Word: maycomb
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...rural South Carolina in 1964, which is just about the time it would have automatically been turned into an Oscar-nominated movie. The obvious reference point is To Kill a Mockingbird, whose girl narrator, Scout Finch, is 6 to Lily's 14, and whose fictional setting is Maycomb, Ala., instead of Bees' Tiburon, S.C. But that was back when most big films tended to serious sentiment. Today, the dominant tone is irreverence, sarcasm, facetiousness. Can a time-capsule movie like this one have any resonance today? Can it find an audience to nurture in the old, noble, now-discredited Hollywood...
...Kill a Mockingbird. Maycomb, Alabama, was a tired old town in the '30s. "Grass grew on the sidewalks, the courthouse sagged in the square. Somehow, it was hotter then. Ladies bathed before noon, after their three o'clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft tea-cakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum. People moved slowly. There was no hurry, for there was nowhere to go, nothing to buy and no money to buy it with. But it was a time of vague optimism. Maycomb County had recently been told that it had nothing to fear...
Whoever said that was dead wrong. In her famous first novel, which won the Pulitzer Prize for 1960, Harper Lee found quite as much to fear as she found to love in Maycomb County-and by Maycomb County she obviously meant the South. Of what was fearful she framed an Alabama melodrama that etched its issues in black and white. Of what was lovable, on the other hand, she made a tomboy poem as full of hick fun as Huck Finn, a sensitive feminine testament to the Great American Childhood. In this film Director Robert Mulligan and Scenarist Horton Foote...
...stands six foot six and has a long jagged scar on his face. His teeth are few, yellow and rotten. His eyes pop, and most of the time he drools. He eats raw squirrels and all the cats he can catch, and whenever an azalea bush dies in Maycomb everybody knows why-Boo breathed...
Scout and her brother live in Maycomb, Alabama, where every family that amounts to anything has a streak-a peculiar streak, or a morbid streak, or one involving a little ladylike tippling at Lydia Pinkham bottles filled with gin. The Finch family streak is a good deal more serious -it is an overpowering disposition toward sanity. This is the flaw that makes Jem interrupt the boasting of a lineage-proud dowager to ask "Is this the Cousin Joshua who was locked up for so long?" And it is what compels Lawyer Atticus Finch, the children's father, to defend...
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