By Tatiana Craine/Andrew Sarris
Translator: Yi Ersan
Proofreading: Issac
Source: Village Voice
Last week, the entire literary community mourned Harper Lee, the author of "To Kill a Mockingbird," who died On Feb. 19 at the age of 89.
Harper Lee
Harper Lee's second novel, The Heart of Watch, released after many years, caused a sensation in 2015, and of course there was a lot of controversy. Some argue that Overwatch should not have been on the shelves at all, and That Kill a Mockingbird has been banned by the school library for a long time since its release in 1960.
Just two years after the original was published, a year after it won the Pulitzer Prize, the movie "To Kill a Mockingbird" was brought to the big screen. Like books, the film has become a beloved part of American culture in the decades since its release.
To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)
Perhaps the most impressive cast of the film is Gregory Pike as the iconic atticus Finch, Mary Badham as the precocious and sincere Scott, Robert Duval as the ghostly Buadley who made his big-screen debut, and Brock Pitts as the heartbreaking, ill-fated Tom Robinson.
"To Kill a Mockingbird" maintains a 92% freshness rating on Rotten Tomatoes, an old movie from 54 years ago — but at the beginning of its release, "Village Voice" did not have a good rating for the film.
Critic Andrew Sarris was critical of the film's creative team, going so far as to say, "By completely formal standards, it's not a movie at all." Sarris criticized director Robert Mulligan and screenwriter Horton Ford for clumsily bringing Harper Lee's insights into race, injustice and small-town life in the South to the screen.
Even Gregory Peck was not spared the gunfire of Sarris, who the "Village Voice" critic credited him as a "hypocritical" social justice warrior who was simply saved from a stereotypical black character who was portrayed as a typical martyr.
What does Harper Lee himself think of the film? She has publicly stated that she liked Parker's performance ("From the moment I saw him, I knew there would be no problem, because he was Atticus") and Ford's script ("Having Horton Ford write the script is the luck of all of us involved in the filming of Kill a Mockingbird.") I think that's important").
Here's Sarris's sharp critique of To Kill a Mockingbird:
Black people are not robins
Andrew Sarris (March 7, 1963, Village Voice magazine)
"To Kill a Mockingbird" links child fervor to the black problem, and the consequences are disastrous. Before considering the confusion of the film's knowledge, it should be noted that even by completely formal standards, this is not a movie at all.
Horton Ford's screenplay is nothing more than a vague summary of Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize bestseller, while Robert Mulligan's director is obsessed with Harper Lee's concise depictions of action scenes. For example, Lee describes the shadow of a ghostly neighbor slowly obscuring a little boy. So Mulligan mechanically photographed the shadow of a ghostly neighbor slowly obscuring a little boy.
What could be more cinematic than this? Unfortunately, a director who succeeds in creating a shadow without conveying its substance is just deceiving the audience. Mulligan mistakenly copied literary effects into the film, and this extremely violent climax was defeated.
The reader can always understand the previously confusing action after a page or two, but the moviegoer wants to know immediately what is happening in front of them, and all the conversation afterwards cannot redeem the forgotten image.
It's too simple
What makes many critics dizzy about "To Kill a Mockingbird" is the trick of the child's perspective. The camera was lowered by a foot and moved rapidly with the children's irregular movements. It seems to open up a new world, and everything becomes deeper and more creative.
A bad director can easily reduce the adult world to a naïve allegory, like "The only thing a mockingbird does is create enjoyable music for us." They don't eat in people's gardens, they don't nest in corn warehouses, they just sing their hearts for us. That's why it's a sin to kill a mockingbird."
The film begins rather innocently, with the camera following a little girl — even cuter than the girl in another overrated movie, Flowers And Warblers. Set in the early 1930s in the town of Meigang, Alabama, the novel is filled with relatives, neighbors, and a variety of residents who form an intricate political and social network, but the town of Meigang in the film is desolate, sparsely populated, and lacks spatial unity.
When Gregory Pike decided to defend a black sharecropper falsely accused of raping a white woman, Pike's adorable children helped stop the mob that enforced the lynching and quietly watched the courtroom scene from an observation deck set for blacks. (I dare say that thirty years later, the courts in Meigang are still racially segregated, and that's the end of Lee's cleverly disguised progressive argument.) )
Fictional characters of liberals
As usual, the Negro in this film is not so much a plump character as a fictional character of liberalism—a projection of a Negro who gains moral superiority through suffering and depravity. Not only did he apparently bear the innocent accusations, but he was much more noble than the white father and daughter who accused him; he also possessed an extremely pure heart.
Bullock Pitts strives to break through the fog of moral whitewashing, but is eventually captured by Pike's hypocritical nobility. When blacks were convicted in court for lack of evidence, Pike offered a glimmer of hope for an appeal. (That was when the "House of the Nine Elders" was in power—The Nine-Old-Men Court was the nickname for the Supreme Court, which was made up of nine justices who confronted President Roosevelt in 1937.) )
The Negro was later shot (off-screen) for attempting to escape, and Pike was so dismayed by this that he lamented the black impulses in accordance with some reverse logic that only liberal Southerners could understand.
Here, the film attempts to appease southern audiences by detaching itself from the sacred text of the novel, omitting the presentation of the 14 bullets fired into the fugitive's body. Lee, Ford, or Maligen never seemed to think the black man's escape was as heinous as the man sitting behind me in the theater as heinous as his unjust verdict. In addition to casting doubt on local police claims about raping white women, unbiased viewers have reason to aesthetically question the veracity of something that isn't shown on screen.
A write-off of grievances
The plot of the story arranges a certain twist of evil and evil retribution, and the red neck that stirs up all the trouble gets its due retribution when he tries to murder Pike's children. The sheriff decided to provide shelter for the killer of the red neck so that the dead could bury the dead and all grievances could be written off.
This is a heart-warming solution in novels and movies. However, this moral arithmetic problem seems unanswerable. An innocent black man and a ferocious red neck are hard to counteract each other. The kind inhabitants of Meigang town find a nasty victim in one grave and a convenient scapegoat in another grave, how clean and painless!
Then again, Southerners are just like "us," good and bad. So what? If you read the last letter left by the German soldiers trapped in Stalingrad, it is certainly hard to believe that this country has monsters that provoke war, but the fact that millions of corpses are an objective existence.
In a sense, when a social system is too evil and unfair, it is difficult for individual ethics to bear any weight. Perhaps blacks and red necks are essentially brothers, victims of the same system. Perhaps both are at the heart of some kind of new political alliance. It's too early to draw conclusions, but it's too late for blacks to serve as moral touchstones for white conscience. The Negro is not a mockingbird.