American Directors: Robert Mulligan

by John Belton

John Belton is Professor of English and Film at Rutgers University. He has a Ph.D. in Classical Philology from Harvard (1975) and a B.A. in Greek and Latin from Columbia University. He is the author of five books, including “Widescreen Cinema” (Harvard, 1992), winner of the 1993 Kraszna Krausz prize for books on the moving image, and “American Cinema/American Culture” (McGraw Hill, 1994), a textbook written to accompany the PBS series American Cinema. A revised edition of this book will be published by McGraw Hill in July 2004. He is currently under contract to McGraw Hill to write an Intro to Film textbook focusing on film and culture. He has edited three books; his most recent book is an edited anthology, “Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window” ( Cambridge, 2000). He edits a series of books on film and culture for Columbia University Press (1989-on), is a former member of the National Film Preservation Board (1989-96), and former Chair of the Archival Papers and Historical Committee of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (1985-96). He is also an associate editor of the film journal, Film History. His research interests are in film technology, film aesthetics, culture and film, American film history, and classical film theory.

( This essay first appeared in “American Directors, Vol. II,” by Jean-Pierre Coursodon, with Pierre Sauvage (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1983).  Reprinted by permission of John Belton and Jean-Pierre Coursodon.)

Over the past fifteen years, Robert Mulligan has, with little or no critical acclaim, directed a series of films as astonishing for their stylistic subtlety as for their emotional power. The sixties, due in large part to Andrew Sarris’s auteur polemics, marked the emergence of the director as superstar, each director with his name, like Capra’s, displayed prominently above the title of his film. Mulligan, however, sees himself more as a collaborator than as a superstar; his name, more often than not, lays buried in the credits. In spite of his popular success with films like To Kill a Mockingbird and Summer of ’42, Mulligan has kept a low public profile, rarely giving interviews or publicizing his films. Even though the British Film Institute singled him out for a retrospective in 1971, Mulligan has remained a director without recognition in his own country.

Mulligan’s self-effacing denial of directorial authorship and his relative anonymity in the industry are part and parcel of the esthetic vision that makes him an auteur. His films do not spring fully armed—like Athena—from his brain but rather are slowly shaped into form through his sensibility. Mulligan is clearly not the author of his films in the same way that Ingmar Bergman is; he does not create his own characters or stories or write the dialogue. But Mulligan is a storyteller, interpreting the stories of others. As Mulligan describes his role, “Things have to sift through me. That’s me up there on the screen. The shooting, the editing, the use of music—all that represents my attitude toward the material.” In his role as storyteller, Mulligan interposes his personality and sensitivity between the tale and the audience; he makes the story his own by supplying attitude. It is this attitude or tone that becomes the true subject of a Mulligan film, not character or plot. Thus in a Mulligan film, no single individual—director, screenwriter, producer, or actor—stamps the film with his personality; the feelings generated by Mulligan’s view of specific characters in specific situations and settings are what count most.

Mulligan, as interpreter, chooses preexisting plots and characters for the stories of his films. His best films have been based on best-selling novels that have in common strong subjective narrations and settings that are inseparable from character and plot. To Kill a Mockingbird was based on the Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel by Harper Lee; Baby, the Rain Must Fall had as its source screenwriter Horton Foote’s play, The Traveling Lady; Inside Daisy Clover was based on Gavin Lambert’s novel about Hollywood studios and stars; Up the Down Staircase on schoolteacher Bel Kaufman’s popular book on her experiences in a New York City high school; The Stalking Moon on Theodore V. Olson’s novel; Summer of ’42 on Herman Raucher’s nostalgic best-seller; and The Other on former actor Tom Tryon’s immensely successful, thirties gothic novel. Mulligan’s flops during this period, on the other hand, were based either on original screenplays (Love With the Proper Stranger, though not a disaster, does not equal Baby, the Rain Must Fall) or on unremarkable novels (The Pursuit of Happiness and The Nickel Ride). Even in his period as contract director at Paramount and Universal, Mulligan relied heavily on best-sellers (Jimmy Piersall’s Fear Strikes Out and Garson Kanin’s The Rat Race), autobiographies (Fernando Waldo Demera’s life was the basis for The Great Imposter) and novels (Jan de Hartog’s The Spiral Road, a story of an agnostic doctor’s discovery of God in the Lloyd C. Douglas mold).

