Atticus Finch

by Joseph Crespino

  Crain had not put this idea on the page, however, before giving up on it. He realized that it would have been exactly the kind of didacticism that the filmmakers hoped to avoid. Harper Lee had already tried to write a novel that spoke directly to the southern racial crisis, and it hadn’t even found a publisher, let alone a movie studio eager to produce it. Pakula and Mulligan wouldn’t have known about that, but they knew that what made Mockingbird so compelling was that it could inform the current political moment without preaching. “The big danger in making a movie of To Kill a Mockingbird is in thinking of this as a chance to jump on the segregation-integration soap box,” Mulligan told a reporter. “The book does not make speeches. It is not melodramatic with race riots and race hatred. It deals with bigotry, lack of understanding and rigid social patterns of a small Southern town.”

  When Harper Lee dispensed with the idea of writing the screenplay herself, Pakula moved quickly. In early February 1961 he had contacted Horton Foote to see if he would do it if Lee opted out. Foote would go on to become one of the most distinguished American dramatists of his generation. Like Lee, he was a product of the small town South. His work often dealt with quiet family dramas in southern locales. One of his early successes, The Trip to Bountiful (1953), is the story of an elderly woman living with her son and daughter-in-law in a cramped apartment in Houston who is determined to take a trip to her hometown. His adaptation for television of two William Faulkner stories, “Old Man” and “Tomorrow,” so impressed Faulkner that he agreed to split the publication royalties with Foote.

  Foote and Pakula worked together closely on the script. Pakula would drive up from New York each day to the rambling white Victorian home in the Hudson Valley where Foote lived with his wife and four children. Pakula thought the screenplay should condense the action in the novel, which takes place over three years, into one, and Foote readily agreed. When the two had a version of the script that they were happy with, they flew to Hollywood to discuss it with Mulligan. He felt that their adaptation too often lost “the point of view of the children.” Foote and Pakula agreed, and undertook another revision. “[T]he spine of the story should be the awakening of the children to their father as a man and to his values,” Pakula wrote in notes from the meeting, “and the year in which we see the development of their inheritance from him.”

  Maintaining the children’s perspective throughout the film would not be easy. The movie never would have been made, at least not in the way and on the scale that it was, if Atticus remained as he was in the book, a supporting figure to the children’s experience. From the very beginning of Annie Laurie Williams’s campaign to sell the film rights, the pitch was that a leading man could play Atticus, and with a leading man in place, a studio deal could be had. Shortly after Gregory Peck was signed, a rumor started that Peck wanted to change the title to “Atticus.” Pakula batted it down as quickly as he could.

  Whatever truth there was to the rumor, with Peck in place, and with considerable financial resources committed to the film, it was all but inevitable that it would become a vehicle for a heroic Atticus. Inevitable, too, was that Atticus would be shaped into the image of Gregory Peck. The actor saw much of himself in the character. “I felt I could climb into Atticus’s shoes without any play-acting,” he would say of the role, “that I could be him.” A father of five children, Peck was roughly the same age as the character. Atticus was a deep reader, a student of history, and a sharp observer of politics, as was Peck himself, who, like A. C. Lee, loved history and biography, particularly books on Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War. Peck’s personal library would eventually include over a thousand books on those two topics alone.

  Peck was also one of Hollywood’s leading liberals. He took the part because he believed that Atticus was a character who could speak to the current racial crisis. “I think it’s the first time that the enlightened, liberal Southerner has been put on the screen,” Peck said. “I think it’s the point of view of the fair-minded Southerner that will provide the solution to this thing with the help of fair-minded Northerners and people of good will.” Notes that Peck made on the script in preparation for shooting suggest his ambitions for the role. In the scene on the front porch where Atticus tells Scout not to fight at school, Peck wrote, “NO FIGHT—peasants fight—big principle in my life—tell audience—it’s not the way to help the South! Atticus and his family won—fight on this point—Southern view—problem must be solved by decency—not violence.” When reading Atticus’s summation to the jury, he left another marginal note: “A fight for justice 30 years ago—a pioneer—Atticus was hidden in a backwater.”

