Teenager Ben Mockridge feels life in a Wild West farm town has nothing better to offer then horse-cart racing with other hicks, so he naively begs cattle company owner Frank Culpepper to engage him as youngest cowboy for a long cattle trail to a fort, his mother barely notices. Ben doesn’t even seem to get it when he’s told to report as ‘little Mary’ to the old cook, whose words cowboy is something you do only if you have nothing better gradually become clear. Instead of an exciting heroic macho life, it’s endless hard work, dumb chores and embarrassment, even getting literally caught with his pants down, robbed of his horse, witnessing unpunished crimes…

An African American detective is asked to investigate a murder in a racist southern town.

In a small Alabama town in the 1930s, scrupulously honest and highly respected lawyer, Atticus Finch puts his career on the line when he agrees to represent Tom Robinson, a black man accused of rape. The trial and the events surrounding it are seen through the eyes of Finch’s six-year-old daughter, Scout. While Robinson’s trial gives the movie its momentum, there are plenty of anecdotal occurrences before and after the court date: Scout’s ever-strengthening bond with older brother, Jem, her friendship with precocious young Dill Harris, her father’s no-nonsense reactions to such life-and-death crises as a rampaging mad dog, and especially Scout’s reactions to, and relationship with, Boo Radley, the reclusive ‘village idiot’ who turns out to be her salvation when she is attacked by a venomous bigot.