The number of Mulligan films based on presold properties tells us less about Mulligan, however, than about industry practices in the sixties and seventies (though Mulligan’s television work in the fifties also consisted largely of adaptations (e.g., David Copperfield, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, The Moon and Sixpence, The Member of the Wedding, and The Catered Affair). Original screenplays became less and less marketable; best-sellers whose popularity had been proven guaranteed film financiers a return on their money. Mulligan’s films with producer Alan J. Pakula, though the director’s best, do reflect the packaging psychology predominant in the industry during the sixties; a presold novel or play and a presold star (Gregory Peck, Steve McQueen, Natalie Wood, Christopher Plummer, Sandy Dennis, Eva Marie Saint) insured a profit at the box office. The Pakula-Mulligan team produced a string of distinctive films: Fear Strikes Out, To Kill a Mockingbird, Love With the Proper Stranger, Baby, the Rain Must Fall, Inside Daisy Clover, Up the Down Staircase, and The Stalking Moon.

After The Stalking Moon, Pakula and Mulligan dissolved their partnership, Pakula choosing to produce and direct his own productions. His first film, The Sterile Cuckoo, was an adolescent love story reminiscent of the films he and Mulligan had made, but with Klute Pakula established his own identity as a film maker, and his subsequent films all deal, as no Mulligan film does, with the struggle between the individual and the invisible machinery of a corrupt corporate power, striking a decidedly more moral attitude and a more political note than any Mulligan film, even the seemingly committed and political The Pursuit of Happiness.

Mulligan, on the other hand, has turned inward, toward a more personal, intimate drama (Mulligan himself delivers the first-person narration of Summer of ’42, with whose adolescent experiences the director, seventeen years old in 1942, perhaps identifies). His recent films are clearly extensions of the sensitive Pakula-Mulligan best-seller projects of the sixties but without the star packaging on which Pakula seems to rely. Mulligan’s films, retreating from the real world to which Pakula anchors his suspense melodramas, have become more and more subjective, beginning with Summer of ’42, which concerns the real but nostalgically magnified memories of one character, culminating in The Other, which explores one child’s fanciful recreation of his dead twin, and continuing into The Nickel Ride, which contains a quite disturbing fantasy sequence in which the hero imagines a bloody battle with the men sent to kill him.

Mulligan’s choice of subject matter lacks the topicality of Pakula’s. His choice of period setting—the thirties in The Other and the forties in Summer of ’42—fortunately coincided with the revival of popular interest in these periods, and Summer of ’42 became the biggest box-office success of his career.

Mulligan’s interest in the reality of feelings, imagination, and memory is apparent even in his very first film, Fear Strikes Out, which deals with the nervous breakdown of centerfielder Jimmy Piersall, played by a pre-Psycho Tony Perkins whose youthfulness and latent emotional instability Mulligan exploits to advantage. Fear Strikes Out also reveals Mulligan’s interest in the dramatic potential of the parent-child relationship. Piersall’s father (Karl Malden) is a frustrated sandlot ballplayer who pressures his son to become a major leaguer. Mulligan suggests the paralytic nature of this pressure early in the film with a high-angle shot of father and son playing ball together in a small, enclosed backyard. Later, when Jimmy starts to play pro ball, Mulligan repeatedly separates the two on either side of wire fences, hinting at the repressed and potentially explosive nature of the feelings within each.

The Rat Race is the first of Mulligan’s New York films. Of all the graduates of the New York television industry in the fifties—Arthur Penn, John Frankenheimer, Sidney Lumet, Sydney Pollack, Martin Ritt—Mulligan is (with Lumet) the only member of the American New York wave who continued to project a New York sensibility and a concern for the cynicism and callousness of big-city life in his films. In addition to The Rat Race, Love With the Proper Stranger, Up the Down Staircase, The Pursuit of Happiness, and Bloodbrothers are all situated in New York.