  In the novel, more than seventy pages pass before the reader learns, as Scout does from the schoolyard bully Cecil Jacobs, that Atticus would defend Tom Robinson. Yet only fifteen minutes into the film we see Atticus accepting Judge Taylor’s request to take the case. Foote dramatizes the scene, whereas in the book we learn only in passing that Judge Taylor assigned the case to Atticus. In the film, as Judge Taylor builds up to his request, he pauses, stumbles over his words—“I… er… was thinking”—aware of the burden he was placing upon this man already loaded down by his law practice and children who “need a great deal of [his] time.” In Foote’s screenplay, Atticus “reflects thoughtfully” before agreeing to take on Tom Robinson’s defense. Peck’s actual performance isn’t so subtle. In fact, he hardly reflects at all. Atticus knows why the judge has come to see him, and he responds eagerly. “Atticus is a fighter,” Peck wrote in his script notes on this scene, “be alive with the problem… energetic… Atticus is aroused.”

  Foote joins this scene with the one immediately preceding it, which, taken together, establish Atticus’s internal, emotional struggle, professionally and personally. As Atticus puts Scout to bed she asks to see his watch and reads the inscription, “To Atticus, my beloved husband.” Here Foote makes literal the matter of the children’s inheritance. Jem will receive the watch, Scout her mother’s pearl necklace and ring. There is not much else of material worth for him to pass on, Atticus says. The implication is that for the children of a noble man like Atticus Finch, their inheritance will not be measured by a material standard anyway. Atticus walks outside to sit on the porch swing. Through the open window he overhears his children quietly discussing their deceased mother. “How old was I when Mama died?” Scout asks Jem.

  Foote invented other scenes that not only flesh out Atticus’s character but also distill his heroism. Early in the film Atticus encounters Robert E. Lee “Bob” Ewell outside the courtroom. Ewell, assuming an easy familiarity with Atticus as a fellow white man, all but apologizes for not killing Tom Robinson himself. “That would have saved you and the sheriff and the taxpayers a lot of trouble,” Foote has him say, evoking the white taxpayer, whom since Reconstruction southern states had used to justify white rule. Foote also reconfigures the episode in which Bob Ewell spits in Atticus’s face. In the novel, the children learn from Miss Stephanie, the town gossip, that after the trial Ewell had confronted Atticus on the post office corner. It was the most public of places in a town without home mail delivery. Ewell had cursed Atticus, spat in his face, and threatened to kill him. Atticus “didn’t bat an eye.” He took out his handkerchief, wiped off the spittle, and later, to his family, got in one of his dry one-liners, “I wish Bob Ewell wouldn’t chew tobacco.”

  In the film, however, the incident takes place outside Tom Robinson’s home, and the audience views it along with Robinson’s family and Jem. The script says only that “Ewell spits in Atticus’s face. Atticus stares at him, wipes off his face, and starts to get into the car.” In his interpretation of the scene, however, Peck elaborates on the interaction and heightens Atticus’s physical bravery. After Ewell spits in his face, Atticus doesn’t just stare at him. He moves in closer, not turning the other cheek so much as daring Ewell to do it again. Ewell backs away, and only then does Atticus pull out his handkerchief.

  Poor Bob Ewell. It’s a shortcoming of the film
that the white cracker is practically the sole representative of white racism. The rest of Maycomb whites seem so neighborly and reasonable by comparison. The novel itself has been criticized for shortchanging the racism of southern whites, but the book is clearly different from the film on this score. In the novel, for example, Tom Robinson is killed by prison guards whose prejudice and capacity for racial violence are signaled by the seventeen bullet holes found in the dead man’s body. “They didn’t have to shoot him that much,” Atticus observes. Tom’s death evoked the brutality of mob violence that was all too common in the Jim Crow South. Yet in the film, Tom is killed by a single shot from a bumbling deputy who fires merely to wound Tom, but misses his aim.

