Mockingbird (32 page)

“This is our own Miss Harper Lee, who has written a wonderful book,” explained the teacher. “If I hadn't kept you in after school, you would have missed seeing her. Aren't you glad, Herbert?”

“No, ma'am.”
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*   *   *

On Christmas Day, 1962, two days after J. B. Lippincott had donated three hundred books in A. C. Lee's memory to the Monroe County Library,
To Kill a Mockingbird
premiered in Hollywood. Lee endorsed the film, beginning to end. “It's a fantastically good motion picture. And it remained faithful to the spirit of the book. It is unpretentious. Nothing phony about it.”
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Annie Laurie Williams wrote to Capote: “You will be happy to know that Nelle's picture
To Kill a Mockingbird
is getting rave reactions from everyone who has seen the previews.”

Alabama cities and towns vied to be the first to premiere the film in the state. The prize had gone to Mobile for the third week of March; Monroeville, which had submitted a petition of citizens' signatures, would get it at the end of March, even before Birmingham—a plum for a small town. In the meantime, First Lady Jackie Kennedy arranged for a private showing in Washington, D.C., in early January for one of her charities. Alan Pakula proudly showed the film to several senators and Supreme Court justices, but he ended up with the wrong print, “a study in grays—no black and white resonance. It was one of the worst nights of my life.”
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On Valentine's Day, 1963, the film opened in New York City. Nelle soldiered on through another public appearance, having given her word that she would. “I must quote to you from a letter I received from a Mr. John Casey, the man who is in charge of the preview room at Universal-International at 445 Park Avenue,” Williams wrote to Alice Lee. “Harper Lee is such a wonderfully warm and friendly woman that I have had all I could do to keep from giving her a big hug right in public. ‘Oh Susanna, do not cry for me, 'cause I met a real fine woman and her name is Harper Lee.'”
49

Audiences for the New York premiere lined up around the block.

Despite the film's subject matter, racism and intolerance, the first few minutes of the movie run against audiences' expectations by showing images of innocence. Credits appear over a child's collection of miniature toys contained in an old cigar box. An unseen child hums, picks up small objects, and draws with crayons on construction paper, a sequence that title designer Stephen Frankfurt shot on his kitchen table on East Fifty-eighth Street in New York. Frankfurt enlisted a neighbor girl to play at the table. Each of the objects in the box has a real or symbolic meaning, including a white marble, which starts to roll via a concealed magnet until it gently bumps into a black one. The
click!,
when the marbles touch, cues the music, a simple melody played on a piano with one hand, as if a child were picking out a tune. Composer Elmer Bernstein, a former concert pianist who had studied under Aaron Copland, suggested the theme music for Mulligan by placing the phone next to his piano one morning and playing it for him. Mulligan was delighted. The effect of the plaintive but sentimental music, which swells into an orchestral treatment, combined with the tiny world inside the cigar box, is charming and, as Mulligan said, “put us directly into the movie.”
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At the time, the film was considered politically liberal because of the attention paid in the screenplay to social justice. Looking back, however, Peck's insistence that Atticus's character occupy more of the film's center injects a heavy dose of white patriarchal values. In a word, Atticus, an educated white male, appears to be the most important person in the film. Everyone else defers to him, humors him, reacts to him, or disagrees with him. As one critic noted, the elimination of Scout's voice-over from most of the film means that the viewer doesn't see small-town southern society from the perspective of a young female growing up in it.
51
Instead,
To Kill a Mockingbird
is largely Atticus's story, even to the point that Tom's fate, which means death, seems less important than Atticus's losing the case—a critical failure in making the audience “walk in Tom's shoes,” as Atticus would have put it.

After the New York premiere, reviewers by and large praised the film as entertainment, though some of the more perceptive identified aesthetic problems.