The environment of Mulligan’s films plays a major role in establishing tone. The impersonal setting of New York provides an atmosphere of isolation and loneliness against which his characters’ attempts to reach out and make contact with one another are played out. Musician Tony Curtis and dancer Debbie Reynolds in The Rat Race platonically share an apartment, each so intent on making it in the big city that they ignore one another and their feelings for each other for two-thirds of the film. Love With the Proper Stranger, shot almost entirely on location in New York, deals, as its title suggests, with the anonymous nature of life in a city of crowds. Mulligan repeatedly stages intimate conversations between Rocky (Steve McQueen), a musician, and Angie (Natalie Wood), a Macy’s salesgirl whom Rocky has gotten into trouble, in extremely public settings. The title sequence establishes the mood of the film: an empty musicians’ union hall slowly fills with musicians looking for work. The chaotic movements and activities of the surrounding people, all heading in different directions and concerned with their own affairs, make meaningful communication between Rocky and Angie impossible. Rocky does not even remember his one-night stand with Angie, who angrily walks out. The union hall and the fifth floor of Macy’s (where their second encounter is set) become settings that frustrate contact, preventing any growth of romantic feeling between the two. Indeed, romance seems impossible in an urban setting. Rocky, in love with himself as much as his showgirl mistress, Barbie, is in love with herself, is unwilling to take on the responsibility of a deep commitment to another; he is even estranged from his own parents, whom he seldom sees (as we see in a remarkable playground reunion with them as he attempts to raise more money for Angie’s abortion), and he views married men as “prisoners of Zenda.” But Rocky’s cynicism yields to Angie’s romanticism. Angie, dreaming of a lover as a knight on a white horse, says she will know that she is in love when she hears “bells and banjos.” At the end of the film, Rocky, playing bells and banjos and carrying a sign that reads “Better Wed Than Dead,” chases Angie through the crowded city streets outside Macy’s. The high-angle long shot of these two “lovers” lost in a crowd recalls the opening sequence in the union hall, but here Rocky has rejected the deadness of his previous life-style, having taken a first step when he prevented Angie from going through with an abortion in a cold, desolate-looking abandoned apartment building. Rocky’s actions here and at the end of the film reflect a triumph of feeling over environment, which is also the subject of Mulligan’s subsequent New York films, Up the Down Staircase and The Pursuit of Happiness.

Actually, New York City is, like the Indian Salvaje in The Stalking Moon, rarely seen in Up the Down Staircase, but its off-screen presence is felt throughout the film. Mulligan’s camera remains focused on Calvin Coolidge High School and the streets surrounding the school and refuses to explore the lives of characters outside of this setting. The school, with its banging lockers, grim halls and stairways, and bustling crowds of students and teachers, is the subject of the film, revealing quite clearly the primary role places play in the director’s films. The immediacy of Mulligan’s environment in this film excludes the existence of all others—there is no world outside of the school. When characters leave this setting, they leave the film (as do Ed Williams and Ellen O’Mara’s romantically suicidal Alice Blake). Sandy Dennis’s novice school teacher, Sylvia Barrett, is less in conflict with this environment than in awe of it, initially unable to understand it or to discover what it takes to survive in it.

The bustle and apparent confusion in the school’s halls during class changes captures the directionless vitality of the place; an energy is there which teachers, in the semiorder of the classroom, attempt to channel. Miss Barrett’s after-school encounter with Joe Ferrone marks an attempt to “recall him to life.” But the sense of place has changed here: when Joe turns off the lights and approaches Miss Barrett, and Mulligan shoots the encounter in dramatic close-ups, the “schoolness” of the room vanishes; the order and stability of the setting has been transformed. Even within a single environment, a variety of moods can coexist, reflecting the complex interrelationship between specific people and specific settings.

