Rent To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

Period Drama (includes spoilers). - To Kill a Mockingbird review by Steve

Meticulous and and detailed version of Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize winning classic. The casting is inspired, from Gregory Peck as the wise lawyer Atticus Finch, all the way down to Robert Duvall's debut as inarticulate recluse, Boo Radley. There are lovely child performances too, particularly from Mary Badham as Scout.

The first half is a character study as the children learn about life from their small southern town. The relationship between Atticus, a widower, and his daughter Scout, is sensitively sketched. The latter part relates to the lawyer's defence of a black farm labourer (Brock Peters) who has been set up by a mob of bigoted smallholders.  

The white agricultural workers of depression-era Monroeville, Alabama are destitute. They have nothing but their perceived superiority to even poorer black people, which they guard ruthlessly. The accused is found guilty of raping a white woman, not because he has a case to answer, but because he pitied her. Which strikes too deeply into the farmers' conviction of primacy.    

The rural south of the '30s is superbly realised. This is a memory film and there is an impression of time and events being distorted by the act of recollection. It's a remarkably subtle and intelligent film which made an issue of southern apartheid as the civil rights movement in America was coming into being.