out, a lover’s lane where guys and girls in swimsuits on beach blankets are draped all over one another in extended embraces, a near surreal picture of sexual expression, a more innocent version of Antonioni’s pot-induced fever dream of orgiastic naked bodies writhing in the desert in Zabriskie Point (1970), becoming a dream sequence of what they might aspire to be doing, yet these kids just walk right through a landscape of merging flesh like it’s an ordinary, everyday occurrence.    

The unique factor is Hermie’s wild infatuation from afar of a stunningly beautiful young woman (Jennifer O’Neill), an older person aged 22 living in a beachfront home overlooking the ocean, happily embraced by her husband, with both dreamily appearing madly in love, but the husband in uniform is also seen exiting the island on a boat, leaving the woman in tears.  Nonetheless, Hermie remains obsessed and intoxicated by her presence, seeing her again struggling to carry a heavy load of groceries, stepping in to help, offering to carry them a great distance to her home, which she greatly appreciates.  She offers coffee and donuts in return, but he awkwardly burns his lip, exiting gracefully, but Oscy immediately wants all the juicy details.  His friend is a self-styled sexist, viewing girls only as sex objects, where getting laid is his only reason to live, talking about little else.  Benjie finds a medical journal in his house that the boys view with reverence and utter fascination, surprised by what they see, with Oscy taking notes, discovering sex is a 12-step plan that he intends to put to use, sharing his discovery with Hermie, as Benjie is still too young to take much of an interest in girls.  Finding a couple available girls at the movie theater, they hook up to watch Bette Davis in NOW, VOYAGER (1942), but all they’re interested in is feeling up the girls, with Miriam (Christopher Norris) continually slapping Oscy’s aggressively roving hands, while Aggie (Katherine Allentuck, Maureen Stapleton’s daughter) seems content with Hermie’s go slow approach.  The juvenile nature of their obsessive search for sex can get pretty annoying, particularly the obnoxious nature of Oscy, who seemingly has no principles and will do anything to score, becoming something of a nuisance, but he does push Hermie into an embarrassing scene where he has to awkwardly ask for condoms at the local drugstore, ridiculously lost for words by his predicament.  Oscy is also the instigator behind a marshmallow roast on the beach that turns into a big fiasco, disappearing into the tall grass with Miriam while Hermie and Aggie are stuck with the marshmallows, comically interrupting them from time to time to ask for a condom, each time more out of breath and slightly less clothed, eventually arriving in just his underwear happily reporting that he’s exceeded the 12 steps, stumbling into unchartered territory as he goes back for more.  The pubescent part of the film is largely irritating and forgettable, standing in stark contrast to the haunting quiet of the beautifully choreographed, almost completely wordless finale, easily the best edited sequence in the film.  Hermie heads off to Dorothy’s cottage with high expectations, but is stunned to see a telegram on the desk announcing the death of her husband killed in combat, doing a circular inspection, seeing other untouched items in the room suggesting an unseen presence, where Dorothy is distraught and overcome with grief.  Playing a phonograph record of the movie theme, she attempts to tidy things up, but they end up doing a slow dance, still holding an ashtray behind her back, reaching for some semblance of affection, moving into the bedroom, where it’s all tenderly expressed, poetically capturing the anguishing internalized dynamic.  Like a dream, she’s gone with the wind, disappearing without a trace, leaving a huge impression on his fragile psyche, closing a chapter on that childhood memory, Summer of '42 1971 Ending Scene YouTube (3:26).

Note

According to Stanley Kubrick’s wife Christiane, this was inexplicably one of Kubrick’s favorite films, a small piece of which is shown in THE SHINING (1980), as Shelly DuVall is watching the heavily romanticized film on television, specifically the scene where Hermie proudly carries Dorothy’s groceries.  According to the comments from this website, Mendocino on My Mind | Lee Rentz Photography Weblog, they identified the precise location of Dorothy’s house, which is no longer there, but it was built on a bluff at MacKerricher State Park Beach just a few hundred yards north of the Ward Avenue access to the southern tip of Ten Mile Beach, just two miles north of Fort Bragg, and approximately 15 miles north of Mendocino, so that would have been a really long walk carrying groceries from Main Street in downtown Mendocino.  In one scene from her house you can see riders on horseback walking along the beach, which would be from nearby Ricochet Ridge Ranch (Ricochet Ridge Ranch | Horseback riding on California's ...) which offers daily rides along the beach.