  Also, the film cuts out the subplot involving the Finches’ elderly neighbor, Mrs. Dubose, which in the novel is important in establishing the depth and the pervasiveness of racism in the white community. Foote preserved it in his original draft of the screenplay. The scene comes after the one in which Atticus shoots the rabid dog. Mrs. Dubose sees the children heading downtown and yells at them, asking if they are proud of their father. When Jem answers yes, Mrs. Dubose smirks that no one else is proud of him. “Old, ugly, nearsighted thing,” she says. “What’s he done to be proud of except defend black trash that ought to be.…” Jem interrupts her, but Mrs. Dubose finishes her thought. “Watch out he’s not shot down in the street one of these days, the way he shot that dog.” In anger, Jem takes a stick and cuts off the tops of Mrs. Dubose’s prized camellia bushes. As punishment, he has to read to Mrs. Dubose after school and on Saturdays. The children learn from Atticus, only after Mrs. Dubose dies, that Jem’s reading had helped her kick her morphine addiction, which the doctor had prescribed to her because of severe arthritis. She was determined to “leave this world beholden to nothing and nobody.” Atticus was glad that his son got to see “what real courage is.”

  The storyline involving Mrs. Dubose serves an essential purpose in the novel by helping the reader imagine the bitter gossip and harsh words spoken against Atticus behind closed doors by members of Maycomb’s established families. Mulligan filmed all of the scenes involving Mrs. Dubose that Foote adapted. It was said that Ruth White, an experienced New York stage actress, gave a stellar performance as Mrs. Dubose, and that the scenes with Phillip Alford, who played Jem, were among his strongest. But the scenes didn’t survive the film’s final cut. The filmmakers felt that they bogged down what by Hollywood standards was already a slow developing movie.

  Film audiences would see Mrs. Dubose only as the cantankerous old lady next door who keeps a Confederate pistol under her shawl. She becomes merely the brief subject of Atticus’s gallantry, as he compares her flower bed to the gardens at Bellingrath, and thereby models for the children a quintessential lesson of small town southern life—how to kill ’em with kindness. But without the other scenes with Mrs. Dubose, the film loses the sense that the hardened, racist opposition to Atticus comes not only from white trash like Bob Ewell, but also from the older generation of Monroeville’s established families, those with a living memory of the Civil War and the alleged tragedies of Reconstruction. They, too, despise Atticus for taking on Tom Robinson’s case.

  Yet Atticus remains undeterred, and in a moral lesson essential to the novel, he explains to his children how Mrs. Dubose could still be a person of courage, deserving of admiration and respect, despite her prejudice. It is the closest Harper Lee comes in Mockingbird to one of Watchman’s central preoccupations: defending proudly conservative segregationists from the facile condescension of the liberal North. In the film, it falls out entirely.

  PAKULA AND MULLIGAN initially hoped to film in Monroeville, but one visit made clear that plan wouldn’t work. The town was no longer the quaint, isolated village of Harper Lee’s youth. Modern glass storefronts dotted the Monroeville square, and TV antennae sprouted on various homes and buildings. South Alabama Street, which fronted the old Lee family home, had fallen victim to commercial sprawl, and, of course, the Lee home itself was no longer there, torn down and replaced by Mel’s Dairy Dream.

  Peck also made the trek to Monroeville to soak up the atmosphere and meet the man who had inspired Harper Lee to create Atticus. Lee family members recalled the quiet, focused intensity of Peck as he spoke with A. C. Lee, studying closely his every mannerism. Amused and bemused in equal parts, A. C. politely abided all the Hollywood folks parading into his hometown, as they made careful studies of the curve of the courtroom bannister, or fussed over how he fiddled with his watch fob. Press accounts of the visit added another layer to the fast-developing mythology of Atticus. To reporters, Peck described A. C. Lee as “a fine old gentleman of eighty-two and truly sophisticated although he had never traveled farther than a few miles from that small Southern town.” A. C. would have chuckled over this, if he ever read it. He wasn’t that big of a rube. His legal and political work had taken him to principal cities throughout the country, including New York; Washington, DC; New Orleans; and Atlanta. But Peck and his fellow Hollywood types were on a mission to bring to the largest popular audience the image of the rural, southern-born sage, a man whose broad-minded probity resulted from nothing more than his own curiosity, conscience, and good sense. As to the particulars, who was A. C. Lee, or his daughter for that matter, to quibble?

