Mockingbird Film at Fifty

If you read the book then the film follows. I always felt the book was better. To Kill A Mockingbird was just so rich in atmosphere and literary sugar that the film always seemed a bit awkward to me. Maybe it is hard for Hollywood to hit the mark on Southern stories. There is Gone with The Wind and then there is what...Cat on a Hot Tin Roof...or Mississippi Burning...but Mockingbird is Gregory Peck. No doubt. Atticus Finch became him or he became Atticus Finch. But once you saw the movie you were stuck with Gregory Peck in your head.

Scout always seemed a little tougher than the girl in the movie. Jem probably was right. Dill was Truman Capote...good luck with that one. Boo Radley was Robert Duvall. He was awful good looking for Boo but he did seem deranged. But the set never seemed to do the book justice. It just didn't conjure up that small Alabama town in the Depression. And again the novel exists apart in time so Hollywood can only do what it can with lights and sets and actors.

Of course the story set the bar. After Mockingbird there followed a whole rash of bad Southern sheriffs in small towns picking on African Americans and Northerner's. And lots of courtroom scenes in hot stuffy Southern towns. Well it's a great motif and in Mockingbird the blend of a child narrator and the adult story is dead on perfect. There would follow many child narrators set in Southern towns as well (see Tobacco Sticks) But there I go talking about the book again.

I am glad there is a Mockingbird film and I am glad there was a novel. When I tried to get Harper Lee to review my novel Tobacco Sticks, I spoke with a man Roy who said he put the book on her nightstand. She never read it. I am glad. There is really only one Southern novel of racial injustice that is resolved by a man of conscience. And only one film.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Tobacco Sticks... Explosive racial tension  and a dramatic denouement in a sweaty Virginia courtroom are entwined in this haunting tale, which has all the characteristics of a good summer read. Publishers Weekly

Our Gatsby Middleclass Shame

There is lots of middle class shame to go around these days. There are people who cant pay their mortgages, are on food stamps, Medicaid, assistance programs at schools. Middle class people don't talk about these things and this goes back to our Purtian work ethic that says failure is nothing less than losing God. Rich people are people who have served HIM and poor people need not apply. The gospel of the United States is one of shaming people who don't have jobs or who cant find jobs or who are homeless. We just don't really believe people can fail through no fault of their own.

But there is another kind of middle class shame. Almost a Gatsby shame evident in Fitzgerald's novel of course, The Great Gatsby. In the novel Gatsby refers to his home as something of a prize, saying it only took him a month to earn the money to buy the mansion. But at the end after his death we meet his father who said Gatsby used to chastise him because he "ate like a hog" and his father bragged about how Jimmy had pulled himself up and left the dirt poor farming existence of his childhood.

And like Gatsby there is a group of people who are ashamed of where they came from because during the boom they bought mansions. These are middle class people who do not believe they deserve their homes but are now stuck in them. Many are just hanging on in a sort of golden handcuffs perpetual state of illusion. The dream they saw when times were good and middle class people believed they could  be like rich people is now a nightmare where they cant get rid of the costume.

And like Gatsby, who at the end reverted to his roots, unable finally to pull it off for the Daisy Buchanan's of the world, these people are no longer able to pull it off for their neighbors, their friends, and ultimately, themselves.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man...one word...one word...plastics.