Review: ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ arrives at the Hollywood Pantages with troubling timeliness
“This is a remarkable book, a stunning work of art that has never been seen before and a moving and fascinating testament to the American tradition of tolerance.”
ByKirkus Review
“To Kill a Mockingbird” is not exactly the kind of book you pick up for the first time in a used bookstore. It is not usually on your reading list for an educational course, nor the kind of thing that would get you moved to tears.
That’s exactly what it was for me, and I was very upset about it. I can’t remember when I first read it, but it probably happened in my adolescence, when I was already well-settled in my parents’ house in the Kansas City suburbs, surrounded by the books and videos on my own shelves. I was already a reader. So the fact that the book made me sob, I imagine was like the first time I watched “The Color Purple” with my parents, and I think we had never seen anything like it in our lives.
I first saw the movie on TV when I was nine, and I have watched it, and loved it, dozens of times since then. This book is also among the very best books I have read, and is one of the very best movies I have ever seen. It is, quite simply, an American masterpiece.
The film is based on Harper Lee’s bestselling 1950 novel, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1952. Lee, who had died of a stroke, was only 47 when she wrote the book. She turned it into a film that won nine Oscars, and has been hailed by both critics and the public as some of the best American literature ever produced. It was the first Best Picture from the Academy.
“To Kill a Mockingbird” was made over a period of eight years. A screenplay was first written by the