  The shoot took place in Los Angeles in the spring of 1962. Mockingbird shared the sprawling lot at Universal with two other productions, The Ugly American and If a Man Answers. Art directors Henry Bumstead and Alexander Golitzen created a Maycomb streetscape using clapboard cottages salvaged from Chavez Ravine that had been scheduled for demolition to make way for Dodger Stadium. Peck made an effort to spend lots of downtime with the child actors, Phillip Alford and Mary Badham, who played Scout, so that they would grow comfortable with him. He had both of them and their families over for a cookout before filming started, and played chess with Alford during breaks. Mulligan had the children rehearse scenes on set casually, and then would slowly, quietly have the cameras moved into position to start filming. Everything seemed to be going swimmingly, the only note of discord being when Pakula had to ask Alford and Badham not to fish in the pond on the back lot.

  As the icon of the liberal white Alabaman was being crafted on a studio lot in California, back in Alabama, two men who a decade earlier represented the closest thing to pass for liberalism in state politics battled it out for governor. So much had changed in the intervening period. George Wallace, the second-place finisher four years earlier, had learned his lesson in his loss to John Patterson. He had discovered that, given the current state of affairs in Alabama and the country, white identity politics was the quickest way for him to get to 51 percent. That had never been the case when he was coming up in Alabama politics. Ever since the Depression helped get Franklin Roosevelt elected, it had been the Black Belt politicians, the handpicked mouthpieces of the Big Mules, who hit the race issue hardest, trying to stir up common folks to vote against the New Deal, which the Mules hated because it buttressed labor unions while increasing their taxes and the regulations on their businesses. But outside of the Black Belt it was hard to get a majority of the vote through racism alone. Most of the whites in these areas were desperately poor, and the New Deal had brought revolutionary changes to their lives. And besides, in north Alabama there weren’t that many black folks around to get stirred up over. It was much better for a politician to talk about what government should be doing for the little guy.

  Yet the importance of civil rights in national Democratic Party politics had been building for years. Wallace had stuck it out in 1948, refusing to bolt the convention in Philadelphia with the Dixiecrats. Yet northern Democrats in Congress continued to push race issues to win votes from southern blacks who had moved into their districts. And then the Supreme Court had changed everything. There looked to be no end to the agitation that black preachers were stirring up in places like Montgomery and Birmingham. And as long as that was the case, there would be no end to the Citizens
’ Councils and the Klan.

  “I started off talking about schools and highways and prisons and taxes—I couldn’t make them listen,” Wallace would explain years later. “Then I began talking about niggers—and they stomped the floor.” Wallace made headlines in 1959 as a circuit judge when he refused to turn over Alabama voting records to the US Civil Rights Commission. Facing contempt charges from District Court Judge Frank Johnson, an old friend from his law school days, Wallace paid Johnson a midnight visit, explaining how he planned to run for governor again. He asked if Johnson could give him ten days or so in jail. “That would help politically,” he said, but “if you send me for any length of time, it’ll kill my mother; my wife won’t care.” Johnson promised to “pop [him] hard” if he didn’t hand over the records. Wallace persisted in his public defiance, all while quietly allowing two federal officials to review the records. Johnson scathingly denounced Wallace’s shenanigans at the contempt hearing, dismissing the charges because Wallace had, in fact, complied. But Wallace denied it all afterward, explaining to a bank of television cameras how he “was willing to risk my freedom” to fight the “evil Civil Rights Commission.”

  George Wallace walking with supporters and his wife Lurleen in 1959, when he plotted his political comeback from his loss in the gubernatorial race the year before. (Getty Images)

  It was the unofficial launch of his 1962 campaign, and a harbinger of the demagoguery to come. Political observers noticed how much livelier and hard-hitting Wallace’s speeches were compared to his performances four years earlier. Aides attributed the change in tone to Wallace’s new speechwriter, Asa Carter, the Citizens’ Councilor-turned-Klansman whose racist extremism Nelle Harper had tried to capture in the character of Grady O’Hanlon in Watchman. One of Wallace’s best applause lines was his pledge to “stand in the schoolhouse door” in order to preserve segregation in Alabama schools.