“To Kill a Mockingbird” is, in many ways, a very likeable undistinguished film. The music by Elmer Bernstein saves the film: it coats the events in the beautiful nostalgic gauze of melancholy and revelation.
Gregory Peck– regardless of the adoring ministrations of thousands of fans–and the Oscar for “Best Actor” was a wooden actor of limited range. Pauline Kael says, “Peck was better than usual, but in that same virtuously dull way.” He won the Oscar for the role, not the performance.
That his performance almost perfectly suited the tone of “To Kill a Mockingbird” was an accident, or the result of a director’s choice to leave well enough alone. Brock Peters was very good as Tom Robinson, and most of the supporting cast was adequate. Philip Alford as Jem was okay.
But Mary Badham as Scout was actually quite awful. She was stiff and awkward and had no sense of timing at all. Look at the scene in which a dinner guest pours syrup all over his plate of food: it is hacked to pieces. It looks like they tried desperately to save it in the editing but I can’t imagine that the director was ever happy with the end result.
There is a story that Philip Alford (Jem) became irritated with her because he was forced to eat the same food over and over again while she tried to get her lines right in the syrup scene. He and and John Megna (Dill) took their revenge when they later filmed a scene in which she gets into a car tire and rolls down the street. The two boys pushed her so vigorously she was almost injured.
It is quite believable that the director and casting crew thought they had the right girl after an audition and then discovered, gradually, that she was really not very good. It would have been difficult and expensive to replace her once footage had been shot. I suspect they tried to make the best of it.
The scene with Boo Radley at the end makes me cringe. Scout just snuggles right up to this strange frightening recluse without the slightest reserve. In fact, that whole plot sequence, of Bob Ewell trying to assassinate Scout, is ridiculous and here is once case when they should have abandoned the book.
It is a mistake.
Incidentally: why did Harper Lee never write another novel? I believe she couldn’t. She had one book in her, a pleasant combination of memory and social activism, and she knew, better than anyone else, her own limitations, that anything she tried to put out afterwards would be a terrible disappointment.
[Edited 2022-05-06]
By the way, did you know that the character of “Dill” was inspired by the young Truman Capote? Yes, young Capote and Lee lived in the same town for a time, and they continued their friendship through the 1960’s when she helped him write “In Cold Blood”.