The Pursuit of Happiness is less a New York film than an “estrangement of youth” film, though the city and the central character’s experiences in it (e.g., the automobile manslaughter, the car’s breakdown in traffic) contribute to his judgment that, “There’s a nervous breakdown going on out there, and I don’t want to be part of it.” Environment—the city—becomes the focus of William’s (Michael Sarrazin’s) rejection of the values of his parents and of the society around him. Unable to understand it or come to terms with it, as Miss Barrett does at the end of Staircase when she makes contact with Jose Rodriguez, William can only dissociate himself from his environment. As Tom Ryan writes in Movie 21, “the film’s final sequence provides an exhilarating if precarious feeling of liberation, as the tiny plane carrying William and Jane soars away from the urban landscape filled with skyscrapers, endless rows of cars, and a veil of smog. The only possibility for escape in the film has seemed to rest with individuals’ ability to move away from the places with which their roles are linked… and to move towards the discovery of an independent identity.”

Mulligan’s central characters frequently view the world around them as a hostile body which, after they establish brief contact with it, they ultimately flee, either literally as in Pursuit or figuratively, by withdrawing into themselves or into a world of memory or imagination. The “real” world in To Kill a Mockingbird is incomprehensible to Scout, who narrates the film. It is an adult world, represented by the courtroom sequence, which deals with adult problems: race and sex. The presence of Scout, Jem, and Dill in the courtroom as Atticus (Gregory Peck) defends a black accused of rape marks a confrontation between innocence and worldliness, much as Scout’s taking of Boo Radley’s hand at the end of the film represents her confrontation with and victory over the childish fears that Boo earlier represented. Yet the narration of the film, told from the point of view of a child, views the adult world with distance and incomprehensibility. The world of grown-ups has an alienating otherness.

Mulligan had suggested the separateness of parent and child earlier in his career by isolating them in the frame or by separating them with fences (Fear Strikes Out) or with screen doors (Baby, the Rain Must Fall). In Summer of ’42, Hermie spies on adult experience, Dorothy and her husband, from a distance, a distance that Mulligan underscores by filming Dorothy from Hermie’s point of view and in an idealized slow motion. Although Dorothy later initiates Hermie into this world, it remains a mystery to him: he returns to her house to find it locked and a note for him left on the closed door. The distance between parent and child, between the world of adults and of childhood experience is realized structurally in Mockingbird and in Summer via the narration that accompanies childhood memories. In both, narrators look back upon experiences of their youth and attempt to understand them, both as they really were then and as they seem now. We sense simultaneously the immediacy of these memories as they appear on the screen and the narrator’s distance from them.

The “otherness” of one’s own experiences, seen in the esthetic distance of Mockingbird and of Summer, becomes the literal subject of The Other, a film about a boy who, through imagination, restores to life his dead twin. Niles (Chris Udvarnoky) has a close relationship with his grandmother, Ada, who has encouraged his imaginative powers. (His mother has withdrawn into her own private world after the death of her other son.) As Mulligan explained Ada’s character, “She was the heart of the house. She has a primitive sense of imagination and drama, which is the greatest thing an adult can give a child… Her only failing is that she has a maternal love so strong that it blinds her to what is happening. Though she enriches and turns on the child’s imagination, her gift is used in a destructive way by the child.” Indeed, Niles becomes responsible for at least three deaths (four, if we count the Niles-induced heart attack of a neighbor).

The film’s first shot, a slow, descending crane and zoom shot, like that which opens Mockingbird, initiates the audience into a very private world of imagination inhabited only by Niles, his recreated brother, Holland (Martin Udvarnoky), and their grandmother, Ada (Uta Hagen). The privateness of this world is so total that, as Mulligan pointed out, “If Niles could have life just the way he wanted it, his world would contain only Ada, Holland, and himself—preferably only Holland and himself”—which is the way the film ends. It is a child’s world of imagination, drama, and magic (which Niles performs and which facilitates his escape from the burning barn at the end). It remains emotionally distanced and separate in tone from the world of those characters around him.

