How It Compares to the Book and Other Thoughts

Recently I watched The Watsons go to Birmingham, based on the book The Watsons Go to Birmingham 1963. It was wonderfully produced and excellently acted, surely one of the best movies based on a Newbery Honor Book.

One thing that surprised me in The Watsons Go to Birmingham was the showing of To Kill a Mockingbird in a Birmingham theater. For one thing, this would be around August of 1963, and To Kill a Mockingbird was released on February 14 of that year, so the theater was getting it a little late, but possibly the film was delayed or repeated as theaters sometimes do. The other surprising thing is that Mary Badham, who played Scout, was herself from Birmingham and was not welcome in many local homes after appearing in the movie, which was extremely controversial. The book still gets banned a lot. It just seems surprising that a Birmingham theater would show this when there were marches, protests, arrests, and bombings going on all over the place. Can anyone confirm whether this could have happened in real life or was it invented for the movie? It does not appear in the book on which the movie is based, and the movie has a few other moments not in the book. Thanks for any insights.

Now that I have read the book, here are some additional aspects. This is one of the more faithful movie adaptations of a book I have seen. The main differences are that the movie starts with an incident at the beginning of the book and then skips to the trip to Birmingham. The book contains a lot of additional incidents in between portraying the family and their personal relationships. What's more, the book is very cleverly written and you miss some of the author's creativity in the movie.

Another thing, or at least my impression, was that the movie seemed to make it clear that the family spent considerable time in Birmingham. In the book, they were just going to drop off the oldest boy, Byron, to spend the summer and then leave. Next thing, when it seems that relatively little time has passed, an incident takes place that is historically known to have occurred on September 15. Anyone who didn't know the real date would assume this took place about two months earlier. So in the book it's jarring as they've arrived not intending to spend the summer and the next thing it's the middle of September. (Personally this happened to me in real life, twice, when arriving for what was supposed to be a brief visit at Grandma's.) The book clarifies a few things that aren't completely explained in the movie but that time lapse was just completely unexplained and left me grasping and saying what, while I wasn't as confused on that point in the movie. Both are very good.