To Kill a Mockingbird

To Kill a Mockingbird

Being accused and sentenced to death is not something anyone looks forward too. However, to be convicted of something you did not do is even worse. This is what happened to a man named Tom Robinson in the Movie named To Kill a Mockingbird, based on a book written by Harper Lee and the movie directed by Robert Mulligan.

This movie is about a black man who is accused of raping a white woman back in the 1960's era. He goes on trial for this crime and is convicted of the rape. Later in the movie, Scout and Jeb are walking in the woods, coming home from a play or something where Scout is dressed up as a big ham. Someone comes behind them as they are walking through the woods and attacks them and since Scout has the ham costume on she falls down and can not get up to run when her brother Jeb tells her to run. The person who is attacking Jeb is attacked by someone else to save the kids and get him off Jeb. Scout makes it home and her father Atticus asks her what happened and she just keeps saying she don't know. Once the doctor takes care of Jeb's injuries, the Sherriff comes and tells Atticus' the children's father, that someone was lying down the street with a knife wound under his ribs and is dead; and the man who is dead is the father of the white woman who was accusing Tom Robinson of raping her. The Sherriff tells Atticus that he should leave it be and not try Boo for killing the man, since he was the one that saved the kids from the man attacking them and let a crime pay for a crime.

This movie is told in the first-person setting. It is a movie that falls, in my opinion, as a narrative film. These are movies that stories that the film tells and the characters, places, and events represent something conceived in the mind of the film creator. (Looking at Movies, Page 29) This story is probably based on a true occurrence, but the names have been changed to protect the real person it portrays.

My interpretation of what this movie is supposed to mean. Back in the 1930's when the blacks were still considered the "Slaves" to the whites, and that if anyone accused a black person of a crime, then it was something to be believed no matter how much or how little of evidence there was presented on a case such as this one. There was NO evidence proving that the black man raped the woman. The testimony that was presented and based on the black man's physical limitations made it, sound like that the white woman was the one that forced herself onto him and decided after it all happened that she could not be branded as coming onto a black man, so she made up the false accusations against him that he raped her.

I liked this movie; for the time it was filmed those kinds of things were something that was heard of more often than they are now in our century.