FAQ for
To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) More at IMDbPro »

The following FAQ entries may contain spoilers. Only the biggest ones (if any) will be covered with spoiler tags. Spoiler tags have been used sparingly in order to make the page more readable.

For detailed information about the amounts and types of (a) sex and nudity, (b) violence and gore, (c) profanity, (d) alcohol, drugs, and smoking, and (e) frightening and intense scenes in this movie, consult the IMDb Parents Guide for this movie. The Parents Guide for To Kill a Mockingbird can be found here.

Yes. The movie is based on American novelist Harper Lee's 1960 book To Kill a Mockingbird.It is loosely based on Lee's observations of her family and neighbors, as well as on an event that occurred near her hometown in 1936, when she was 10 years old.

The title comes from an old proverb that it's a sin to kill a mockingbird. Atticus Finch (Gregory Peck) gives air rifles as Christmas presents to his daughter Scout (Mary Badham) and his son Jem (Phillip Alford), warning them that they should shoot only at tin-cans but not at mockingbirds. Scout is puzzled by this remark and asks Miss Maudie Atkinson (Rosemary Murphy) about it. Miss Maudie says that: mockingbirds don't do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don't eat up people's gardens, they don't nest in corncribs, they don't do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That's why it's a sin to kill a mockingbird. The mockingbird is seen to be a harmless creature that does its best to please its hearers by singing but is defenseless against hunters. The wrongness of killing the bird is evident, and it becomes a metaphor for the wrongness of harming innocent and vulnerable people.

Boo Radley (Robert Duvall)'s situation was not explored, either in the movie or the book. Some viewers say that Boo is mentally impaired or at least thought so by his family and base that idea on the fact that he stabbed a family member with a pair of scissors. Others point out that the scissors incident was a rumor started by Aunt Stephanie Crawford (Alice Ghostley) and that Arthur Radley was perfectly normal as a kid, just got in with a bad crowd, got arrested, and his extremely religious parents vowed to never let him leave the house again.