The Man On the Shore (L’Homme sur les quais)

THE MAN ON THE SHORE (L’Homme sur les quais)           A                    

aka:  The Man By the Shore

France  Canada  Haiti  Germany  (106 mi)   1993  d:  Raoul Peck

All sea animals eat up men, but only the shark has a bad reputation.
—Sarah (Jennifer Zubar)

A film on my short list of all-time favorite films, rarely screened and never released on DVD, distinguished for being the first film from the Caribbean ever screened at Cannes, where it may still hold the distinction of being the best film ever made from that region.  Peck was born in Haiti during the reign of the Duvalier dictatorship and his armed militia, the Tontons Macoute, who terrorized the population, where his father was arrested and jailed for trying to unionize farmers, so at the age of 8 his family fled the country and he was raised in the Congo, educated in France, Germany, and the United States, briefly serving (several years “after” making this film) as Minister of Culture in the Haitian government (1996–97) until he resigned his post in protest.  He currently runs the Parisian film school La Fémis and will serve as a Jury member of the main competetition entries at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival.  Peck wrote the film during the brief period of optimism of Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s initial reign as Haitian president, following the U.S. led exile of Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier, where Aristide attempted to carry out substantial reforms, bringing the military under civilian control, firing the head of the Army, initiating human rights violations, and bringing several Tontons Macoute to trial, all of which lead to his quick ousting by the military.  Peck integrates autobiographical scenes of his childhood in this fictional but unsentimentalized period piece that tells the repressive and murderous story of the “Papa Doc” Duvalier regime in Haiti during the 60’s as seen through the eyes of an 8-year old child Sarah (Jennifer Zubar). The depth of this film is surprising, co-written by the director and André Graill as it plays out in novelesque fashion, fully developing many characters, where the camera’s constant slow pan becomes a character unto itself, as it brings the audience into full participation with a historical place and time, allowing them to non-judgmentally observe.  This also plays out as a memory piece, as these are the recollections of someone thirty years older now who survived to tell the tale.  The initial impressions are the colorful buildings painted with bright colors, giving Haiti a cheerful look, also the women’s clothing that are saturated in sunny colors.  Actually shot in the Dominican Republic by cinematographer Armand Marco, due to the continued military uprisings in Haiti where it was initially scheduled to shoot, this has the feel of Coppola’s APOCALYPSE NOW (1979), as it actually took them three years to shoot this film in what amounts to a foreign location, continually altering their schedule and having to wait for more money to continue.  But this has an extremely personal feel to it, as it could be anyone’s family.   

Told out of sequence, moving back and forth over two years time, the film details the changing behavior when the local police lose their authority to the brutal methods of the Tontons Macoute, Duvalier’s militia thugs with guns who rule the neighborhoods through intimidation and fear.  The chief enforcer is Janvier, Jean-Michel Martial, a wickedly sadistic madman who doesn’t look at people so much as stare holes through them, usually accompanied by bloody beatings, and to the extreme, shootings and disappearances.  But at least initially, he is still under the authority of the police, Sarah’s father, who doesn’t condone those methods, but when he tries to intervene, “Don’t tempt the devil” would be Janvier’s response, where he and his gunmen would resort to gangland style violence, eventually taking over, demanding blood money from everyone.  Her mother and father flee to Cuba while Sarah and her two older sisters are forced to hide in their grandmother’s attic for two years, never showing their face under fear of arrest.  Initially they lived under the jurisdiction of the Catholic Church, but they soon became host to continual site inspections under the threat of guns.  In this closeted, dreamlike world, all people had were photograph albums and memories of a life they used to have.  Sarah was confused why the militia wore the same uniform as her father, thinking they must be working together, and after his extended absence, she began associating her anger over his absence with the hostility people had for the Tontons Macoute.  This is contrasted, however, with the proud and dignified images of her grandmother (Toto Bissainthe) and Aunt Elide (Mireille Metellus), both of whom are impressively dressed and have income from running their own clothing and fabric store, so they represent the educated aristocracy who are among the most intelligent citizens in Haiti, where more than 50% of the country remains illiterate and mired in poverty.  Their faces, however, are the real face of Haiti, proud, stubborn even, yet always strong and dignified, where throughout the film one thing is clear—they command respect.  The psychological power games between the crude and sinister methods of Janvier and these defiant women who refuse to back down couldn’t be more riveting, especially when it’s sexual capitulation that he’s looking for.  Rarely do films stare terror in the face like this one, where the results are shattering. 

