I guess that the ubiquity of home video has made the traditional Hollywood practice of showing film clips during celebrities' send-offs commonplace from one end of the continent to the other, but those shown at today's memorial were significant for their taste, restraint, and brevity.

Actor Brock Peters, who'd been close to Peck since Peters played Tom Robinson, the unjustly accused black man whom Atticus Finch defends in TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, gave a splendid, moving eulogy that seemed to sum up all that will be missed most by those who knew Peck best.

Though Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" from the Ninth Symphony was sung as a hymn during the semi-liturgical service (the lyrics didn't seem to be a direct English translation from Schiller's original German text), the musical heart and soul of the memorial was, not unexpectedly, the Main Title from Elmer Bernstein's TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD score, played several times during the latter part of the service and as the attendees departed.

Bernstein (who couldn't attend today) has related that after he received the commission to score MOCKINGBIRD, he screened the film and wondered for weeks how to approach it, until it finally dawned on him that the music had to be simple, like a nursery rhyme, because the events depicted in the book and film adaptation were a fable, told from the perspective of Atticus Finch's children. Such an approach may seem obvious to us now, seen from the perspective of forty years' hindsight and innumerable emulations of Bernstein's original inspiration, but at the the time it was quite novel, and maybe even a little bit daring.

That makes the choice of Bernstein's TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD music all the more appropriate for the memorial, in that the passing of a good man or woman from vigorous life into memory is a story older than history, one that makes children of us all.

I don't normally look in this window, but I am glad I did. Thank you for your report and heartfelt tribute to Gregory Peck. It clearly shows the warm and generous person I know you to be.

quote:

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"...conscience does makes cowards of us all."

-- Hamlet, Act III, Scene I

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