None of the three contestants in this recent episode of the Jeopardy Invitational Tournament figured out the correct response to this Final but it was Boo Radley, the enigmnatic figure in the 1962 classic film, To Kill a Mockingbird.
The actor was a young Robert Duvall (first film role) who has died at the age of 95. Duvall went on to be nominated for an Oscar a bunch of times and won for Tender Mercies. He was in The Godfather and Apocalypse Now and so many more roles where one says, "right, he was in that!" One headline described him as a chameleon because he could shift into just about any role in any genre.
He was also Academy Award nominated for playing the evangelical preacher Sonny Dewey in The Apostle. Duvall fincanced it, wrote the script, directed, and starred in the picture because he was fascinated by the theatricality and the flawed yet sincere faith of many of these preachers. Here is an excerpt from a 1998 article and interview:
What does Duvall think of southern Christianity and revivalist preachers in general? He has a fascination for them which began more than thirty years ago when he visited a Holiness church in the small town of Hughes, Arkansas. He says that he was intrigued by the cadence, rhythms and honest faith he witnessed in the songs and tent meetings there. For Duvall, these revivalist tent meetings are “an important part of American culture.” The preaching is “a distinct American artform.”
“The best preacher I ever met,” says Duvall, “was a 96 year-old black man from a little church in Hamilton, Virginia. He seemed to me more spiritual than the Dalai Lama or Mahatma Gandhi. This guy was great. He had a great cadence of preaching, a great honesty.”
Duvall invited a Jewish film-director friend and his Catholic wife to hear him preach. “It was terrific,” Duvall recounts. “The director told me a year and a half later that he could never get the preacher entirely out of his mind. He was that impressive. A lot of these preachers are phony, but a lot of them are not.”
The Candian talk show host, Dini Petty, did a great interview with Duvall back and he describes how some of the other preachers in the flim are the real deal. So here's the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXVCSCtzT_o
Boo Radley and Scout
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