1962 Savannah, Georgia

Alan J Garfunkel

1948

Savannah Georgia

Interviewed on 1/31/22

by Samuel Thompson

It wasn’t the first movie that I saw, but the first movie I remember seeing was To Kill A Mockingbird. I was 14 years old, and a junior in high school. I ended up going to college at sixteen, as I combined seventh and eighth grade into one year. The thing that really caught my attention in the movie was the trial. My father was a prosecutor, and I would go to his trials. The fact that the central character was a young girl who reminded me a lot of my sister also sparked my interest in the film. At the time, my sister was about the same age as the girl in the movie – Scout.

I went to watch the movie with my younger brother in 1962. My mother drove us and dropped us off at the theater. The funny thing is that my brother would have been about twelve years old, and he always had trouble getting into movie theaters as a child. He was about 6’2” or 6’3” at the time, so he always had trouble convincing the theater workers he was a kid. By then he was taller than me – I was about 5’11” at the time. There was a concession at the theater, and I most likely had popcorn. I had a swimming coach at the time who didn’t let us eat candy.

I remember thinking that the way the trial was written – and the way Gregory Peck acted during the trial – was very representative of how an actual lawyer might conduct himself. I also thought that he came up with excellent reasons for why his defendant was innocent, and yet, it didn’t work because of prejudice. 

I thought all of the acting in the film was excellent. It was a black and white movie, however, at the time there was color photography. Yet, the film was still riveting, and the character development and acting was excellent. However, I thought that the weakness of the film was the scenery. I thought that the scenery looked very staged: it looked like it was filmed on a back lot somewhere. It didn’t look like it was a high budget film outside of the actors. Looking back at it from today’s perspective, I think that the music within the film was a bit unsophisticated. I remember that whenever I was supposed to be nervous while watching the film, the music was there to remind me that I should be nervous. On the other hand, I remember being impressed by the use of light – particularly shadows – which added to the suspense in the film. 

There were no ushers at the theater, although there were ticket takers. The name of the theater was the Lucas Theater in Savannah, Georgia. The seats in the theater were old fashioned seats, and the movie theater was not all the way downtown. It was off a street called Drayton Street. We lived downtown until I was sixteen, so we were probably about a three or four minute drive to the theater. I think my Mom had a Ford at the time. Savannah has a lot of squares with monuments in the middle, and the theater was next to one of those squares. It was a very historic area where the theater was, I think it is still there. 

The overall experience felt unusual because we saw a movie about how unfairly Black Americans were being treated, and the theater was segregated when I saw To Kill A Mockingbird. I remember – to put it in simple terms – going into the theater not thinking much about how the theater was segregated, but when I left it felt odd that the theater was segregated. The movie made me think about segregation and how unfairly Black people in America were treated at the time. When theaters and other community spaces began to integrate, everything began to change.