To Kill A Mockingbird is a 1962 movie starring Gregory Peck and Mary Badham and it is set in 1932 Alabama. A young black man is falsely accused of raping a confused white woman and Peck plays lawyer Atticus Finch who is assigned to represent the man. The whole town tries to get Finch to drop out of the case but he becomes convinced that the man is innocent and decides to pursue the case. Within the context of this story is the story of Finch’s children and their relationships with various strange characters in and around the town of Maycomb that comes in to play later on in the movie. The two plots intertwine as the movie progresses and what results is a fascinating story that is accented with great acting and backed up with an acknowledged masterpiece of writing. The movie was based on the Pulitzer Prize winning book written by Harper Lee in 1960. When you have a Pulitzer Prize winning book to base your script on and an Oscar nominated actor in Gregory Peck then you can rest assured that To Kill A Mockingbird had all the makings of an American movie classic.

The Academy Awards that To Kill A Mockingbird won are interesting to examine. Gregory Peck won his first, and only, Academy Award for his role in To Kill A Mockingbird. It was not his first nomination as Peck had been nominated 4 times previously for the Oscar but it was his first win. Winning the Oscar for best screenplay based on another medium for his work in To Kill A Mockingbird was Horton Foote. Foote had the task of taking all of the aspects of this award winning novel and boiling them down into a movie format and that must not have been easy at all. The movie also won an Oscar for its use of black and white instead of color. It seems to be a strange thing to give an Oscar for but when you watch To Kill A Mockingbird you begin to realize the vitally important role that the black and white motif played in the movie’s success. We will never know if the movie done in color would have been as effective but what we can see is the power of the black and white and the symbolic black versus white message it sends which is the core of the plot of the movie.

To Kill A Mockingbird was a huge box office success to go along with its critical acclaim at the Academy Awards ceremony. It also helped launch the career of iconic actor Robert Duvall as it was Duvall’s first movie. It was often said that To Kill A Mockingbird was one of Gregory Peck’s favorite movies that he made and To Kill A Mockingbird also wound up being Clark Kent’s favorite movie in the comic series Superman. The effect of great movies can be felt for years and reaches many people before it is done. That is the case with To Kill A Mockingbird which helped to launch the career of a future great actor and helped to put a well deserved exclamation point at the end of another great actor’s career by winning him his first Oscar. It remains as one of the greatest American movies ever made and it also continues to inspire people all over the world. The imagery runs deep in To Kill A Mockingbird and the back story behind its creation is almost as interesting as the movie itself. But To Kill A Mockingbird occupies a hallowed place in the history of Hollywood and it will always be remembered as one of the greatest movies ever made.