There’s a national unity celebration filled with loud speaker pronouncements from President for Life Duvalier to his citizenry, a street procession of raw, authentic Haitian music, much like Best haitian music Webert Sicot Crab mazorey (3:41),  ORCHESTRE SEPTENTRIONAL (6:57), or even Cuban salsa queen Celia Cruz - Guede Zaina (3:10), with posters of Duvalier lining the streets, and red and black flags all around when Duvalier announces an amnesty.  All Haitians who fled are urged to return, as the country needs to generate needed capital and it was the rich that had the means to flee, where Duvalier actually brokers an agreement with the Pope where the Church and State become inseparable, where Sarah and her sisters could finally come out into the open, but what people are subjected to is continued harassment and raids by the Tontons Macoute who don’t follow any laws, but simply brutalize and murder anyone they don’t like on trumped up charges, proving repeatedly that anyone could be suspected of subversive behavior.  No proof is necessary, only guns.  There’s an interesting character, a brain-damaged invalid named Sorel (Patrick Rameau), who feels like a simpleton character out of August Wilson plays, the stuttering Hambone from Two Trains Running who continually shouts out the same words throughout the entire play, “I want my ham.”  Whenever he sees the Tontons Macoute he stands at attention and salutes, calling them chief, mimicking the shooting of a rifle, but he’s simply a street beggar who takes on the role of Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), an idiot savant, but also a protector of children.  He plays a big role in the film as the audience identifies with what he goes through, as he is arrested, beaten and sexually brutalized with a nightstick, a tortured character who is traumatized by listening to the endless machine gun shots by the shore near the police holding center. This is one of the most eloquently powerful films describing life under such a repressive regime, where it all plays out like a nightmarish dream, where one wonders how this can actually happen, where all human resistance is simply liquidated.  Unlike THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS (1966), no one is trying to overthrow the government here, yet every citizen is viewed with derision and contempt.  The finale to this film is profoundly moving, beautifully set on the gorgeous shores of the turquoise ocean, young girls riding bikes under the swaying palm trees, a picture of serenity ultimately violated in the most obscene way, but the director chooses not to sensationalize and uses a long shot, where the audience can see what happens off in the distance before that continually panning camera comes to rest on an idyllic shore.  The setting is Haiti, but we’ve seen this kind of wretched terror inflicted on citizens before by Hitler, Stalin, Mao Tse-tung’s Chinese Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, and a host of others, where genocide is a historical reality, but this film brilliantly puts a human face on the reign of terror.  THE MAN ON THE SHORE has a searing intensity that is expressed through a poetic realism, where the beauty of the island landscape and the proud dignity of the people who inhabit the country are the centerpiece of the film, where a Pandora’s Box opens wide to spoil and nearly destroy this Edenesque lost paradise.         

The Trouble With Harry

THE TROUBLE WITH HARRY         B+                 

USA  (99 mi)  1955  d:  Alfred Hitchcock

He looked exactly the same when he was alive, except he was vertical.
—Jennifer (Shirley MacLaine)

A good old-fashioned murder mystery where the whodunit concerns are completely overshadowed by the embellished, personality-driven aspects of this autumnal theater piece set in the glorious fall colors of rural New England, where characterization supersedes all else, as the acerbic tone and blistering speed of the nonstop dialog feels like a tongue-in-cheek Hitchcockian take on an equally comic romp about concealed murders in Frank Capra’s equally enthralling ARSENIC AND OLD LACE (1944).  Hitchcock obviously loved morbid humor, where the colorful pastoral setting gives this an artificialized, storybook feel, where even the childlike stick drawings in the charming opening credit sequence by Saul Steinberg have a dark and particularly edgy “Once upon a time” appeal.  The opening shots resemble colorful pages of fall colors from a magazine, where every tree is exploding with a painterly appeal, where out of this pictorial bliss appears a dead body.  The film was a favorite of Hitchcock, but one of the few that actually lost money, becoming one of The Five Lost Hitchcocks, kept out of circulation for decades (thirty years for this film) because their rights were bought back by the director and willed to his daughter, eventually re-released in theaters in the mid 1980s.  Only his second comedy after MR. AND MRS. SMITH (1941), this is a film uncluttered by extraneous plot devices or unnecessary loose ends, but is instead a vivid character-driven account of events that take place one day in the lives of two couples, though they barely know one another at the start of the day, brought together by the presence of a corpse, where each initially has their own unique reaction to his death.  The truth of the matter is no one really cared that much for Harry, nor is anyone truly sorry to see him go.  Nonetheless, the poor guy gets ungraciously buried and dug up 4 or 5 times in a single day, each time with some new revelation about the effect his death will have on the participants. 

