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Robert Mulligan: Horton Foote
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With its integrity, poetry, and depth of feeling, Robert Mulligan’s To Kill a Mockingbird stands alongside On the Waterfront and The Grapes of Wrath in the ranks of Hollywood's most enduring and beloved message films. Gregory Peck earned an Academy Award for his performance as Atticus Finch, a southern lawyer of consummate tenderness and a sterling sense of justice who defends a local black man charged with raping a white woman. With passions aroused in the small, Depression-era southern town, Atticus finds his safety threatened along with that of his two children, six-year-old Scout (Mary Badham) and ten-year-old Jem (Phillip Alford). Based on Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, To Kill a Mockingbird was adapted for the screen by another respected southern scribe, Horton Foote (Tender Mercies), whose screenplay was ... recognized with an Oscar. Mulligan manages to capture the steamy, drowsy atmosphere of a southern summer, while Foote movingly translates for the screen Lee's troubling story about childhood innocence forever altered by a brush with adult cruelty and injustice.
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Long before Mississippi Burning and A Time To Kill, there was Harper Lee's novel, playwright Horton Foote's adaptation, Robert Mulligan's film and Gregory Peck's Oscar. This little bird sang a sweet song, indeed.
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Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning autobiographical novel was translated to film in 1962 by Horton Foote and the producer/director team of Robert Mulligan and Alan J. Pakula. Set a small Alabama town in the 1930s, the story focuses on scrupulously honest, highly respected lawyer Atticus Finch, magnificently embodied by Gregory Peck. Finch puts his career on the line when he agrees to represent Tom Robinson (Brock Peters), a black man accused of rape. The trial and the events surrounding it are seen through the eyes of Finch's six-year-old daughter Scout (Mary Badham). While Robinson's trial gives the film its momentum, there are plenty of anecdotal occurrences before and after the court date: Scout's ever-strengthening bond with older brother Jem (Philip Alford), her friendship with precocious young Dill Harris (a character based on Lee's childhood chum Truman Capote and played by John Megna), her father's no-nonsense reactions to such life-and-death crises as a rampaging mad dog, and especially Scout's reactions to, and relationship with, Boo Radley (Robert Duvall in his movie debut), the reclusive "village idiot" who turns out to be her salvation when she is attacked by a venomous bigot. To Kill a Mockingbird won Academy Awards for Best Actor (Peck), Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Art Direction.
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Both a landmark of American film and a beloved favorite, director Robert Mulligan and writer Horton Foote’s adaptation of Harper Lee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel addresses timeless moral issues through the formative eyes of a child. In one of the truly iconic performances in the history of cinema, Oscar®-winner Gregory Peck portrays single father and country lawyer Atticus Finch, a profile in quiet moral courage who, despite pervasive ignorance and intolerance, attempts to defend an innocent black man in the Depression-era South.
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Horton Foote