Word: megna
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Kill a Mockingbird. Like the Pulitzer Prize novel by Harper Lee, this picture is two things in one: a black-and-white meller and a tomboy ode to the Great American Childhood. Gregory Peck is appealing as the father figure, and the children (Mary Badham, Phillip Alford, John Megna) are three little darbs...
...squeaks, and the children turn to stare at a tiny boy (John Megna) with huge buck teeth...
...fact, its side-porch sociology is simply fatuous: the Negro is just too goody-good to be true, and Peck, though he is generally excellent, lays it on a bit thick at times-he seems to imagine himself the Abe Lincoln of Alabama. But the children are fine. John Megna, who played in Broadway's All the Way Home, has talent as well as teeth. Mary Badham and Phillip Alford, a couple of nice kids the producer found in Birmingham, don't have to act right-they just are right...
...loud; the play is far too long in ending and then ends badly. Other things in the play seem insufficient and even flat: scenes lack outward drama without displaying any of Agee's inner force. But, with good performances by Colleen Dewhurst, Arthur Hill, Aline MacMahon and John Megna (as the small son), the people, most of them, smell of life and their behavior smacks of truth. Miles apart as in many ways they are, Agee, like Chekhov, really substituted feeling for drama, like Chekhov tinged sadness with humor, and showed a compassion that though it might not acquit...