Differences Between To Kill A Mockingbird Book And Movie

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The novel To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee was made into a movie in 1962. The story features the Finch family, the Radley family, and the Ewell family, all who watch their town struggle with the Great Depression and racism. One of the main scenes in both the novel and movie in set in the court during the trial of Tom Robinson who has been accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell. In my opinion, the movie and the novel have more similarities than there are differences. The major similarities are in the order of the interviews and their dialogue with the attorneys.
The sequence of the witness interviews is exactly the same in the novel as it is in the film. For instance, the novel went into detail during the interviews with Heck Tate, then Bob Ewell, Mayella Ewell, and lastly Tom Robinson. Just as it was in the movie, while each witness was being interviewed by Judge Taylor and Atticus Finch, Atticus would pause and ask questions with deeper meanings to help him get a better understanding of each story, and just like in the movie, Atticus tested some of witness claims by having Bob Ewell either catch a glass cup or write down his name on a piece of paper to see which is his …show more content…

In the novel a lot of the dialogue was so close to their choice of words in the movie, you could watch the movie and almost be able to know exactly what they were going to say before they said it. The only slight difference in language was the use of foul language in the novel that were substituted in very subtle ways in the movie. For example, in the courtroom scene in chapter 18 when Mayella Ewell responded to Judge Taylor by saying “I said come here nigger, and bust up this chiffarobe for me, I gotta nickel for you.” Unlike that scene from the novel, Mayella referred to Tom in more pleasant and non-racist ways in the movie but still was able to portray a lot of emotion and the heaviness of the