Us and Gregory Peck

I was briefly convinced we might have a connection to Gregory Peck. The only one of his movies I have seen where he was really miscast is Hornblower (too old, too handsome, too American) where his wife was played by Virginia McKenna, who also played Violette Szabo in Carve Her Name with Pride and who has met the proprietor of the Violette Szabo museum who we met last month. So, a link all the way to Peck.

Except that Hornblower's wife was actually played by Virginia Mayo, not McKenna. So, in breaking news, I can confirm there is no connection between us and Gregory Peck.

Occasion for this non-speculation – watching To Kill a Mockingbird last night. We both read this recently and the Boy has to read it for school, so we thought watching it would also be useful. (He says it wasn’t but what does he know.) I never read it at school for which I’m very grateful – I would have just got bored and I wouldn’t have understood half the nuances. Harper Lee writes in a way that could make a description of a shopping trip interesting. Her voice is so graceful, her tone so matter of fact that you can easily miss how slyly and how deep she is driving the skewer into the heart of that thoroughly untenable society, the Deep South of the 1930s.

Sometimes it doesn’t seem so bad. There’s no slavery. The blacks and whites live in separate communities and, yes, the whites obviously rule the roost but the blacks have their dignity and both sides seem happy with the arrangement. But look closer and you see how far the civil rights movement still had to go. In the courthouse scenes, the blacks sit in the gallery and the whites get the downstairs seats. Atticus spends the night in front of the jailhouse because he knows a lynch mob is bound to turn up – consisting of decent, respectable citizens that he knows personally. All reasonable forensic evidence shows that black Tom Robinson is innocent, but he is still found guilty by a white jury because the alternative is to admit a white woman was lusting after a black man. And he is condemned for his perfectly reasonable answer to a reasonable question – “I felt sorry for her” – because even though he is a decent, hard working family man and she is just ignorant slutty trailer trash, what right does a black man have to feel sorry for a white woman?

Maybe I should have said earlier: spoilers ahead.

Atticus Finch is the heart, soul and conscience of both book and film. There has never been a stronger, more decent man in literature and Gregory Peck was obviously born with the role in his DNA. Which makes his occasional portrayal of loopiness – Ahab in Moby Dick – or sheer evil – Josef Mengele in The Boys from Brazil – all the more impressive.

Apparently Harper Lee herself came to see the filming and at one point she wiped away a small tear at Peck’s performance. When he commented on this after, she said it was because he had a small pot belly just like her father’s. He commented gravely, “that’s just acting.”