Harper Lee: From Mockingbird to Watchman

Filmmaker Mary McDonagh Murphy offers a very slightly updated version of her 2011 documentary Hey, Boo: Harper Lee & To Kill a Mockingbird (VL-9/11), featuring a revised opening and extended ending. In between, to quote VL reviewer Kathy Fennessy's review: “This touching documentary…looks at the stunning success of Harper Lee's semiautobiographical 1960 novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, which won a Pulitzer Prize, inspired a beloved movie starring Gregory Peck, and has sold over 50 million copies worldwide. Although Lee led a closely guarded private life, the filmmaker draws on enough family history here to provide the necessary context for telling the story of the Alabama writer who would never pen another book. Murphy starts with a look at Lee's Monroeville childhood, including her friendship with Truman Capote, who inspired the character of Dill Harris, companion to young narrator Scout in the novel. Archival photos and excerpts from letters provide the backdrop for commentary from assorted individuals, including well-known figures such as Oprah Winfrey, Richard Russo, Tom Brokaw, and Andrew Young, as well as Mary Badham, who played Scout in the 1962 film; Lee's 99-year-old attorney sister, Alice Finch Lee; and others who've known her through the years, such as Michael and Joy Brown, a couple who not only befriended Lee while she was working in New York but also gave her enough money to take a year off to write what would eventually become her iconic novel. Some of the commentators here read passages from the book, which are set to scenes from Robert Mulligan's Oscar-winning motion picture. Lee herself stopped granting interviews in the 1960s, so Murphy incorporates archival radio material to fill that void.” A brief new section on the 2015 publication of Go Set a Watchman features comments from HarperCollins' president Michael Morrison, as well as Lee's longtime friend, Joy Brown. The interviews were conducted prior to the book's publication, so their remarks are necessarily vague (although Brown insists that Lee was in favor of Watchman being published). The sole DVD extra is a featurette that is misleadingly titled “Mary Murphy visits with Harper Lee in her hometown on June 30, 2015,” which features some still photos of Lee receiving the first copy of Watchman with muddled audio of Lee responding, but primarily consists of interview clips with the insiders who engineered the book's publication, including Lee's attorney, Tonya Carter, whose account of how she discovered the manuscript for Watchman has since been challenged. Regardless, this is still a fine portrait of Lee that also pays tribute to the incredible impact of To Kill a Mockingbird. Recommended. Aud: H, C, P. (R. Pitman)