“The trial weighed upon the novel, and in the film, where it is heavier, it is unsupportable. The narrator's voice returns at the end, full of warmth and love … but we do not pay her the same kind of attention anymore. We have seen that outrageous trial, and we can no longer share the warmth of her love,” wrote
Newsweek.
52
Bosley Crowther in the
New York Times
pointed out, “It is, in short, on the level of adult awareness of right and wrong, of good and evil, that most of the action in the picture occurs. And this detracts from the camera's observation of the point of view of the child.… [I]t leaves the viewer wondering precisely how the children feel. How have they really reacted to the things that affect our grown-up minds?”
53

Brendan Gill, writing for the
New Yorker,
disliked that the film's resolution, Bob Ewell's death, was no more defensible than it was in the novel: “In the last few minutes of the picture, whatever intellectual and moral content it may be said to have contained is crudely tossed away in order to provide a ‘happy' ending.… The moral of this can only be that while ignorant rednecks mustn't take the law into their own hands, it's all right for
nice
people to do so.”
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Andrew Sarris for the
Village Voice
wrote the most critical review of all: “‘To Kill a Mockingbird' relates the Cult of Childhood to the Negro Problem with disastrous results. Before the intellectual confusion of the project is considered, it should be noted that this is not much of a movie even by purely formal standards.”
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Nelle was unfazed. “For me, Maycomb is there, its people are there: in two short hours one lives a childhood and lives it with Atticus Finch, whose view of life was the heart of the novel.”
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*   *   *

The juggernaut of publicity rolled on into the early winter of 1963. Nelle had promised Truman she would accompany him to Garden City again, but he was clearly becoming peeved at having to play second fiddle to her success. “I think our friend Nelle will meet me in G.C.,” Capote wrote to the Deweys in February. “However, she is so involved in the publicity for her film (she owns a percentage, that's why; even so, I think it very undignified for any serious artist to allow themselves to be exploited in this fashion).”
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Williams, on the other hand, couldn't have been more pleased with Nelle. Writing to Alice Lee on February 16, she lavished praise on her:

When Nelle came in yesterday with the enclosed clippings, she was so tired she could hardly sit. She had been with the Universal people being interviewed by Hal Boyle of the Associated Press and the hours on hours of public appearances, plus sitting and being asked questions, was about all she could take.… [S]he talks so well before little or big audiences and never stops or is halting in what she is saying but “performs” like a real professional lecturer, but when she gets through, she always thinks she didn't do so well and gets real surprised when you tell her how good she is.

I have never seen a picture receive so much love and tender affection as
To Kill a Mockingbird
.”
58

Nelle had opened up with Hal Boyle more than she had with most interviewers, or perhaps she was becoming more relaxed. She admitted, tongue in cheek, “Success has had a very bad effect on me. I've gotten fat—but extremely uncomplacent. I'm running just as scared as before.” Perhaps speaking of herself and the pressures on her, she said, “Self-pity is a sin. It is a form of living suicide.…”
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Williams wrote to Alice, “It was a good interview and I'm glad Nelle ‘spoke her mind.'”
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The Alabama premiere took place on March 15, with many shows sold out in advance. Two weeks later, the film arrived in Monroeville, and Nelle was in town to witness the reaction. A full-page ad in the
Monroe Journal
, paid for by businesses, trumpeted, “We Are Proud of Harper Lee … and Her Masterpiece! We Would Like to Share with Her These Moments of Artistic Triumph!” Reserved-seat tickets were on sale by March 17 at the theater box office or by mail order: one dollar for adults and fifty cents for children. The first five customers who brought in a live mockingbird would receive ten dollars apiece.

Dorothy and Taylor Faircloth drove over from Atmore on a starry, cool night to see the movie: “You were really fortunate to get tickets. It was a fantastic event for a small town like Monroeville.”
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Also in the audience was Joseph Blass who, as a teenager, had caddied for Mr. Lee. “Mr. Lee did not look much like Peck in the movie, although Peck, who had spent time with Mr. Lee, copied some of his mannerisms in a way that was almost eerie to those of us who knew him.”
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When the film ended, remembered Taylor, there was no applause. Few people said anything until they reached the lobby. “At that time in the South, everybody seemed to be divided. You were either a liberal or a racist. And when the movie ended, the discussion afterwards went along those lines.”
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The film was held over a week. Nelle posed for a photo under the marquee with some Monroeville dignitaries, squinting in the springtime daylight, but obviously beaming.