The descending crane shot introduces us to a world of subjective experience. As Mulligan has said, “I want to put the audience into the body of the boy with this shot and to make the experience of the film, from beginning to end, a totally subjective one.” In putting the audience into the body of the boy, Mulligan, in effect, does exactly what Niles does when he puts himself into the body of a bird in flight; he celebrates the magical power of imagination.

Though Mulligan never cheats in the film—Niles and Holland are never in the same frame at the same time but are always separated by a cut or a pan across space—the audience believes in the existence of Holland, so totally are we immersed in the subjectivity of Niles’s point of view, until Ada shatters that subjectivity for us. Late one night, Niles sneaks downstairs and talks to Holland in the living room. Mulligan pans from one twin to the other—always from Nilesto Holland as he has done previously, affirming Niles’s point of view. But when Ada comes downstairs, the camera suddenly shifts to her point of view, and we see that Holland is not there. The next day, Ada shows Niles Holland’s grave but fails to undo the harm her imaginative powers have caused.

One of the major subjects of the film is the power of imagination both to liberate, as seen when Niles becomes the bird in flight, and to imprison, as seen when Holland must hide in the film’s second half. This subjective reality—as Ada tells Niles, “your world is very real… for you”—lies at the core of all of Mulligan’s work. Similarly, The Great Imposter features a childlike character whose fantasies give him moments of escape yet ultimately imprison him: he never comes to terms with himself or with those around him who care for him.

The Other ends as subjectively as it began. Mulligan tracks from the burning barn in which Ada, as an “angel of death,” has killed herself and, supposedly, the evil Niles to the second-story window of the adjoining farmhouse from behind which Niles looks out at the burning barn. As in the film’s first shot, Mulligan again zooms in—this time to a close-up of Niles’s face. Niles blinks twice, the frame freezes, and the film ends. Again Mulligan’s camera work leads us into the child, into the reality of his world. But this time, because of what has occurred during the course of the film, we draw back. The intervention of the window, which now separates us from the child, becomes a visual symbol of the distance that exists between his private world and the real world around him. Like the opening shot of Baby, the Rain Must Fall in which we see Georgette (Lee Remick) framed behind a bus window, this last shot of The Other affirms the impenetrability of a private world of feelings.

Mulligan’s treatment of the Niles-Holland world makes it vividly real for us and, through visual stylization—internally framed compositions, zooms, freeze frames—makes it unreal as well. Yet Mulligan is not a mere stylist. Less interested in plot mechanics than in mood, he creates a mood that produces its own sense of reality. For example, the director carefully tries to reconstruct a thirties atmosphere through period detail. Yet as Mulligan points out, “Objects don’t have specific meanings in my films; they are only part of mood I’m trying to create.” Similarly, his controlled suspense techniques heighten the spectator’s involvement in action by pulling back from violent or climactic events. Like Fritz Lang, Mulligan lets his audience imagine rather than see the violence and, as a result, magnifies it in their minds.

Mulligan’s editing creates a rhythm that entrances his audience. “I cut a lot in The Other from long, open shots to tight, constricting close-ups,” he explains, referring in particular to the bird-in-flight sequence. At the same time, Mulligan alternates long, fluid camera movements with short, static shots. Toward the end of the film, he breaks even spatial continuity (in the barn burning) to intercut shots of Ada’s face with the face of the Angel of a Brighter Day (a stained-glass-window angel in a nearby church) and suggests Ada’s transformation as it appears in Niles’s mind. Mulligan’s rhythmic editing reflects the film’s narrative dialectic between imagined and real experience.

The alternation between subjective and objective reality in The Other’s narrative and the incorporation of the alternation into the film’s visual style make it one of Mulligan’s most complex works. At the same time, The Other appears to be Mulligan’s most controlled work, every camera movement, every cut contributing to the film’s suspense and plunging the audience in the labyrinthine subjectivity of a very private world.

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