Word: atticus
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...most cerebral President since Woodrow Wilson, Obama has more in common with Atticus Finch than with Arianna Huffington. A persuader by instinct, he is trapped inside a political culture that has lost any instinct for persuasion. That he is the third consecutive President to polarize the electorate - the fourth in five if one looks beyond the posthumous regard accorded Ronald Reagan - reveals more about us than about him. It is no accident that the past three decades have seen the rise of sound-bite politics, of snarky bloggers and strident talk radio, not to mention cable "news" largely preoccupied with...
...Universal Pictures, the sponsor of To Kill a Mockingbird, wanted the role of Atticus to go to its top star, Rock Hudson, whom Mulligan had directed the year before in the romantic comedy Come September. But Pakula and Mulligan held out for Peck, the screen's flintiest rock of movie rectitude. Lee was in enthusiastic agreement, for she had based Atticus on her lawyer father and saw a kinship between him and Peck. On the first day of shooting she told him, "Gregory, you've got a little potbelly just like my daddy," and Peck replied, "Harper, that's great...
...Robinson (Brock Peters), a black man, has been accused of raping a white woman, and Atticus takes on the case - a perilous assignment in an Alabama town in the 1930s. He offers brilliant arguments, demolishes the opposition, convinces each member of the movie audience...and loses. But Atticus has shown courage by putting his reputation on the line. Later in the film, he embodies a kind of pacifist resistance. The white woman's racist father sees him with some blacks and spits in his face. Atticus, with ferocious dignity, takes out a handkerchief, wipes off the insult and walks away...
...Critics of the movie, most prominently Roger Ebert, say that its emphasis on the white man's burden of nobility betrayed a willful ignoring of Tom Robinson, the real person in peril. Atticus loses face; Tom loses his life, but his case is seen not as his or his race's tragedy but as one step on his lawyer's Calvary. Then the plot shifts to the Finches' eccentric neighbor Boo Radley (Robert Duvall, in his first movie role), and Mockingbird forgets about the black man, unfairly convicted by a racist society, to concentrate on the white...
...never really understand a person," Atticus says, "until you consider things from his point of view. Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it." Tolerance ripening into fascination, and then to empathy: that was Mulligan's strength, especially in his psychological portraiture of the young. You could call him the J.D. Salinger of directors and be grateful that, in his movie heart, he stayed so young so long...