The film was the object of enjoyment and praise, but judging from its premiere in Birmingham at least, it didn't seem to prick people's consciences. When the film opened in Birmingham, on April 3 at the Melba Theater, “huge crowds jammed the street … to catch a glimpse of the movie's two child stars: Birmingham natives Mary Badham and Philip Alford,” writes S. Jonathan Bass in
Blessed Are the Peacemakers.
“Ironically, the story line depicted white bigotry and black injustice in Alabama during the 1930s and illustrated the meaningful role a paternalistic, decent, and moderate white southerner could play during a racial crisis. Regardless, the movie apparently had little impact on the racial outlook of Birmingham's white community during the spring of 1963.”
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At the same time that the Melba Theater was filled with appreciative audiences, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference had organized thousands of black children to march in Birmingham. Police carried them off in buses to jail. When there was no more room, “Bull” Connor ordered that police dogs and fire hoses be turned on the demonstrators. The pressurized water was powerful enough to rip the bark off trees and sent children skidding down the pavement. After weeks of violent acts by the Birmingham police, Attorney General Robert Kennedy successfully lobbied white business leaders to desegregate public facilities. The whole country, he pointed out to them, even parts of the western world, was watching the city of Birmingham become a spectacle of brutality.

*   *   *

By spring of 1963,
To Kill a Mockingbird
had been nominated for eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actress (Mary Badham), Best Black-and-White Cinematography, and Best Music Score—Substantially Original.

As a year in film history, 1962 had been remarkable for the number of high-quality films released, many of which became classics. John Frankenheimer had directed three of those films:
All Fall Down
, adapted from James Leo Herlihy's novel about a dysfunctional family, starring Warren Beatty, Eva Marie Saint, Karl Malden, Angela Lansbury, and Brandon De Wilde;
Birdman of Alcatraz
, with Burt Lancaster, making a plea for prison reform; and
The Manchurian Candidate
, a political thriller about right-wing zealots taking over the government. Blake Edwards released two: a stylish thriller,
Experiment in Terror
, and an uncompromising look at alcoholism,
The Days of Wine and Roses
, which was Jack Lemmon's breakout role as a dramatic actor.

Arthur Penn directed the film version of his Broadway hit
The Miracle Worker
, starring Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke. Also from Broadway came the screen version of
The Music Man
, starring Robert Preston. Stanley Kubrick adapted Vladimir Nabokov's
Lolita.

In the Western genre, Sam Peckinpah's
Ride the High Country
put a rousing moral dilemma in the hands of two cowpokes, veteran actors Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott, each in one of his best roles. John Ford directed
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
, and Kirk Douglas starred in
Lonely Are the Brave
, a modern-day Western.

Two horror films that year depended on psychological twists:
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
featured Bette Davis and Joan Crawford in roles that destroyed their images as femme fatales; and Robert Mitchum was alternately charming and frightening as he stalked a family in
Cape Fear.
For the epic re-creation of D-day,
The Longest Day
, Darryl F. Zanuck engaged the talents of so many actors that audiences became preoccupied with whom they could recognize.

From abroad came two François Truffaut masterpieces,
Shoot the Piano Player
and
Jules and Jim.
David Lean's epic
Lawrence of Arabia
probed the masochism and megalomania of its hero, T. E. Lawrence, played by Peter O'Toole in his first major role. Marcello Mastroianni was nominated for an Oscar in Pietro Germi's satire of infidelity and male arrogance,
Divorce Italian Style.
Tony Richardson released
The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner.
Finally, Alain Resnais puzzled audiences with his enigmatic
Last Year at Marienbad.