The actor, who would have been just four years shy of his centennial this year, brought a perfect mix of compassion and decency to the film adaptation of Harper Lee's novel, To Kill A Mockingbird as Southern lawyer Atticus Finch, who takes on the task of defending a black man accused of sexually assaulting a white woman--an act that not only endangers his career in his small town home, but also the lives of himself and his two small children. Mockingbird has the rare distinction of not only being one of the great works of American literature, but also a pillar of the American filmmaking canon, directed by Robert Mulligan and flawlessly evoking Lee's novel without becoming an "issues" movie about race relations in the U.S..

As a black man, there's maybe nothing so frustrating to me as the "black people problem" movie where the white savior has to come in and reconcile the history of racial inequality and injustice that have bedeviled this young country since its inception, and yet, 50 years later, no film has matched Mockingbird in terms of showing that the it's not something that can be "fixed" and the beauty of Atticus Finch is that he is heroic but his character isn't allowed to simply save the falsely accused man and declare race relations in Maycomb, Alabama resolved--the resolution to that particular plot thread is more complex and heartbreaking than that and I remain thankful that both the morally instructive film and book exist (something I rarely feel about works of art, but there it is).

By contrast, Spellbound is a little trickier and so is Peck's character, an amnesiac convinced that he's murdered a psychiatrist and depending on the the lovely Ingrid Bergman to help restore his name and his memory. Look at the much younger-looking Peck across the two roles: one a fairly young man in Spellbound, lanky, assured, and slightly dangerous, the other in middle age, rigid and upstanding--even his voice has more resonance and power in the latter film.

I admit, I was actually a little unprepared for Spellbound (yes, this is actually my first time with Hitchcock's psychodrama) having watched the disc only a couple of weeks out from catching Suspicion for the first time. I was worried that this would be another movie where Hitch (who has a well-documented, "complicated" relationship with the women and female characters in his film) would simply torment another female lead for roughly two hours with another morally repugnant leading man (Cary Grant's character in Suspicion is a terrifically impossible asshole, not to put too fine a point on it). But contrary to my expectations, Spellbound is actually carried by Bergman's analytical, methodical, and yet intuitive character, playing the private investigator and solving the mystery of her new love's missing identity. I love that in effect, she saves not only Peck's character, but herself. The movie is also ably aided by dream sequences engineered by Salvador Dali, apparently a hugely commercial move at the time given the surrealist's popularity in the 40's.

Both discs come packed with special features (Mockingbird is practically overloaded) but there is a bit of a discrepancy in the picture quality of both movies, with Mulligan's movie coming in clear, crisp, and pristine in a lovely restoration, while Spellbound is a somewhat rougher affair with significant grain and some very noticeable flaws toward the final act of the movie where the black and white image is very, very soft (and very noticeable in the last scene of the film). It's not terrible by any stretch, but it would have been nice to get something a bit cleaner than this for Hitchcock's work.

Both Spellbound and To Kill A Mockingbird are available now on Blu-ray.