Introduced by the whimsical musical score of Bernard Herrmann (later used in a 2010 Volkswagen commercial), in his first of many Hitchcock collaborations, a young boy, Arnie (Jerry Mathers, soon to be Beaver Cleaver from Leave it to Beaver [1957 – 1963]), goes innocently playing in the woods with a toy gun in his hand, much like Little Red Riding Hood, only to be greeted by a corpse lying on the ground.  Simultaneously, Edmund Gwenn is retired sea Captain Albert Wiles, an elderly old coot with exaggerated autobiographical exploits who happens to be shooting for rabbits in the woods.  Seeing the dead man sprawled out on the ground, he naturally assumes he accidentally shot the man and thinks to bury him on the spot, but quickly hides when he hears others approaching, which include the likes of a wandering hobo who steals the shoes, a self-obsessed professor so engrossed with reading his book that he actually trips over the corpse but nonchalantly continues on his way, unconcerned, until the young boy returns with his mother Jennifer (Shirley MacLaine, goofy and brilliant in her first film appearance), who doesn’t seem the least bit sorry about a corpse that she recognizes as her dead husband.  The Captain narrates his thoughts out loud, as what he hoped he could secretly bury and quickly cover up from view was turning into a busy thoroughfare of pedestrians wandering through this precise patch of isolated woods, eventually joined and invited for elderberry tea by his eccentric neighbor, Mildred Natwick as Miss Ivy Gravely, an elderly spinster, and a local landscape painter Sam Marlowe (John Forsythe), who actually stops to help the Captain bury the corpse.  We quickly learn of budding romantic interests of both the elderly, with Gravely politely and flirtatiously serving tea and blueberry muffins, and the young couple, where Marlowe makes his intentions clear straightaway by forwardly confessing an interest in painting her nude, which leads to the unphased Jennifer changing the subject to her fresh batch of tart lemonade. 

The secret to the success of this witty and deliciously dark comedy is the quick pace of the highly impulsive chatterbox dialog and the warm charm of each of the characters, especially MacLaine, who has the kind of infectious, sensual spunk of a grown up Scout from To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), where the setting could just as easily be the cozy small town allure of Angela Lansbury’s Cabot Cove from Murder, She Wrote (1984 – 1996).  Among the more memorable scenes include MacLaine’s curiously detailed explanation of her past with Harry and his brother, also the four of them, like thieves in the night, carrying shovels as they continually walk back and forth into the woods to unearth the poor corpse once again, with a collective intent to keep Harry’s decidedly unpopular influence at a minimum, as who needs to notify the authorities, see their name dragged through the mud, and be forced to re-live this experience all over again?  Better to let bygones be bygones and let Harry sleep undisturbed.  But Harry simply won't stay in one place.  Watching them press and clean his oft buried clothes in order to keep the police from discovering any scent of their unscrupulous activities has an absurdly comical air of wiping their hands clean of any indecent or immoral activity, yet all along they plot like petty criminals how best to cover up their crimes.  This scatterbrained, screwball comedy was written by John Michael Hayes, adapted from a Jack Trevor Story novel.  Shot in Craftsbury, Vermont in late September 1954, nearly all the foliage was gone by the time the film crew arrived, necessitating leaves to actually be glued to the trees in order to create this colorful canvas of idealized perfection, and also, due to the incessant rain, several scenes were shot in a nearby school gymnasium, where a 500 pound camera attached to an elevated crane fell and just missed hitting the venerable director.  21 minutes into the film is Hitchcock’s signature appearance seen through the window of a general store walking past a parked Rolls Royce while an elderly man inspects roadside paintings for sale.  Using occasional racy dialog throughout that might sound more at home in a Marx Brothers movie, it’s curious the effect a corpse can have on an otherwise sleepy and safely protected community, each resorting to innocent white lies that only grow in epic proportion with their wildly active imaginations. 

