To the literary world, Harper Lee was known as one of the greatest
one hit wonders of all time. At the young age of thirty-four, Lee won
the Pulitzer Prize for To Kill A Mockingbird, which was published in 1960. Mockingbird
is a coming-of-age story, set in the mid-thirties in fictional small
town Maycomb, Alabama. The story, to a large extent autobiographical,
is comprised of narrated recollections of Scout Finch, looking back on
her childhood. As a six year old she idolized her father, Atticus, a
well respected country lawyer called upon by the town's judge to defend a
black man charged with the rape of a white woman. Of course, the jury
which will decide the defendant's fate is all white.
By
the time I was a high school upperclassman in the mid-sixties, there
were very few of my contemporaries who had not read Lee's book. It was
required reading in many schools, and word-of-mouth recommendations also
led to its popularity. People eagerly awaited Lee's next book, which
undoubtedly would have debuted at # 1 on the New York Times Best Seller
List. Only one problem with that prognostication: Lee chose not to
write again, preferring instead to live most of her life as far out of
the spotlight as possible in the tiny burg where she was born,
Monroeville, Alabama.
Two months ago, an
astonishing secret was revealed, much to the delight of fiction readers
and book sellers everywhere. Lee announced that she had, after all,
written another novel, which will be published in July 2015. The new
book, Go Set A Watchman, was penned a few years before Mockingbird. The Watchman plot occurs while Scout is a young adult who travels back to Maycomb to visit Atticus. Her then-editor reviewed Lee's draft of Watchman, and asked for a rewrite focusing on Scout as a little girl. That rewrite became Mockingbird. The manuscript for Watchman
was purportedly misplaced, remaining undiscovered until late last year,
when it was found attached to some of Lee's writing worksheets in a
cabinet.
In 1962, when Mockingbird was
the hottest book on the shelves, Universal Studios produced a movie of
the same title, enrolling Gregory Peck, a Hollywood heartthrob, to play
Atticus. (Universal originally intended the role for Rock Hudson, but
production delays caused Hudson to bow out.) Harper Lee revealed in an
interview that she modeled the character, Atticus, after her own father,
Amasa Lee, who was a country lawyer too. Sadly, Amasa died during the
filming of the movie. Lee was so impressed with Peck's work that she
gave him Amasa's gold watch, which he had worn to court during his forty
year legal career. Peck wore that watch when he accepted the Best
Actor Oscar at the 1963 Academy Awards. It was the only Oscar Peck ever
won in his brilliant acting career which included over sixty films.
***
Here are the movies I saw at The Quentin Estates during the first quarter of 2015:
1.
Airport (1970 drama; Burt Lancaster is a married Chicago airport
manager who juggles an affair with airline rep Jean Seberg with his main
duty of getting Runway Two-Niner cleared for co-pilot Dean Martin's
bomb-damaged plane's landing.) B+
2. Cat On A Hot Tin Roof (1958
drama; Elizabeth Taylor is married to Paul Newman, an alcoholic who's
the only one in his family not interested in the wealth of his
terminally ill father, Burl Ives.) B+
3. Foxcatcher (2014 drama;
Steve Carell is a mysterious tycoon who recruits Olympic gold medal
winning wrestler Channing Tatum and his brother, Mark Ruffalo, to live
and train on his estate.) C-
4. A Hard Day's Night (1964 comedy;
the Beatles have a big televised show to perform in London, but, to the
consternation of their manager, their prep time is up for grabs because
they're too busy frolicking in the big city and trying to keep
grandfather Wilfrid Brambell out of jail.) A
5. Nevada Smith
(1966 western; Steve McQueen crosses the western US to track down the
three killers of his father and Ciowa mother.) B+
6. Patton (1970
war biopic; George C. Scott is General Patton, an egotistical, driven
combat leader whose often outlandish, boorish behavior and big mouth get
him into trouble with his superiors and DC big whigs.) A-
7. To
Kill A Mockingbird (1962 drama; Gregory Peck, a widowed father of two
grade school age kids, is a small town Alabama lawyer called upon to
defend a black man on a charge of raping a white woman.) A
8. The
Verdict (1982 courtroom drama; Paul Newman is an ambulance-chasing
Boston lawyer who takes on smooth opposing counsel James Mason in a
medical malpractice suit.) B+
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