So I never read this story in school or anything, so while I’ve obviously heard stuff about this movie, all I really knew is that Atticus Finch is a famous civil rights attorney who defends Boo Radley from being unjustly accused of murder, and has a daughter named Scout.

Turns out most of that isn’t even true. Boo Radley is a character who gets mentioned a lot in the movie, but barely exists in it at all. (I’d wonder why he’s even referenced so much in it, but there are probably a zillion high school homework papers that answer that question.)

So the movie really is two separate things.

The first of those is a movie about kids and their family. This movie is great! The kids are some of the most realistic kids on camera, and they feel like actual kids and they do actual kid stuff, and seeing the dynamics of the Finch family play out is A++ movie material.

The second movie, though, is a Very Special Episode where Atticus Finch defends a Black guy (who is actually named Tom Robinson, not Boo Radley) unjustly accused of raping a white woman. It is obvious within 1.3 nanoseconds that really her husband beat her and there’s nothing legitimate about this accusation, which makes the extended “BUT ISN’T IT TRUE THAT YOU’RE LEFT-HANDED?” courtroom drama seem pointless and silly. Nobody on the jury is interested in facts, so why are we sitting here hammering them home like this? I guess maybe the audience is supposed to be surprised at a transparently unjust outcome, having been raised on a diet of heroic-lawyer fiction? I dunno, it seemed weird to me.

And then of course as a zillion people have observed over the years, this anti-racist story is really all about the white lawyer, who gets to walk away at the end just being sad about the guy who died, so it seems off-point.

But so yeah, my take on this is that it’s a well-made, well-acted movie about a family that gets pointlessly derailed in the middle into an extended courtroom scene, and that if you take all that out, you have the bones of an entirely different, but probably better, movie. Presumably it landed differently in 1962, but I think it has not aged well.