To Kill a Mockingbird

TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD       A             

USA  (129 mi)  1962  d:  Robert Mulligan

I remember when my daddy gave me that gun. He told me that I should never point it at anything in the house; and that he'd rather I'd shoot at tin cans in the backyard. But he said that sooner or later he supposed the temptation to go after birds would be too much, and that I could shoot all the blue jays I wanted—if I could hit 'em; but to remember it was a sin to kill a mockingbird. Well, I reckon because mockingbirds don't do anything but make music for us to enjoy. They don't eat people's gardens, don't nest in the corncrib, they don't do one thing but just sing their hearts out for us.

—Atticus Finch (Gregory Peck)

One of the most beloved of all American films and certainly one of the best movies ever made that continues to have such a powerful impact on children, shot during a time when the races were still bitterly divided in this country, this is a brilliant adaptation by Horton Foote of the legendary Harper Lee novel taking place during the Depression in a small town in Alabama, particularly notable because it’s seen through the eyes of several young children who guide us through their very young and still innocent worlds.  It’s given a touch of magic by the superb performances by Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch, in the role of his lifetime as a single father and attorney whose patience and virtues won him both an Academy Award and the distinction by the American Film Institute that voted him the greatest hero in any American film 100 Greatest Heroes and Villains - AFI, and also Mary Badham as his 6-year old daughter Scout who simply couldn’t be more good naturedly precocious and actually steals one of the best scenes in the film when her overt friendliness shames a group of adults hellbent on lynch mob justice.  Meticulously recreating the close-knit intimacy where an entire world is seen through one city block, we follow the very impressionable Scout and her older brother Jem (Phillip Alford) as they collect precious gifts found in a tree and lull away their endless summers with a visiting friend Dill (John Megna).  We see them rush out the door for their first day of school, then have to explain to her father why she gets into fights, invite friends over to visit, read bedtime stories, have serious talks on the porch, or peek into the mysterious universe of the haunted house next door inhabited by the unseen, ghostly evil countenance of Boo Radley (Robert Duvall’s first role), a delightfully overshy creation by the author, who based the part of Dill (John Megna), the curiously inquisitive friend visiting for the summer, on her real life neighbor Truman Capote.  Harper Lee and Truman Capote have been forever linked together by the biographical film adaptations of CAPOTE (2005) and INFAMOUS (2006). 

The film beautifully interweaves Southern style and manners with the history and customs of the time, including reflections looking back from an older Scout, read by an unseen narrator Kim Stanley.  When Atticus is chosen by the judge to represent a black man charged with raping a white girl, we are slowly introduced to a darker world that exists in the world beyond their block, where according to Jem, this trial is the biggest thing the town’s ever seen.  The only spots left in the courtroom are in the balcony where all the seats are filled by blacks, where the two kids sit next to a black preacher, Reverend Sykes (Bill Walker).  Presented relatively close to real time, Brock Peters plays Tom Robinson, the accused, with a quiet sense of nobility, where it soon becomes clear to viewers that he’s being framed, but in that era there were few whites who could even conceive taking a black man’s word over a white.  Perhaps the most powerful scene in the film, even more dramatic than Peck’s final summation, is his quiet walk out of the empty courtroom where none of the blacks in the balcony have left, where all remain standing.  Reverend Sykes has to politely remind Scout by her birth name, “Miss Jean Louise. Miss Jean Louise, stand up. Your father's passing.”  While the film deals with broad subjects of good and evil, both in the courtroom and in that mysterious house next door, it does so in such a lyrical manner that one can’t help but be moved by the very simplicity of the presentation onscreen. 

The music by Elmer Bernstein and cinematography by Russell Harlan matches the gorgeous look of the film, which retains its power even after the passage of time.  The shift into the adult world of the courtroom never loses its impact on the lives of the children, who are the eyes and ears of the still undeveloped moral conscience of the next generation overseeing what constituted small town justice when they grew up.  The focus remains real people leading ordinary lives where they have to come to terms with the changing world around them, as it still reverberates decades later in their adult life.  Told with a poetic conviction, this has the exact same impact on the viewer, as each subsequent generation that views this film recalls its quiet, understated tone, as personified by Peck’s dignified restraint, and will continue to grapple with similar moral questions in their own lives.  Because of just how brilliant it is, it’s quite likely the film will have a greater impact than the Pulitzer prize winning book.  In reality, as of this date, Harper Lee (Harper Lee - Biography), who was herself an unruly tomboy who fought on the schoolground and talked back to her teachers (see The Big Read), continues to live in her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, with her older sister Alice (15 years her elder), currently the oldest practicing attorney in the state.  An interesting comparison between her own life and the book is explored here:  Reading: Bridge to a Wider World - Harper Lee.