To Kill A Mockingbird

I checked out the VHS movie from the library and watched "To Kill A Mockingbird" It 's a very powerful movie. Gregory Peck does an excellent job as Atticus Finch. I never knew that young Robert Duvall was in the movie as Arthur "Boo" Radley. My son has to read the book for school and I checked it out for him but he doesn't want to watch it until he finishes the book. I read the book a couple of years ago when it was the book for Chicago's "One Book" program.

Synopsis

Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning autobiographical novel was translated to film in 1962. 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 Megan), 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.